Joy of All the Earth – My Paean to Jerusalem

• Jerusalem in the Western Mind

My paean to the State of Israel began with a reference to astronauts and outer space. I’ll begin this paean to Jerusalem in the same way. The following is recorded in Thomas Friedman’s book “From Beirut to Jerusalem”:

“When American astronaut Neil Armstrong, a devout Christian, visited Israel after his trip to the moon, he was taken on a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem by Israeli archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov. When they got to the Hulda Gate, which is at the top of the stairs leading to the Temple Mount, Armstrong asked Ben-Dov whether Jesus had stepped anywhere around there.

“I told him, ‘Look, Jesus was a Jew,’” recalled Ben-Dov. “These are the steps that lead to the Temple, so he must have walked here many times.” Armstrong then asked if these were the original steps, and Ben-Dov confirmed that they were. ‘So Jesus stepped right here?’ asked Armstrong. ‘That’s right,’ answered Ben-Dov.

‘I have to tell you,’ Armstrong said to the Israeli archaeologist, ‘I am more excited stepping on these stones than I was stepping on the moon.'”

What makes a city, a geographical location, have such a hold on the hearts and minds of people around the world? To the extent that Christianity derives from Judaism, The Jewish attachment to Yerushalayim made its way into the Western soul as well. Sometimes negatively so. In the year 1095 CE, Pope Urban II riled up a crowd of the faithful in France urging them to go conquer the Holy Land from the infidel Muslims. The faithful responded to the Pope’s call with Latin cries of “Deus Volt” – God wills it! In the year 1099 they succeeded in establishing the first Crusader state in the Holy Land – the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Its first ruler was Godfrey of Bouillon, who refused to take the title of King in the city where only God is King, preferring to be called Prince instead. He also refused to wear a crown in the city where his savior wore a crown of thorns. This was all heavily romanticized in the West, but not by Jews, for whom the Crusades meant only more massacres and persecutions.

The theologies of both Christianity and Islam at the time were supercessionist. Their fight over the Holy Land was to determine which religion was the true successor to the Jews. The Jews themselves were no longer even in the running. If you had told either party at the time that a thousand years later it would be the Jews in control of Jerusalem once again, neither side would have believed that such a thing could be possible, not only circumstantially, but theologically as well. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik (popularly known as The Rav) said after the IDF took Jerusalem in 1967 that it was a Kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of God’s name, in that it disproved centuries of Catholic supercessionist theology which had been used to persecute and marginalize the Jews.

The Christian attachment to Jerusalem finds expression in America’s own homegrown branch of Christianity, the Latter Day Saints (LDS) more popularly known as the Mormons. Mormon theology teaches that God will eventually establish the New Jerusalem, also called Zion, in Jackson County, Missouri. This county includes the bulk of the Kansas City metropolitan area, where I happen to reside! I want to be clear that my intention here is not to mock Mormon beliefs. On the contrary, I find their rootedness and connection to our Torah to be inspiring. The Book of Mormon begins in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE, on Tisha B’Av, when the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple. A Jewish man named Lehi and his wife Sarah and their four sons flee Jerusalem and sail across the ocean to America, landing there two thousand years before Columbus.

• Jerusalem in Jewish Thought

The last line of the Seder is Next Year in Jerusalem. Most people relate to this line as a religiously sentimental one: wouldn’t it be nice and ideal to have the Seder in the Holy City. However, the line is actually a legal (halachic) one. By law, when the Temple is standing, the Pesach offering with the Matza and Maror can only be eaten in the Holy City. All able-bodied Jews are required to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem and have their Pesach lamb or goat slaughtered, in groups of ten or so, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in a six-hour window, from midday to sunset. (How could those logistics possibly work? We’ll await the Mashiach to inform us). After slaughtering the offering, the Seder must be convened in the city of Jerusalem, and the sacrificial meat cannot be removed from the city.

Rabbi Soloveitchik explains that the city of Jerusalem is itself a part of the Temple complex. It’s the outer ring of the Temple itself. Or, as I like to put it in my own words: if you were an architect explaining the blueprints for the Temple. You’d say there has to be an altar here, of these dimensions, made of these materials; a menorah here made of these materials, of these dimensions; and a habitation of Jews living all around the outer part. That’s the city of Yerushalayim – it’s the outer ring of the Temple complex itself. To the extent that we are now rebuilding Yerushalayim, the Rav taught, we are actually beginning to rebuild the Temple itself. To be in Jerusalem is to be in a state of Lifnei Hashem – in the Presence of God’s Shekhinah.

In January of 2014, my mother was sitting shiva for my grandmother at my aunt and uncle’s house in Ramot Bet, a suburb of Jerusalem, and I was there as well. At the shacharit service the Kohanim arose to give the priestly blessing. The general rule is that the priestly blessing is not recited in the shiva house. This blessing must be given in a state of ahava, a state of love and joy, and there is no joy in the house of mourning. The exception to this rule is in a shiva house in Jerusalem. In the Holy City, in the presence of God, there is always joy, even in the house of mourning, and so the Kohanim can in fact give the blessing there even at the shiva house. We learn this from when King David placed the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem, and declared (1 Chronicles 16:27) –

“There is beauty and majesty before Him; might and joy in His place”.

