The Eternal Capital for the Eternal People:
If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem
Why does Jerusalem capture the Jewish soul? Read more about the meaning of Jerusalem to the Jewish people, particularly in recent times.
About fifteen years ago, I had Shabbat dinner in Jerusalem with a retired radio reporter. He had spent three decades covering Israel for America's old Mutual Broadcasting Network. I forget his name -but I will never forget his story.
His was a typical Israeli apartment, a bit too small, overflowing with a few too many books. The furniture was simple but not shabby, with a picture of an officer in uniform dominating the living room wall-unit.
He was a typical journalist, well-educated, wide-ranging, brimming with great stories. "What was your greatest moment in journalism," I asked him, whereupon he left the table, cued up an old reel-to-reel tape machine on his wall unit, and said "Listen."
The tape was from the morning of June 7, 1967. My host had set out early that morning, and ended up at an Israeli command post on Rechov Strauss, in the center of Jerusalem, with a commanding view of the ancient walled city. As my friend set the scene, I tried to picture tanks and soldiers, half-tracks and stretchers, amid the tacky souvenir shops and pungent shwarma stands of to day's Jerusalem. The tape began, describing the efforts of Mota Gur's paratrooper brigade to reach the Old City.
The reporter's dispassionate, descriptive, professional tone sounded to the ears of this spoiled American like the play-by-play of a well-paced basketball or hockey game. Only this time, the roar of ammunition replaced the roar of the crowds.
Then, from his perch, the reporter sees the paratroopers pierce Lion's Gate and enter the Old City. All of sudden, he bursts out: "After 2,000 years, the Jewish people have liberated Jerusalem! Jerusalem is ours once again!" Hearing this man shift from playing the objective reporter to being a proud Jew gave me goose bumps. His sense of history, the way he felt the past in the present, instinctively echoed the stirring battle orders handed to the troops that morning, which read: "final objective: the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Old City. For two thousand years our people have prayed for this moment. Let us go forward (kadimah) -to victory."
As my host turned off the tape recorder, I asked about the picture on the wall-unit. "That," he said, "is my son. He died in Lebanon two years ago."
This journalist was a true Yerushalmi, a Jerusalemite infected by the spirit of the city.
'Mesmerized by the city's past, he could not simply sit on the sidelines. Despite his professional training, he had to get involved, he had to be passionate, he had to commit his soul, and his family's future, to the Jewish people's eternal city. He had paid an exorbitant price, but he had also reveled in the joys of Jerusalem.
The Power and Romance of Jerusalem
The power of Jerusalem reminds us that Zionism is a passionate, romantic movement even if you are secular. A typical Israeli, this man did not think twice about flipping on a tape-recorder during his Shabbat meal, but to call him "secular" is to ignore how deeply Jewish, how profoundly religious, he, and so many of his actions, were.
Beneath its rationalist and secular veneer, Zionism has always been an emotional and religious movement. Even Theodor Herzl was romantic and utopian. The only way so much was achieved in such a short time was due to the passion of Herzl and his followers.
Herzl learned the hard way just how profoundly religious his supposedly secular nationalist movement was. When he considered the British offer to establish a Jewish homeland in Uganda (actually the Kenyan highlands), his followers rebelled. Most understood that Zionism would not survive without Zion.
In synagogues throughout the world, when taking the Torah out of the Ark, Jews sing "kee mi tzion tezeh Torah, u davar Adoshem me'Yerushalayim," the Torah will come forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. "Zion," the Biblical name for Jerusalem, is not just the three-thousand-year-old capital of the Jewish people, it is the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual center of Jewish gravity. Mentioned over six hundred times in the Bible, it was the city of David the heroic, who conquered it, and of Solomon the wise, who built the first of the two Temples there. During the many centuries of exile, Jerusalem symbolized both the glorious past of the Jewish people -and their hopes for the future. Much of Jewish prayer, in fact, entailed reflecting on what once was in Jerusalem as a way of conceptualizing what again might be there.
