The Music Places Challenge

City That Belongs to Everyone and Therefore No One

In the rubble of September 11, Steve Earle wrote a prayer for Jerusalem knowing exactly how foolish it would sound, and said it anyway

Dome Of The Rock, Jerusalem. Image: Canva

There are cities you visit and cities that visit you. Jerusalem is the second kind. It arrives uninvited — in headlines, in hymns, in the particular weight of a word that has meant too many things to too many people for too long to mean any single thing cleanly anymore.

The Holy City. The Eternal City. The contested city. The city that three of the world’s great religions claim as their own, which is either the most sacred thing imaginable or the source of more sustained human suffering than almost any other piece of real estate on earth.

Steve Earle wrote Jerusalem in 2002, in the weeks after September 11, when the temperature of the world had changed and the air was full of people explaining why violence was not only inevitable but necessary. He was a country singer from Texas who had spent time in prison, kicked a heroin addiction, and emerged with the kind of hard-won clarity that tends to produce either cynicism or stubborn, unfashionable hope. Earle chose hope. He did it knowing exactly how it would sound.

The song begins with death machines rumbling across the ground where Jesus stood — a line so compressed it contains centuries — and a man on television explaining that it had always been this way and nothing could be done. This is the oldest argument against peace: not that it is wrong, but that it is naive. That the world is simply arranged this way, violence and counter-violence cycling forward through history, and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention.

Earle almost listened. Almost lost his mind. Then he looked into his heart and found something that the television couldn’t accommodate: a belief that one fine day the children of Abraham — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, all of them inheritors of the same ancient story — would lay down their swords.

He called it dreaming. He called himself a fool. He said it anyway.

The genius of the song is that it doesn’t pretend the hope is easy or earned or even rational. I don’t remember learning how to hate in Sunday school. The hatred came later, somewhere along the way, accumulated through history and politics and the particular human talent for turning the sacred into the weaponised. The faith came first. The violence was the digression.

Jerusalem the city has been destroyed and rebuilt, conquered and reconquered, divided and reunited and divided again. Its stones have absorbed more prayer and more blood than any stones have a right to. Every wall in it means something to someone and something different to someone else. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christians believe Christ was buried, has been administered since the 12th century by a Muslim family, because the Christian denominations inside it couldn’t agree on anything else. This is either absurd or quietly magnificent. Possibly both.

Earle wasn’t writing a political solution. He was writing a prayer. Not the kind that expects an answer but the kind that insists on being said regardless — because the alternative is the man on the television, and his world, and his certainty that nothing can change.

Some prayers take centuries.

Jerusalem is still waiting.

[embed]Source: YouTube

**Click here for the lyrics**

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