I was not aware of this special exception for Jerusalem at the time. When the Kohanim arose to do the blessing, I began to shout for them to stop. My uncle then took me aside and explained the special ruling for the Holy City, which extends to the entirety of Greater Jerusalem, even the parts that expand outside the wall of the Old City, including even up to the suburb of Ramot. I had not been aware of this rule. But I should have been. Years earlier, on Chol Hamoed sukkot I visited the Kotel in the afternoon. I was approached by a young man encouraging me to shake the Lulav and Etrog. I had already performed the mitzvah in the morning at my Yeshiva in Moshav Beit Meir, I told him. He smiled and told me: but there’s still a mitzvah to shake Lulav and Etrog again in the Old City, in the presence of God, in keeping with the verse in Vayikra 23:40 –

From the words “before God” we learn there’s an extra Mitzvah to take Lulav and Etrog in Jerusalem, in the presence of the Shekhinah. You should even repeat the blessing, he told me. At this point, another man overhearing this conversation began to shout that the first man’s halachic reasoning is all wrong, and I should not repeat the blessing. It was at that point that I slipped away to buy some shawarma. I met up with some friends from Yeshivat HaKotel. We discussed some matters of Torah, but also the usual fare of sports, movies, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld. How can you ever goof off like this, I asked them, or misbehave when you live in the Old City? Don’t you feel a constant sense of dread, living in the Presence of the Shekhinah? You just kind of get used to it, they told me. But I never believed them.

After 1967, R. Solovetichik was asked if he would ever visit the liberated city of Jerusalem, which he had celebrated in speeches and remarks to such a great extent. The Rav was the president of Mizrachi, the world Religious Zionist organization, but he had not visited the Holy Land since 1935. The Rav would respond with great vulnerability that in 1967, he had also lost his wife, his mother, and his brother, all within the span of a few months. His grieving for his wife was particularly acute. To be in Jerusalem, in the Presence of God, the Rav explained, one must be in a state of joy. And he could not feel in a state of joy since his wife had passed. It is poignantly well known that the Rav never did fully get over the loss of his beloved wife Tonya, even by the time that he ordained my father in the late 1970’s. He never did visit the Holy Land again.

• My Bobby Yetty’s Jerusalem

My great grandmother Yitta Neugroshel was a pious Hasidic woman in the mold of “they don’t make them like that anymore”. Bobby Yetty would cry on Tisha B’Av and describe in detail the destruction of Jerusalem as if she had lived through it herself. She did not cry publicly about her first husband Yirzchak who was killed in the Holocaust. But she would cry on Tisha B’av. Bobby Yetty had a scholarly knowledge of the Midrash, and she took all Midrashim literally. And so, whenever a new technology came out, such as the microwave or the cordless telephone, she would smile and say I’m not so impressed, because the Midrash on the verse in Kohelet “There is nothing new under the sun” teaches that all future technologies to ever exist already existed in King Solmon’s Jerusalem, only to be rediscovered and reinvented later.

Bobby Yetty envisioned ancient Jerusalem like something out of The Jetsons, a utopian place with flying cars and robots. And she believed this with a perfect faith, just as I believe the world is round. Such is the Jewish reverence for the Holy City, imprinted into the Jewish soul throughout the ages. Jerusalem is a place where the distant past looks like the distant future. It transcends space and time in that way.

R. Yosef Messas, a Moroccan Rabbinic sage in 20^th century Israel, opined that the seven lights of the Menorah in the Third Temple will be electric bulbs, because the Temple will keep up with the times. If R. Messas were still alive, I would tell him that according to my Bobby Yetty, the Menorah in King Solomon’s Temple may very well have been electric as well!

• Jerusalem Day – My Anniversary

My earliest memory of one of my father’s high holiday sermons, when I actually began listening to them, was one year on a Yom Kippur after the Oslo Accords, when there was talk of Israel potentially ceding sovereignty over Jerusalem. I was stirred by my father’s passion in thundering: “Jerusalem is the city that we mention at our weddings, and at our funerals; after every time we eat a meal, and on every day in which we fast; it’s our heritage from the past, our beating heart in the present, and our destiny in the future”. My parents now live in Nahariya, in northern Israel, but one can drive from their house to the Kotel in about 2 and a half hours.

I chose to include at the top of this piece a photo of my father at the Hyatt Jerusalem in 1995. He was introducing Natan Sharansky at an Israel Bonds delegation. The very words “Hyatt Jerusalem” capture the timeless scope that the Holy City holds across the ages. A blend of the ancient and the modern. There is no Hilton of Babylon, or Ramada of Sparta. But there is a Hyatt Jerusalem! And we can’t take that for granted.

There is a custom to fast on one’s wedding day. My wife Becca and I were lucky to not have to do so, since we got married on Yom Yerushalayim, exactly ten years ago, and we relate to that day as a joyous one on which it is not appropriate to fast. In our invitations we wrote: “Year 49 to the Liberation of Jerusalem” We were privileged to have our first anniversary at the start of year 50, the Jubilee year, to that sacred milestone in 1967. We will now begin year 59 and counting. As we recite in the Psalm for Monday each week: (Psalm 48:2-3) –

“The Lord is great and very much praised, in the city of our God, the Mount of His Sanctuary. The fairest of branches, the joy of the entire earth; Mount Zion, by the north side, the City of the Great King”

May we all merit to gather soon in Yerushalayim, the City of God, the Joy of all the Earth, and to see it become the futuristic utopia that my Bobby Yetty envisioned it having already been in the distant past.