The fate of the Jewish people seemed tied directly to the fate of Jerusalem. As the great philosopher Martin Buber noted in 1934, "When Jerusalem ceased to be a Jewish city, when the Jew was no longer permitted to be at home in his own country -it is then that he was hurdled into the abyss of the world. Ever since, he has represented to the world the insecure man." Most Zionists understood that only if Jerusalem were redeemed could the Jews be redeemed as well.
Jerusalem was such a vital symbol during the exile that it both inspired and repelled early Zionists. In the early throes of the Zionist revolution against Rabbinic legalism, some zealots discounted the centrality of Jerusalem. Hoping to build a new Europe in their ancient homeland, some young rebels felt compelled to reject the way Jerusalem had been used to anaesthetize the Jews. To them, the Jerusalemite was a hostage to fate, awaiting the Messiah in prayerful silence while relying, in the meantime, on the next best thing -a handout from abroad.
Labor Zionists, in particular, sought a Nietzschean "transvaluation of values," to transcend the passivity, the scholasticism, the arid rationalism of the Diaspora Jew and the pious Jerusalemite. Ultimately, however, Jerusalem was so central to the Zionist's material and spiritual world that the idea had to be updated and reconfigured, but not rejected. Even in 1882 -a decade before Herzl- the pioneers of "Bilu" waxed nostalgic about their "celestial Temple." Establishing a modem, international movement, they chose an ancient city for their head office -Jerusalem. Conflating seemingly "religious" and "secular" symbols, they amended the "Shema," the most basic prayer, to read: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and our Land, Zion, is our one hope."
A City Divided, a Nation Depressed
Unfortunately, when the state finally emerged, in May, 1948, war tore apart the city of peace. David Ben-Gurion, who had expediently but broken-heartedly accepted the United Nations' 1947 partition plan, read the Declaration of Independence from Tel Aviv. Many "secular" Zionists preferred Tel Aviv, a refreshing city of the future, a Zionist city lacking Jerusalem's historical baggage. But two weeks later, when the Old City fell, the secular and the religious mourned together.
How odd it was. After two thousand years, the Jews had a state. They controlled most of the city of Jerusalem. But without Har HaBayit, the most purely religious part of the city, without the site of the Holy Temple and the Jewish quarter, the State of Israel was not whole. The divided city came to symbolize the great costs of maintaining a state -while also becoming a potent national-cultural symbol for secular Zionists.
In 1949, when the United Nations voted to internationalize the city, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, the secular Zionist prophet governing from Tel Aviv, told his colleagues "pack up. We're all moving to Jerusalem tomorrow." On January 23, 1950, the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, proclaimed Jerusalem would "always" be "the capital of the Jewish nation." Since July 1950, diplomats have presented their credentials to Israel's president in Jerusalem.
During those frustrating nineteen years, as the Jordanians desecrated synagogues and cemeteries, turning sanctuaries into stables and headstones into cobblestones, Jews throughout the world learned just how important Jerusalem was to them. By 1967, the songwriter Naomi Shemer had captured the Jewish yearning for a united capital in her stirring "Yerushalayim Shel Zahav." Shemer's Jerusalem is a golden city that delights the senses, stirs the soul, fills the heart and engages the mind. It is an eternal city, a city deeply tied to the Jewish people, where time stands still, where ancient markets still bustle, where twentieth-century moderns become time-travelers wandering from reminders of one milestone in Jewish history to another.
