May 22 2009 - IN HONOR OF JERUSALEM

Yesterday we marked Jerusalem Day. Centuries ago, Yehudah Halevi, Jewish poet and philosopher, spoke of the city of David in words so filled with yearning that they are nearly palpable:

	My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west
	How can I find savour in food?  How shall it be sweet to me?
	How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet
	Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains
	A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things in Spain
	Seeing how precious in mine eyes it is to behold the dust of the 
          desolate sanctuary.   (Yehuda Halevi, Hebrew poet, c. 1075-1141,
          translated by Nina Salaman), IIC p. 14.

Jerusalem is both sacred idea and place in the mind’s eye of the three major Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Fought over for centuries, settled on Judean hill tops which, in that part of Israel, can be considered near mountains, Jerusalem has captivated and beckoned, bewitched and enchanted since before the days of King David. David captured this fortress city from the Jebusites in about the year 1000 BCE. He made it the capitol of his kingdom, and although he wanted to build a great Temple to God there on what was reputedly Mt Moriah, the site of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, God commanded that the task of sanctuary building was to be left to Solomon, David’s son.

That there was a great and beautiful Temple built on the highest point in the Old City is today only a matter of dispute to those who would deny us Jews a history in the city and, in fact, in the very land of Israel, itself. Notwithstanding the Wafq’s attempts to remove, physically, the evidence of the First and Second Temples from the layers beneath the Temple Mount’s surface, archeological finds on a near monthly basis are establishing, over and over again, the Jewish presence which dates back long before the rise of modern Arabism and the existence of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosques. These Moslem places of worship now stand where Solomon’s Temple once stood.

For Christians, Jerusalem’s history includes the life, trial, and death of Jesus. For Moslems, it encompasses Mohammed’s ascent to heaven on his steed from a rock on Mt Moriah. Jerusalem is dominated by churches, synagogues, mosques, holy sites and clerics of all faiths. Under Israeli control since the Six Days War, Jerusalem has never been freer to believers and worshipers than it is today.

For us Jews, our greatest joy of modern times was that day in June of 1967, when the Old City of Jerusalem fell to the hands of Israeli soldiers. For 19 years, since the Jordanians took the city in 1948, Jews had been forbidden access to the Old City’s synagogues. Nearly every Jewish House of Worship the Jordanians utterly destroyed. Worst of all, access to Judaism’s holiest site, the Wailing or Western Wall, an outer wall of the Second Temple, long revered because of the deep longing Orthodox and Conservative Jews felt over the loss of the Temple, a place where God’s presence had, for centuries, been invoked, was denied.

Now, these young soldiers, religious and secular alike, wept over what they had accomplished and what they were witnessing. One of Israel’s greatest poets, Yehuda Amichai characterized the meaning of the unification of Jerusalem when he wrote:

	Jerusalem-- port city on the shores of eternity.
	The Holy Mount is a huge ship, a luxurious pleasure craft.
	From the lattices of her Western Wall, happy saints look out, 
	travelers.
	Chassidim on the dock wave goodbye, shout hurrah till we meet
again.
	She’s always arriving, always sailing.  And the gates and the docks
	and the policemen and the flags and the high mass of churches
	and the mosques and the chimneys of synagogues and the boats
of praise and waves of mountains.  The voice of the ram’s horn is 
heard: still another sailed. Day of Atonement sailors in white uniforms
climb among ladders and ropes of tested prayers.
And the trade and the gates and the golden domes:
Jerusalem is the Venice of God. (translated by Harold Shimmer),
IIC p. 15.

I, myself, studied in this ancient/modern city back in 1971. There are, today, sounds and sites which bring me back to Jerusalem. The sensory vehicles which convey me the quickest are odors and aromas of spices, fruits and vegetables. These snap me back into the descending alley ways of the Old City.

Out of the brightness reflected from the stone called for the city’s name of which nearly every building is constructed, the alley leading from the Jaffa Gate leads one to the Kotek HaMa’aravi, to the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount and its golden domed, so-called, Mosque of Omar, built over the rock from which Mohammed was to have ascended.

Jerusalem is an experience both in time and place but most of all in spirit. Oh how we Jews yearned for this special place. Psalm 137 nearly captures it all:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yes we wept
When we remembered Zion…
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy… IIC, p. 9.

It is said of this city that ten measures of beauty were bestowed upon the world; nine were taken by Jerusalem, and one by the rest of the world. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin 49) When first you ascend to the city, you are taken by its white and golden textures, its bustling traffic, its denizens so many of whose women are dressed in ankle and wrist length dresses; the men in black caftans, tzitzit and payot waving in the nearly continuous dry breezes which caress the city’s many pine trees and desert-like plant life. Everywhere, along the skyline, there are cranes as the city expands and claims more and more of the hilltop areas which encompass and protect it.

So many want to nationalize or divide this city…and perhaps some day, in their near desperate quest for peace, the Israelis will allow Jerusalem to once again be divided, but I for one, hope that this doesn’t happen. For like Yitzchak Rabin, I understand what the unity of this city means to us Jews and to a world blind with its own agendas but forgetful of Jerusalem’s history.

And so, on this night of celebration, I’d like to close with the words of one of Israel’s greatest warrior-statesman who spoke these words on Jerusalem Day, 1994, barely a half year before he was to be assassinated.

There are visions that accompany people throughout their lives.
There are visions that cannot ever be forgotten: the visions of Jerusalem--mine, yours—are like these.

I remember, as yesterday, the citizens of Jerusalem, shelled and under fire, running about while bent over, for fear of snipers in the streets of the city.

I remember their fatigued faces in line for their rations of rice, flour and containers of water.

I remember the convoys ascending to the city, and the drivers in their armored compartments, freezing in the chill of winter, and sweating during the heatwaves. 

I remember the flames which erupted from the armored vehicles, the scream of the wounded and the silence of the dead.

I remember the members of the Harel Brigade, my soldiers, who, together with the soldiers of the Jerusalem Brigade, went to battle, night after night, around Jerusalem and its mountains, to the Arab villages.  They would return in the morning, fewer and with increasingly depleted ranks.

And I remember, 19 years later, the warning to Hussein, the first shells, the order to move.

And also the paratroopers, and the men of the Jerusalem Brigade and of the Harel warriors in their armored form, breaking through the walls and the mountains and the hills; and the residents of Jerusalem escorting them with prayers and tears to the Wailing Wall; and the long, long lines—of the dead and the names.

We remember – and we know that Jerusalem is the very heart of the Jewish people, and the one and only united capital of the state of Israel.

And we know that this is the place to which every Jew turns in his prayers, and of which generations dreamt and poets wrote.  Thus, from our perspective, Jerusalem is ours – it was and will be ours, while we always promised and ensured freedom of worship for all religions and free access to all holy places.

Today, we pay our respects to the many who fought for the city, but were never privileged [to see this day].

And we salute you, the warriors who brought this city to us, and we say thank you.

And, as always, we raise Jerusalem above our greatest joy. IIC. Pp. 4-5

* Selections were quoted from the Israel Information Center pamphlet, “Jerusalem Day,” Ahva Press, 1995.