Milan (AsiaNews) – The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, started a project today in the Holy City by officially launching Within Your Gates, a forum that aims to bring together “scholars and practitioners from different faith traditions” to explore and publicise the "universal vocation of Jerusalem”. This constitutes a reflection on Jerusalem that must be rediscovered before any political solution is achieved, taking a deep look at its identity. Without it, there are no right words for speaking about peace.
The patriarch had already written about this last April in his pastoral letter saying that they “returned to Jerusalem with great joy". From the deep wound left by 7 October 2023, and the war in Gaza that followed, one cannot emerge without returning to ask about “‘God's dream for Jerusalem’.”
This initiative fits into the efforts deployed by the Church in the Holy Land. While Israel and Palestine are currently preoccupied with anxious anticipation by the results of elections that are unlikely to open up new horizons, the cardinal is trying to open a new chapter on a different but no less crucial level, that of narratives about Jerusalem.
The name itself suggests an ambitious programme, taken from a verse in Psalm 121, one of the Canticles of the Ascension, sung in Jewish tradition while ascending the Temple Mount. “Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem,” reads the psalm.
Precisely, this pause for reflection and outreach between people who have different perspectives on the Holy City is the heart of the new forum Cardinal Pizzaballa has chosen to launch together with the University of Notre Dame in Jerusalem.
“We all belong to Jerusalem”
“Despite everything, I continue to believe that the city’s mission is to become ‘a prophecy and promise of that universal reconciliation and peace which God desires for the whole human family’,” writes Cardinal Pizzaballa in a letter that accompanies the initiative. “In recent years, we have collectively lost sight of this mission, and it is to this mission that we must return.”
“I write these words not as an abstraction. I write them from a city where the words ‘peace’, ‘coexistence’, and ‘dialogue’ have become hollowed out, distant from our daily realities.
“The violence that has engulfed this land has done more than destroy lives and homes. It has poisoned language itself. And when language fails, silence follows – and in that silence, violence shrieks its brutal language.
“It is precisely in that silence that something must be said.”
Behind Within Your Gates lies the ambition to offer much more than another condemnation to be levelled at someone or an analysis to be added to many others.
This is a “serious and sustained attempt to recover the compass we have lost – to ask again, with honesty and humility, what Jerusalem is for, and what it requires of those who live within its gates and of those across the world to whom it belongs.”
“The Song of Ascents invites us to rejoice in finally being within the gates of Jerusalem,” writes the cardinal. “These are not gates built for defense. On the contrary, they serve to define a way of life: open in every direction, toward the stranger and the pilgrim, toward whoever wishes to enter and take part.”
Above all, “There is no monopoly here; We all belong to Jerusalem. Its walls stand not out of fear, but out of identity – and that identity is constituted by being welcome to all. This is what I wrote to my communities earlier this year. It is also the spirit in which Within Your Gates is built.”
“My initial interest in creating the Forum stemmed from a desire to understand the Christian perspective on the situation in the Holy Land. The more I have thought about it, however, the clearer it has become that, given this perspective is explicitly universal, it can only be whole when the common good of all communities is integrated into it.”
For this reason, the forum is not set up as an institution of the Church of Jerusalem. Its doors are open to scholars and professionals from different faith traditions, disciplines, and communities.
For the prelate, “theologians and political scientists, historians and architects, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, believers and those of no faith – all those who share the conviction that Jerusalem’s complexities are not an obstacle but the very conditions that makes a better future possible, all those who care for their own communities while also caring for all the residents of the city.”
The board and the scientific committee
A clear idea of this openness can already be seen from the people involved in the initiative.
Along with the patriarch, the Board of Promoters includes three other significant people: Prof Sari Nusseibeh, an Arab philosopher and political scientist, former president of al-Quds University in Jerusalem for nearly 20 years, and a historic Palestinian voice for nonviolence; Prof Sarah Stroumsa, former rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she taught for many years in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature, studying Arab-Jewish relations in the medieval era; and Margaret Karram, a Christian from Haifa who has been involved in interreligious dialogue for many years and who has led the Focolare Movement since 2021.
Other important figures sit on the scientific committee.
Avraham Burg, son of one of the Founding Fathers of the State of Israel, and a former speaker of the Knesset who quit active politics in 2004. Since then, he has become one of the most courageous Israeli intellectuals addressing the issue of the plural face of Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
Nivine Sandouka, a feminist and peace activist who grew up in Shufat, the large Palestinian refugee neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, who now heads the Alliance for Middle East Peace, a coalition of NGOs working to bring Israelis and Palestinians together.
Other names are connected to other academic institutions, like the University of Notre Dame, who have long been working to reflect on Jerusalem and its unique role as a crossroads: Father Anthony Giambrone, for example, from the Dominican École biblique and Martino Diez of the Oasis International Foundation, founded by Cardinal Angelo Scola and active for more than 20 years in Christian-Muslim dialogue.
The initiative will be coordinated by Daniel Schwake, director of Notre Dame Jerusalem, a point of reference for an initiative that is open to all who wish to join and share its spirit.
A space for serious and courageous conversations
What will this new forum actually do? “The Forum,” the cardinal writes, “will produce applied interdisciplinary research oriented not toward abstract ideals but toward the lived realities of this city and the questions that those realities raise. The work will be scholarly and serious. It will also, I hope, remain human and honest, willing to confront difficult truths rather than paper over them.
“This Forum is for scholars who want to think seriously about Jerusalem without being pressed into familiar categories – the Forum follows no political agenda and represents no political interests.”
It will be “For practitioners who work daily in the space between communities and need language adequate to what they see. For people who want to change realities for the benefit of all the city’s residents. For all those – near and far – who believe that what happens within these walls concerns the whole human family, and that Jerusalem belongs, ultimately, to everyone, it is the shared heart of humanity.”
Lastly, “The city I have lived in through these years of conflict has taught me that brokenness, honestly faced, can become the ground of something real. Within Your Gates is not a solution to our collective brokenness, but a space for the kind of serious, grounded, and courageous conversations that this city demands and, at its best, still makes possible.”
