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marvelous. The dome is the sky that is made. The sky is nothing—the real sky—and beggars have more of it than others.
    Muslims own Jerusalem sky. This gold-leafed dome identifies Jerusalem on any postcard, the conspicuous jewel. Jews own the ground. The enshrined rock was the foundation for the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s temple, the room that enclosed the Ark of the Covenant. The rock is also the traditional site of the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. God commanded Moses to commissionBezalel the artisan to make the ark. The Book of Exodus describes two golden cherubim whose wings were to form above the ark a Seat of Mercy—a space reserved for the presence of the Lord. The architecture for the presence of G-D has been conceptualized ever after as emptiness.
    The paradox of monotheism is that the desert God, refuting all other gods, demands acknowledgment within emptiness. The paradox of monotheism is that there is no paradox—only unfathomable singularity.
    May I explain to you some features of the shrine?
    A man has approached as I stand gazing toward the dome. He looks to be in his sixties; he is neatly dressed in a worn suit. The formality of syntax extends to his demeanor. Obviously he is one of the hundreds of men, conversant in three faiths, who haunt the shrines of Jerusalem, hoping to earn something as informal guides.
    No thank you.
    This is the Dome of the Rock,
he continues.
    No thank you.
    Why are you so afraid to speak to a guide?
(The perfected, implicating question.)
    I am not afraid. I don’t have much time.
    He lowers his eyes.
Perhaps another time
. He withdraws.
    My diffidence is purely reflexive. One cannot pause for a moment on one’s path through any of the crowded streets or souks without a young man—the son, the nephew, the son-in-law of some shopkeeper—asking, often with the courtliness of a prince, often with the stridency of a suitor:
May I show you my shop?
    Emptiness clings to these young men as well—the mermen of green-lit grottoes piled with cheap treasure—men with nothing to do but fiddle with their cell phones or yawn in theirunconscious beauty and only occasionally swim up to someone caught in the unending tide of humanity that passes before them.
    May I show you my shop?
    No thank you.
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    To speak of the desert God is to risk blasphemy, because the God of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims is unbounded by time or space, is everywhere present—exists as much in a high mountain village in sixteenth-century Mexico as in tomorrow’s Jakarta, where Islam thrives as a tropical religion. Yet it was within the ecology of the Middle Eastern desert that the mystery of monotheism blazed. And it is the faith of the Abrahamic religions that the desert God penetrated time and revealed Himself first—thus condescending to sequence—to the Jews.
    Behind the wall of my hotel in East Jerusalem are a gasoline station and a small mosque. The tower of the mosque—it is barely a tower—is outfitted with tubes of green neon. Five times in twenty-four hours the tubes of neon flicker and sizzle; the muezzin begins his cry. Our crier has the voice of an old man, a voice that gnaws on its beard. I ask everyone I meet if the voice is recorded or live. Some say recorded and some say real.
    I believe God is great. I believe God is greatest.
    The God of the Jews penetrated time. The Christian and the Muslim celebrated that fact ever after with noise. In the medieval town, Christian bells sounded the hours. Bells called the dawn and the noon and the coming night.
    In the secular West, church bells have been stilled by discretion and by ordinance. In my neighborhood of San Francisco, the announcement of dawn comes from the groaning belly of a garbage truck.
    No one at the hotel seems to pay the voice any mind. Thewaiters serve. Cocktails are shaken and poured. People in the courtyard and in the