Spiritual Exaltation in Timeless Places of Worship: Insights from the New Maimonides Central Sephardic Synagogue, Hadera, Israel

Abstract

The deep emotion we feel when entering any timeless place of worship—a synagogue, a church, or a Buddhist temple—stems from the patterns of space that generated them. These are patterns that reflect the innate patterns printed in our minds from the outset and that are thus common to us all as human beings of any culture or religion. In designing the Maimonides Central Sephardic Synagogue I endeavored to capture the timeless spiritual exaltation one experiences in the places of worship where Maimonides prayed, such as the Iben Denan Synagogue in Fez, Morocco or the Ben-Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and to revive the traditional patterns based on Maimonides’ halachic rulings—the laws he set down in his book Hayad Hahazaka, as passed on to me in the synagogues of Tzfat, the holy Kabbalah city of Galilee, birthplace of Judaism’s mystical strand, and hometown of my family since the early nineteenth century.