Homelessness of the Poetic Homecoming: Imagination, Idolatry and the Sacrality of Space

Historians of religion have long noted that a central component in the phenomenological constitution of religious belief and ritual is the notion of sacred space. Together with sacred time, the idea of sacred space orients one in the world both vertically and horizontally. In this lecture, Elliot Wolfson will explore the dialectical relation of the sacrality of space and the idolatry of place manifest in the specific example of Judaism. Central to the Jewish experience has been the tension between the territorial rootedness of a promised land and the exilic uprootedness of the diaspora. Wolfson will elicit a third alternative—what he calls the poetic homecoming—according to which the journey home is dependent on dwelling within the domain of the foreign.