Jerusalem of Gold After 1967
The 1967 victory -secured by modern weaponry but appropriately celebrated with the blowing of the shofar, the venerable ram's horn -initiated modern Jerusalem's golden era. The battle-hardened, deeply secular kibbutznik soldiers who wept unashamedly at the newly-liberated Western Wall underscored the nationalistic significance of the holy Temple's ruins. With that rumpled genius, Mayor Teddy Kollek, at the helm, the city banked its future on preserving its Te t putting millions of Diaspora dollars to good use, Kollek and his Jerusalem Foundation polished one architectural diamond after another eating a dazzling tiara of old-new beauty in the reunited capital of Herzl's "Altneuland." Developers built upward, transforming the venerable skyline, balancing gleaming skyscrapers against golden towers. At the same time, an army of archaeologists burrowed deep into the city's core, adding new dimensions, literally and figuratively, to the Jews' relationship with their capital as they uncovered material proof of the Jews' time-honored love for the city.
The result is a magical mix of the Kotel and the Knesset, the old and the new, the secular and the divine, the East and the West. To the east, in the Old City, a museum with remnants from Second Temple times displays the earliest representation of a menorah, the seven-handed candelabra, while to the west, in the New City, a large menorah stands sentry outside Israel's parliament, testifying to the modern state's ancient but vital roots. To the east, the refurbished Cardo, the ancient shopping arcade, once again hums with merchants and shoppers, while to the west a huge mall offers kosher Burger King and exclusive boutiques to Arabs and Jews united, albeit temporarily, in consumerism. To the east, donkeys, cars, and pedestrians crowd the narrow cobblestoned alleys, while to the west, sporty sedans whiz across the superhighway. To the east, muezzins chant, rabbis pray, mystics meditate, artists paint, vagrants beg, merchants haggle, while to the west, rock stars perform, politicians posture, scholars study, computer scientists program, pedestrians jaywalk, and businessmen haggle.
As the Jerusalem of earth and stones thrived, so, too, did its inhabitants. For nearly twenty years -until the outbreak of the Intifada in 1987 -Jerusalem, the city of peace, offered a remarkable example of Arab-Jewish cooperation. Yes, there were tensions lingering and traumas aplenty, but there were also business arrangements formed and warm friendships made. Jews wandered the back alleys of the Old City freely, respectfully, relishing the exotic warmth of the Arab casbah -relishing the Middle Eastern character of their modern state. Many Arabs, despite their frustrations, enjoyed the relative autonomy Mayor Kollek secured for them. Even as many bristled under the occupation, many prospered, and all were freer in Kollek's Jerusalem than were almost all of their brethren in the rest of the Arab world.
Jerusalem Letters
Today, the beauty of Jerusalem still entrances but the passions roiling the city evoke terror. In the imagination, Jerusalem's romantic landscape sketched in gold coexists with a memorial scroll etched in blood. A geography of loss has been superimposed on the map of magic. The crowded chaos of Mahaneh Yehudah, the open air market, attracts tourists and terrorists. Warm memories of rich smells and exotic foods collide now with the memories of too many dead and wounded from too many bombs planted there. Similarly, Sbarro's Pizza in the heart of the city represents economic progress as American franchises opened kosher branches in the Jewish capital, and devastating loss.
In the Middle Ages, Christian pilgrims proudly sported "Jerusalem letters," crosses or other symbols tattooed on their bodies to commemorate their visit to the Holy City. Alas, today, too many Jews bear scars attesting to their devotion to this city. Far better for the modern "Jerusalem letters" to be metaphorical, and positive.
The battle for Jerusalem has begun -or continues in a new, bloodier, phase. Unfortunately, many secular Israelis, and many North American Jews, have allowed themselves to overlook the centrality of this city to our people. Now that we have it all, too many of us take it for granted. References to Jerusalem are so ubiquitous in Jewish lore, we become momentarily inured to the potency of the symbol. We may sing "Next Year in Jerusalem" at our Seders, we may even participate in a community "March to Jerusalem" every year, but we often fail to take that extra moment to savor our connection to the city. Even more disturbing, as many Palestinians demand that Jerusalem serve as their capital, too many Jews blithely cede Jerusalem to them. Some extreme secular Israelis disdain the fuss made over a "bunch of stones," while too many American Jews just don't know why there is a fuss at all.
