The Rock (3 page)

The cave is pierced by two holes. The first bores through solid stone for the length of a man and is round and smooth, just large enough for a child on a rope to slither through and drop down on the floor below. Not even my father knew who cut this hole or why.

The smaller second hole pierces the floor of the cave below. For as long as I can remember, it has been covered with a large, round slab that has a hoop set into it, which I was never able to shift. Ka’b said that on the slab’s underside there is another hoop protruding downward with a chain attached onto which Solomon used to hang the keys of his Temple. The slab conceals an underground cavern that drops like a giant waterskin into the belly of the mountain. People call it the Well of Souls. They say that, if you listen very carefully at certain times of the year, you will hear muffled mumblings emanating from deep within the mountain.

We shall show them Our signs
in the horizons and in themselves
.
(photo credit 1.4)

T
hose who know what a great seducer the desert is understand how the faith of its sons gets tested daily simply by their being condemned to live in it. Amid sands and dunes that shift and undulate like loose women, rocks stand out, omnipotent and steadfast, commanders of presence, demarcators of boundaries, bearers of witness—visible presences in place of invisible ones, the known in place of the unknown and the unknowable. And when such signs of God’s work cannot be found because the terrain is too flat, too muddy, too monotonous, and unresistant, they have to be made up. A building then takes the place of a mountain.

In the Holy Land, such signs did not have to be invented as they were in Babylon and Egypt with their sacred assemblages of brick and stone aping the kind of permanence that nature itself had eschewed. They were already there. But they had to be identified and their relation to God interpreted correctly. Sinai, Horeb, Zaphon, Carmel, Hermon, Tabor, all pointed to the attributes of
Him who created them—the Fixed and the Unalterable, the Great and the Illimitable. These are among His names. Not that mountains are God. They are merely signs of Him from whom revelation and knowledge pour into the mind like water into a valley.

Only He whom the eye cannot attain knows why Zion was chosen above all other mountains, and why its summit was blessed with a share in His majesty.

Is a stone thus singled out still a stone? The Rock will always be itself, a plain and humble piece of limestone no different from the other stones upon which this Holy City is built, but in what ways does it partake in the nature and mystery of God? Rediscovering those ways, which began long before they could be told, and which sprang from the source from which all religion springs, was Ka’b al-Ahbar’s most important contribution to the religion of Muhammad.

A
name, my father used to say, “
is
the thing it names. Did not God teach Adam the names of all things so that he might know them?” Ka’b refused to call the Rock by anything other than its oldest name, the Rock of Foundation.

“You are like a superstitious midwife,” my stepmother would joke, “who blesses the child she has just delivered with a name at exactly the moment she cuts its umbilical cord, and is then afraid to call him by any other name.”

Precious Stone. Rock of Atonement. Adam’s Sepulchre. Navel of the Universe. Stone of Stumbling. Rock of Sacrifice. David’s Rock. Holy Rock. Rock of the Holy of Holies. Zion’s Rock. Rock of Calvary. Rock of the Ages. Jacob’s Rock. Peter’s Rock. Rock of the Church. Rock of Salvation. Stone of Consolation. Rock of Fear and Trembling. Rock of Judgment. The Rock has many names.

So many names. So many carriers of blessing. So many proofs of excellence. Are they a sign of confusion? Perhaps the Rock has been delivered too many times into the world. Perhaps a thing encumbered with this many names has turned into a kind of fetish.

The names troubled Ka’b.

“Is the Rock one thing, or is it many things at once?” he asked me one day by way of a challenge.

“I have no idea, Father.”

“God, who makes the tongues of the eloquent fall short of
praising His beauty unless they use the means by which He praises Himself, has at least ninety-nine names. Does that mean God is ninety-nine different things, because He has ninety-nine names?”

“I suppose not.”

“You suppose! You don’t know! What is that worthless Shaikh teaching you every day?” he exclaimed, referring to the old man who had come with Umar’s army and now held classes for the children of settlers in a room on the sanctuary.

Ka’b meant to say that, even if a name is the thing it names, it is not that thing’s whole essence. Each name reveals an aspect of essence, one meaning among many. The elucidation of meaning requires a story, the stuff of religion, a story that lies at the origin of a particular name.

