Historian Herbert Butterfield paints a portrait of historical study that compels its students to embrace the complexity of an idea, person, or event by exercising an “imaginative sympathy.” This sympathy seeks to understand rather than define a thing by collecting particularities rather than judgments.
As I continue to reflect upon the moments and memories that formed my trip to Israel, I realize more than ever what it means for a thing to demand the kind of perspective Butterfield describes.
The stones of varying heights and lengths purposefully compel pilgrims to slow their strides and tread in quiet reflection as they climb the steps of the entrance to Jerusalem. As a Christian, I walked these steps with the overwhelming knowledge that Jesus Christ walked them as he entered the city to be the final sacrifice.
The imaginative sympathy that Butterfield describes, however, demands that I recognize that these stones were not placed here for my own personal pilgrimage. These steps were first worn down by the thousands of Jewish worshippers journeying three times a year to the Temple to make sacrifices, to once again become one with God.
An imaginative sympathy demands that I remember that these same people saw their temple destroyed for a second time. It reminds me that years later, the Jewish people saw Islamic worshippers set up their own holy places on the Temple Mount. And that today, you can still see these people weeping and swaying with holy fervor at the Western Wall, offering up prayers for the restoration of their Temple, for the restoration of the steps that I tread with so narrow a perspective.
These stone steps demand something of me. They demand that I acknowledge the thousands of years of life and death, worship and tragedy, that have taken place upon that mount. They demand of me sympathy with the Jewish people and their tradition — and an understanding that only in sympathy with this tradition may I fully understand my own.
Israel is a country made up of moments, such as mine in Jerusalem, that demand this kind of sympathy, this kind of complexity. Yet my brief trip to this holy land also reminded me that the story of each nation is made up of individual persons who also deserve this perspective of sympathy. Far more than even the stones leading to Jerusalem, persons, infinitely complex, demand that I take the time to imagine the entirety of their world — lest they become to me simply a marker along my own personal story rather than a complex yet beautiful narrative of their own.