To the extent that this abdication reflects a desperate yearning for peace, it is at least well-meaning; to the extent that it reflects the dry, clinical, excessively rationalistic approach too many sophisticated Jews take to contemporary Judaism and Zionism, it is pathetic. A century after the Zionist revolution began against the Rabbis' dry, clinical, excessively rationalistic approach, we have come full circle. It is the modernizers who now risk deforming the Jewish soul.
Hopefully, some diplomatic wizardry will be able to satisfy the Palestinian desire for Jerusalem while protecting the Jewish stake in the city. During the July 2000 Camp David negotiations, Prime Minister Barak and his aides floated various proposals for sharing this multidimensional city, on. different planes. Some recognized the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish soul, others did not do that sufficiently. And even f part of Jerusalem is ceded for the sake of peace, no one should underestimate how important Jerusalem is to the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Cosmic Nationalism
Forgetting the unhappy experiences when Jordan ruled, overlooking the practical difficulties of sharing the same territories, neglecting the Jewish people's unique and enduring relationship to the city, are foolhardy and dangerous. We already learned in the 1950s and 1960s how central Jerusalem is to the Zionist enterprise. Jerusalem is not simply a piece of real estate that can be subdivided easily; it is the touchstone of Zionism and the State of Israel. "There is a cosmic element in nationality which is its basic ingredient," the Zionist thinker A.D. Gordon explained. "That cosmic element may best be described as the blending of the natural landscape of the Homeland with the spirit of the people inhabiting it. This is the mainspring of a people's vitality and creativity, of its spiritual and cultural values. Any conglomeration of individuals may form a society in the mechanical sense, one that moves and acts, but only the presence of the cosmic element makes for an organic national entity with creative vitality."
I first discovered Gordon's "creative vitality" at the Young Judaea camp Tel Yehudah. I have since become reacquainted with it through my experiences with birthright Israel. And I find the cosmic element renewed again and again when I wander around Jerusalem, even when the city is haunted by terrorism and tension. These three experiences have shaped my Zionism profoundly -and make me optimistic about the Jewish future. These three experiences convince me that we have a "product" that can still "sell" in the modern world.
In February 2000 I danced in the Shabbat with a group of birthrighters at the Western Wall. As our "lah, lahs" resonated in my ears, I heard from behind me a muezzin's sonorous call inviting Muslims to pray; in front of me, and across the valley, I heard church bells ringing. Today, these might sound like discordant notes fighting for primacy. But back in the days of Oslo peace and prosperity, I heard the three musical expressions as a symphony of synergy, as a chorus of coexistence. I do not know why great beauty and great tragedy are so often linked, but I reserve the right to hope that in Jerusalem, and elsewhere, the beauty will trump the tragedy very soon.
"Im eshkachech Yerushalayim, tishkach yemeeni": If I forget, if I FORSAKE, you O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning, may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth. If we abandon Jerusalem, we betray the essence of our being, that which makes us human, our hands and our mouths, our bodies and our souls. Jerusalem reminds us of the passion Zionism should evoke; Jerusalem transcends today's often overstated dichotomy between the religious and the secular in our Zionism, in our Judaism.
Over many centuries, across many cultures, Jerusalem has signified a corner of the earth offering a taste of heaven, or at least the heavenly. Every Thanksgiving Americans remember how the Pilgrims came to the New World seeking a New Jerusalem. As Jews, we are blessed by a connection with the old, real Jerusalem, but we also can create new Jerusalems. I found a taste of Jerusalem at camp, summer after summer. I found a taste of Jerusalem on one birthright bus after another. I still find the taste of the real Jerusalem enriching, inspiring, ennobling. We need more Jerusalem in our lives.
This article also belongs to the following subjects:
Israel
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Jerusalem
Jewish History
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1948-Today: Modern Zionist Age
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