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A Sanctum of Stone
Once upon a time, a rabbi told me to “crawl back into the cave you came from.” The words became an invitation. What if I did crawl back into the cave I came from — what could that look like?
Growing up in a post-9/11 world, the word cave was a pejorative. After all, the most wanted man in the world at that time, Osama bin Laden, was believed to be fighting the empire from a cave. Long before the current context of war fixed our eye on only one perspective on how to see ‘cavemen,’ there was a long, rich legacy of human orientation toward caves. Caves were often sanctuaries against persecution. The practice dates far back to the Paleolithic age and continued through the evolution of belief systems. Europe, for example, hosts complex underground Jesuit caves with Egyptian, Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, and pagan art. Mary Magdalene, a revered Abrahamic matriarch, is said to have been a cave dweller, living the last 30 years in a cave in the Sainte-Baume mountains in the South of France. Across the world, caves and tunnels protected people and the ideas that maybe weren’t yet ready to be mainstreamed — a theme that runs through Islam as well.
On a journey from Medina to Mecca, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and Abu Bakr sought refuge in a cave. The story goes that as they hid in the cave, outside, a tree rose from the ground, a pair of doves began nesting in it, and a spider spun a web between…
