Israel, a Palace in Space: A Gendered Re-Vision of Territoriality

Throughout thousands of years of exile and return, the Jewish People has been engaged with the sacredness of space and time. Deep cultural structures connect the Jewish People to our homeland, but at the same time, absent from the holy places and often persecuted in the Diaspora, we have regularly taken refuge in the sanctum of time. Yet Jewish sacred time is determined not only by the interactive cycles of the sun and the moon, but also by the seasons of rain and harvest in Israel. The sacred geography of the land of Israel undergirds the observance of the holy days. While espousing the sacredness of the land, Jewish culture has long been fraught with the contradiction between the promise of the land of Israel and its enduring “unattainability.” Beginning with some of the biblical scenes that produce this contradiction, this paper explores “Israel: A Palace in Space”—a corollary to A. J. Heschel’s view of the Sabbath as a “Palace in Time.” Intricate time-space matrices inform Jewish metaphoric and material claims to the land of Israel. During the ancient Hasmonean period of Jewish sovereignty in Judea and during our own period of Israeli statehood, Jews have expressed claims to Israel in male-gendered territorial terms of entitlement, conquest, possession, and ownership. The Zionist transformation of Jewish exilic identity into Israeli militarist so-called masculine identity has proven problematic during recent decades. The problem is well indicated by the gendered polarization of power and roles in Israeli society and implicated in the endemic conflict with the Palestinians. In these days of violent desecration of the sacred body of Israel, feminist efforts toward peace will benefit from interpreting and critiquing our relationship to the sacredness of time and space. This paper wrestles with gender complexities of the Jewish people where we intersect with sacred land as considerations that are relevant to making peace. “Israel: A Palace in Space” acknowledges Jewish longing