Place

I'm struck by some of my friends' connection to a place - not all of my friends, but some, and especially the newer ones in Gloucestershire. I'm aware that I don't have that sort of connection. In a recent conversation about 'home' it seemed entirely natural to me, and to the person I was talking to, to make a distinction between home as an actual physical place and 'the sense of home' that you have from being in a good state of mind. I think that for some people, at least, this would seem an entirely abstract and artificial distinction, because for them 'home' is unproblematically a place. This, I think, is part of what Bruno Latour is going on about in "Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime"...well, probably, because it's quite hard to understand.

It's hard to avoid concluding that for me, this alienation from place is a Jewish thing. We really are rootless cosmopolitans. At least one of my sons was born in a different country from both of his parents, who were themselves born in different countries from each other. In my wife's case, her father was born in a third country, and her grandfathers (and grandmothers) in fourth and fifth countries.

Jewish rootlessness has deep roots. Jew were sometimes prohibited from owning land, but even when they weren't few Jews became farmers. (The Talmud is full of rules about how to farm according to God's will, mind you.) Even when Jews do become farmers, and there seems to be a move towards this at the moment, it doesn't seem to translate into a deep connection with a place. Trotsky's parents were Jewish farmers, but they upped and moved to a town. Max Yasgur, the farmer who owned the site where the Woodstock festival was held, eventually sold up and his son is a lawyer.

I'd like to cite King Josiah as the culprit. He's the guy who created the pre-Jewish temple-based religion, in which the ancient Judaeans worshipped only one God, through animal sacrifices performed by a hereditary priesthood at a single centralised site - the temple in Jerusalem. No other place mattered at all. Josiah, and then his successor kings, spent a lot of time overthrowing other altars to God, often in 'High Places'. They destroyed sacred groves in which God, and other gods, had been worshipped; they deposed these other gods, referred to in the Bible as the 'Host of Heaven'.

It's pretty clear that until then the Israelites, or whatever name the pre-Jews went by, were keen on sacred groves and trees, and holy places, and that they used them to worship a range of divinities and supernatural beings. After the Josiah 'revolution' all this disappears, and there's only one God to be worshipped, though for a while others continue to exist - sometimes as angels or demons. It's possible that Josiah's motivation was entirely theological, and that the revolution was inspired by spiritual inspiration; but establishing that there was only one God to be worshipped, and that one at a shrine entirely under one's own control, had a political pay-off. The cultural consequence, though, was a divorce from places, and to a lesser extent from nature.

Some of this has carried over into Christianity, but unevenly. The early Christian were good at co-opting local supernatural beings into saints, and turning local sacred sites into 'holy' wells, or putting churches on them. In some churchyards the yew trees, which were considered sacred by pre-Christians, are older than the church. Reformed churches were more like the Jews, and down on made-up saints and holy sites (and very down on graven images). I came across this Calvinist website that goes into great detail about how bad sacred groves are. On the other hand, non-conformist chapels are often named after places in the Bible (Ebenezer, where Jacob's ladder had its foot, and Bethel, and Shiloh, are all favourites) - the same places where the post-Josiah kings overthrew altars and destroyed sacred groves.