How much is unquestionably authentic about these stories? Justifications of conquests, apologias of defeats, tales of victory and of woe, rituals of worship, all mixtures of lies and truths have become wondrous stories accumulating around Moriah’s weatherbeaten face since men first fixed their eyes upon it. Women weep for themselves beside the Rock, suffering infinitely, only to leave it transformed in heart and soul, light shining from their faces; brash young men lift their faces to Heaven, guffawing, only to leave the Rock they have seated themselves upon terrified, their bodies twisted and trembling. Sifting through all the debris in search of the Rock’s essence is an unreliable exercise at the best of times.

But not so for the Rock’s first name, Ka’b said, its most important name, following which all the other names came, in the order of the prophets and the strange and wondrous things that happened to them on or near the Rock.

F
ather, I asked Shaikh Abdallah at school today where God was during creation.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said that God was in a watery mist without shape or form.
There was no Heaven, no Earth, no height, no depth, no name. Just a milky-white mist the pallor of a dead man’s face. He created the sky and the waters out of that mist. He sat his throne upon the water. Still, there were no separate things with or around Him. Then, the Shaikh said, God dried up the original water upon which His throne sat, thus forming the Earth. Mountains were pushed into place by the froth left on the surface of the water as it was drying up.”

“Something troubles you about what the Shaikh said?”

“The fact that water comes first, before mountains and rocks. He didn’t mention rocks.” I needed to know how Ka’b accounted for the holiness of the Rock, if Shaikh Abdallah was right.

Instead of answering the question, Ka’b began solemnly to recite words handed down by Solomon:

“Father, who is speaking?” I said, interrupting him before it was too late.

“Wisdom.”

“Are you saying wisdom came first in the order of creation, before water?”

“Yes,” he replied, “according to the great Solomon himself.”

“But the Holy Book opens with: In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. Wisdom is not even mentioned.”

“The beginning is not necessarily the
very
beginning. In the very beginning, God did not create things like the Heavens or the Earth, and certainly not men or demons. He created wisdom, by which He founded the Earth.”

“What is this wisdom?”

“It is the great underlying plan according to which the Heavens and the Earth and all that lies in between are laid out.”

“What does that have to do with the Rock?”

“Everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Does not the idea of a circle precede its drawing?”

“It does.”

“And to execute that idea on the face of the deep, does one not need a point upon which to stand?”

“You mean like the stone tied to the end of Shaikh Abdallah’s piece of string when he is drawing a circle for us in class?”

“Exactly. The Rock was that fixed point in relation to which the Lord laid out the rest of creation. Just as Shaikh Abdallah’s circle would not have appeared without the fixed end of his compass, so wisdom would not have become manifested in the world without the Rock.”

“But I
see
his circle. I cannot see wisdom.”

“Can you see good or evil? The Rock is to wisdom what the body is to knowledge of good and evil.”

“What did God make the Rock from?”

“He plucked a jewel from underneath his throne and plunged it into the abyss. One end of it remained fastened there, while the other stood out above. Upon this end He stood while He went about the rest of creation, spreading the earth to the right and to the left and into all directions until it became as you see it today.”

“I don’t see a jewel,” I said, pointing in the direction of the esplanade. “What happened to the jewel?”

“It was tarnished by our sins until it metamorphosed into the thing you see before you. The People of the Torah call it the Rock of Foundation, because this was where God began his work on the first day of creation. We call it simply the Rock. But the two are one and the same.”

“Jerusalem is littered with rocks. How can you tell which one of them is the Rock?”

“Just as the navel is the center of the human body, so the land
of Palestine is the center of the world. Jerusalem is the center of Palestine. The Mountain is the center of Jerusalem. Upon its summit, Solomon built the Temple. The innermost precinct of that Temple, the Holy of Holies, is the center of the Temple, and at the center of the Holy of Holies is the Rock of Foundation.”

(photo credit 1.5)

U
ntil he reached puberty, my father once told me, he thought Jerusalem was a place in Heaven, not on Earth. “Rabbi Salih taught me otherwise.”