THE LOVE OF A PEOPLE FOR THEIR CITY

There has never been a love story like it in all of history: the love of our people for our city.

Jerusalem is mentioned approximately 660 times in Tanakh. History teaches us that the Temple was destroyed twice, and the city has been besieged 23 times and captured and reconquered 44 times. Yet in all those years, wherever Jews lived they never ceased to pray about Jerusalem, face Jerusalem, speak the language of Jerusalem, remember it at every wedding, in every home they built, and at all the high points of the Jewish year. Somehow it was where every Jewish prayer met and ascended to heaven.

Other cities and other faiths hold Jerusalem holy too, but they have holier places: Rome, Constantinople, Mecca, Medina. Jews only had this one city, a tiny city but somehow it was the place, said Maimonides, from which the Divine Presence was never exiled.

Never has a city had such power over a people’s imagination. Never were a people more loyal than our ancestors who endured twenty centuries of exile and persecution so that their children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren could come home to Jerusalem, ir hakodesh, the holy city, the home of the Jewish heart.

From the 2017 video entitled “Rabbi Sacks on Jerusalem: The 50th Anniversary of Reunification”

JERUSALEM: THE CITY OF PARADOXES

What’s special about Jerusalem today is that despite all the very real tensions within and surrounding it, nonetheless it remains a city of peace. It is one of the very few places in the Middle East – indeed one of the very few places in the world – that is holy to three distinct faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), where those faiths pray together in freedom and in peace. That has only been made possible under Israeli rule in the last fifty years.

Somebody once said about Israel, and you could certainly say this about Jerusalem too, that it is not that long and it is not that wide, but it is very deep. Jerusalem is very deep. And somehow within its relatively narrow confines, it contains, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, “multitudes.”

Another incredible thing about Jerusalem is that something magical happens to our sense of time there. For instance, the walls of Jerusalem were destroyed by every conqueror and then rebuilt using the very same stones. If you look at the stones of the walls around Jerusalem, they come from all the eras. Somehow, past and present, the old and the new, are all jumbled together. These bricks are a testament to how this city remains the oldest of the old, and yet it has also become one of the emerging high-tech cities of the world.

So it’s the oldest of the old and it’s the newest of the new. It is the living symbol of what Theodor Herzl titled his book about the return to Zion, Altneuland: the old new land, the old new city, for the old and renewed people.

From the 2017 video entitled “Rabbi Sacks on Jerusalem: The 50th Anniversary of Reunification”

❖ Points to Ponder

1. Which paradoxes found in Jerusalem are mentioned here? Can you think of any others? Do you think this adds or detracts from Jerusalem’s holiness and beauty?

WE NEVER FORGET JERUSALEM

I used to ask myself: How could Jews believe so much in a city they had been exiled from for so long? The answer is very powerful, and it is contained in two words in the story of Yaakov. Recall, the brothers return home and show Yaakov the blood-stained coat of Yosef. Realising Yosef has gone, Yaakov weeps, and when the brothers move to comfort him, we are told, “veyima’ein lehitnaḥen,” that Yaakov “refused to be comforted.” Why? There are, after all, laws in Judaism about the limits of grief; there is no such thing as a bereavement for which grief is endless.

The answer is that Yaakov had not yet given up hope that Yosef was still alive. To refuse to be comforted is to refuse to give up hope.

That is what Jews did with Jerusalem. They remembered the promise that am Yisrael had made by the waters of Babylon, “Im eshkaḥekh Yerushalayim tishkaḥ yemini,” “If I forget Jerusalem, may my right had lose its skill.” We never forgot Jerusalem. We were never comforted. We never gave up hope that one day we would return and, because of that, Jews never felt separated from Jerusalem.

And when it happened in 1967, my Jewish identity was transformed as the world heard the announcement: “Har HaBayit beyadeinu!” “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” Those three words changed a generation.

From the 2017 video entitled “Rabbi Sacks on Jerusalem: The 50th Anniversary of Reunification”

❖ Points to Ponder

1. Why do you think Jews never forgot, or stopped yearning for, Jerusalem?

*JERUSALEM OF TODAY CRIES OUT: “AM YISRAEL ḤAI!”*

On Yom Yerushalayim a few years ago, standing on the streets of the city, I watched youngsters from around the world waving Israeli flags, singing and dancing with a joy that was overwhelming. As I watched the celebrations, I was overcome with emotion because suddenly I had a vision of the 1.5 million children who were killed in the Shoah not because of anything they had done, not because of anything their parents had done, but because their grandparents happened to be Jews. I remembered how twenty-six centuries ago, the prophet Yeḥezkel had a vision of the Jewish people reduced to a valley of dry bones. God asked, “Shall these bones live?” and Yeḥezkel saw them come together, take on flesh, and begin to breathe and live again. God promised Yeḥezkel He would open His people’s graves and bring them back to the land.

I remembered the first reference to Israel outside the Bible on the Merneptah Stele, a block of granite engraved by Merneptah IV, successor to Ramesses II, thought by many to have been the Egyptian Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus. It was an obituary: “Israel is laid waste, her seed is no more.”

I thought how some of the greatest empires the world has ever known – Egypt of the Pharaohs, Assyria, Babylon, the Alexandrian Empire, the Roman Empire, the medieval empires of Christianity and Islam, all the way to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union – were the superpowers of their day that bestrode the narrow world like a colossus, seemingly invulnerable in their time. And yet each tried to write the obituary of the Jewish people, and whilst they have been consigned to history, our people can still stand and sing Am Yisrael Ḥai. What I was seeing on that day in Jerusalem was teḥiyat hameitim, a collective people being brought back from death to life.

When we visit Jerusalem today and see a place of such beauty, it takes your breath away. Jerusalem is the place where all the prayers of all the Jews across all the centuries and from all the continents meet and take flight on their way to heaven. It is the place where you feel brushed by the wings of the Shekhina.

We have had the privilege to be born in a generation that has seen Jerusalem reunited and rebuilt. We have seen the Jewish people come home.

Today God is calling on us all to be Guardians of Zion. Never has this been more important. We must all stand up for the one home our people has ever known and the one city our people has loved more than any other. We are all shagrirei Medinat Yisrael (ambassadors for the State of Israel) and we must all make Israel’s case in a world that sometimes fails to see the beauty we know is here. Let us all take on that task. With Hashem’s help, we will succeed and we pray the world will make its peace with Israel so that Israel and Israel’s God can bring peace to the world.

From the essay “We Never Forget Jerusalem,” rabbisacks.org, May 15, 2015

❖ Points to Ponder

1. How does Jerusalem embody the story of Jewish history?