c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Each time I visit Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, I experience an extraordinary sense of history.

In the Greek capital, I make the long walk up the hill to view the Parthenon, dedicated to the goddess Athena. Built around 447 B.C., the Parthenon represented the peak in Doric architecture, but over the centuries it was horribly neglected.

In 1458, the conquering Turks transformed the temple into a mosque. In 1687, the structure suffered damage when a powder magazine exploded during one of the many wars that have ravaged Greece. The final insult came in 1800, when the ruling Ottomans permitted an English nobleman, Lord Elgin, to remove many of the Parthenon’s statues to London’s British Museum, where they remain today.

Visiting the Parthenon is a manic-depressive experience: a reminder of the “Glory That Was Greece,” offset by the sad record of physical negligence, foreign expropriation and the theft of a nation’s cultural legacy.

When in Rome, I walk under the arch that celebrates the Emperor Titus and his destruction of Jerusalem and Judaism’s Second Temple in A.D. 70. The arch’s bas-reliefs show the Temple’s sacred religious objects _ including the seven-branched menorah _ carried off by victorious Romans as spoils of war. The arch’s Latin inscription, “Divo Tito,” refers to the emperor’s divinity. Titus is riding in a chariot accompanied by the goddess of victory.

The Arch of Titus has been a symbol of the Jewish people’s defeat. Following the catastrophe in 70, the Romans banned Jews from living in Jerusalem, but remembrance of the Temple’s destruction and the hope for a return to Israel became embedded in Jewish liturgy.

During the Middle Ages, Jews were not permitted to walk under the arch, lest their presence diminished “Divo Tito’s” glorious victory. It is that bitter historic humiliation that compels me to walk under the arch reciting aloud in Hebrew the Jewish prayer of thanksgiving.

Visiting Jerusalem always includes the Western Wall, part of the Second Temple that Titus allowed to remain following his victory. Until then, the Temple had stood for nearly 600 years. Because the Western Wall is a physical reminder of the destroyed Temple, it became Judaism’s most sacred spot.

The historian Josephus described the destruction Titus inflicted on Jerusalem: “It was a melancholy thing … the city was a desert … for the war had laid all signs of beauty to waste … the Romans set fire to the extreme parts of the city and burnt them down, and entirely demolished Jerusalem.”

However, it is believed that God mystically dwells within the Western Wall and weeps for Jerusalem. For many centuries, Jews cried when they prayed at the wall, and observers coined the derogatory and inaccurate term “Wailing Wall” to describe the huge beige-colored stones, some nearly 40 feet in length and weighing 100 tons. The wall is another ancient architectural gem. Although its massive stones were placed atop one another with no mortar to bind them together, the wall has remained intact for more than 2,000 years, surviving wars, fires and earthquakes.

Jews also wept in anger because in more recent times, they were permitted little or no access to the holy site, and were forbidden to sound the shofar, or ram’s horn, which is an integral part of Jewish liturgy. Following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Jordan occupied Jerusalem’s Old City and prevented Jews from praying at the wall.

In 1967, all of Jerusalem _ including the Western Wall _ came under Israeli control, and Jews were finally free to worship at the wall at any time, any day.

My most recent visit was in September. While placing written prayers for myself and my friends into the stones’ many crevices, I thought how difficult, if not impossible, it had been in past centuries to do what I was doing so easily. In the midst of such thoughts, I heard the piercing sound of the shofar and the joyous Hebrew prayers in the city that even “Divo Tito” could not destroy.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

KRE/PH END RUDIN

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