Trying to organise parish pilgrimages to the Holy Land, I have often come across church people who refuse to travel to Israel, and to Jerusalem in particular, because they do not want the reality of the place to interfere with their idea of it. “Jerusalem the golden / With milk and honey blest…,” they have sung in church, “I know not, O I know not /What joys await us there, / What radiancy of glory, / What bliss beyond compare.”

No town can ever live up to that sort of billing. The reality is always going to be more prosaic. Which is why those who do make the pilgrimage can sometimes feel a little deflated by the sheer everydayness of the place – the shops, the traffic, the traffic wardens, and all the paraphernalia of a bustling tourist industry.

For Jews this disconnect can feel even sharper, given that for nearly 2,000 years Jerusalem was a hope and a promise – but not a place to actually live in. Indeed, much of the literature of the Hebrew Bible took shape in that period, even further back in time, when the people of Israel were exiled in Babylon. “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion,” wrote the psalmist. And this Jerusalem wasn’t just nostalgia for the capital city of a united kingdom. The Temple in Jerusalem, built on the site of Jacob’s famous dream of a ladder connecting heaven and earth, was understood to be a portal between God and humanity. Like no other place on earth, this specific spot is where heaven and earth are supposed to reach out and greet each other.

Yet following the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in AD70, the Jewish people experienced nearly 2,000 years of exile from this holy place. And the idea of Jerusalem was kept alive in the constant telling and retelling. Indeed, since Jerusalem was founded, Jews have spent more time telling stories about the place than actually living in it. Which is why the very idea of being Jewish is inseparable from a yearning and a homesickness for the city of Jerusalem.

At the heart of the traditional Jewish wedding, for example, is the breaking of a glass to symbolise the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the making of a promise, taken from the same rivers-of-Babylon psalm, 137: “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning: If I do not raise thee over my own joy, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Boney M didn’t get this bit into their song, but it was a promise I made when I got married in Israel. As have millions of Jews over the centuries. So, too, “next year in Jerusalem”, as Jews have promised each other at every Passover.

Jerusalem is both a place and an idea. But just as there are those who want it to remain a perfect idea in their heads, so also there are those who can only see Jerusalem in terms of the current political crisis, a place of walls and occupation. My point is not that the Jerusalem of hopes and dreams trumps the Jerusalem of drains and shops and politics, but that Jerusalem the golden is just as much a part of the reality as the practicalities of a modern city in a highly contested area.

The secular mindset can often feel frustration towards the influence that the Jerusalem of the imagination has over its present-day politics, and not least over Donald Trump’s unhelpful intervention in recognising Jerusalem as the capital city of modern Israel. And it’s true, Trump is being driven on by Christian fundamentalists, most of whom won’t ever leave flyover country and for whom the city of Jerusalem is just a distant fantasy. And I completely understand the frustration of people like my father-in-law, who was born there and who lives in Jerusalem day to day and who finds it maddening to be the object of such vast, overwhelming projection.

Nonetheless, Jerusalem has always been a construction of the imagination – and I don’t mean that pejoratively. Jews, Christians and Muslims have all invested in it their hopes and dreams, their tears and their longing. The imagination has made Jerusalem the city that it is. And no real-life political peace can ever be possible without an understanding of why and how this is so.