Timeless Torah

London comes from a Celtic word which means, “A wild and wooded town.” Cairo is an anglicized version of the Arab name for Mars, while Paris is named for the Paris of Greek myth. In contrast, Jerusalem was named by G-d Himself.

On the 28th day of Iyar (approximately one week before Shavuos) the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount were liberated during the 1967 Six Day War, uniting the Arab and Jewish sections of the city. The day is commemorated in Israel as Jerusalem Day.

Through 2,000 years of exile, Jews from four corners of the world always turned in prayer toward Jerusalem. What memory were they so eager to preserve?

We need to understand the importance of memory. Memory is not history or dead memorabilia. By defining the past, memory creates the present. Dictators have long appreciated this. Which is why Stalin airbrushed Trotsky out of photographs, and revisionists denied the Holocaust ever happened.

In Hebrew, the word for man is “zachar”; for memory it is “zecher.” Man is memory. People who suffer memory loss through illness or accident don’t just misplace their keys. They lose their selves. They become lost and adrift, because without memory, the current moment has no context, and no meaning.

London comes from a Celtic word which means, “A wild and wooded town.” Cairo is an anglicized version of the Arab name for Mars, while Paris is named for the Paris of Greek myth. In contrast, Jerusalem was named by G-d Himself. The name has two parts: Yira, which means to see, and shalem, which means peace. Jerusalem was the place where Abraham sacrificed Isaac, and said, “This is the place where God is seen.”

Elsewhere, G-d is a theory, but in Jerusalem, G-d is seen and felt as a tangible presence. In Jerusalem we reach beyond the frailty of our lives, and strive for transcendence. Elsewhere we grope for insight, in Jerusalem we anticipate clarity. Paris may be for lovers, but Jerusalem is for visionaries.
Jerusalem is a metaphor for a perfected world, and it gives us perspective on our lives. When Aldous Huxley said, “We have each of us our Jerusalem,” he meant a vision of what life might be. That vision was embodied in the phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Uttered amidst poverty and oppression, it preserved the dream of a world in which love and justice, not power and self-interest, would be the currency men live by.

The second part of the name Jerusalem means peace, although the city has rarely known anything but strife. But the peace of Jerusalem is the peace found at the center of the spokes of a wheel, where opposing forces may be delicately balanced. The Talmud says that creation began in Jerusalem. Medieval maps show Jerusalem at the epicenter of Asia, Europe, and Africa. From this place, the whole world is cast into perspective.

This explains the never-ending battle for the Holy City, for humanity has long understood that he who controls Jerusalem controls the world’s memory. He controls the way God is seen and the way we collectively see our future.
Once the Temple Mount was the highest point in the city, but in the year 135, Roman slaves carried away the dirt of the mountain, expelled the Jews, and renamed the city Aelia Capitolina. The Crusaders also tried their hand at rewriting history. Jerusalem, they preached, was no longer the center of a Jewish national drama, but the site of the passion and death of Jesus. Then the Moslems came and systematically began building mosques on every Jewish holy site. They too airbrushed the past.

All of these cultures rewrote our place in history. They consigned us, so they believed, to the dust bin of history - a once great people, now abandoned by God; bypassed by time.
But Jews preserved Jerusalem as a memory. When we built our houses we left a square un-plastered, and at our weddings we broke a glass. From all over the world we prayed toward Jerusalem, and because memory was kept alive, the Jewish people lived.
When Jerusalem was liberated, the past became present. What we had longed for became ours. What we had dreamed of became real. And when we woke up from our 2,000 year dream, we realized that we were not despised and impoverished itinerants, surviving on the fickle goodwill of other nations. We are a nation of farmers recovering swamps, a nation of reluctant warriors, and a nation of priests. We are the people who taught the world “To beat their swords into plowshares,” and that appellation belongs not to the rich and powerful, but to the good and wise.
A mere forty years have passed since those heady days when Jerusalem became ours, and we believed anything was within our grasp. But now we are divided. Only the fragile threads of memory bind us together. If they sever, we will fragment.
To this threat, “Yom Yerusholayim - Jerusalem Day” provides a counterpoint. This day and this city embodies more than our memories of the past, it contains our hopes for the future…because Jerusalem is a living memory, a vision of G-d in our daily routine, an image of a better world. This tiny dot on a world map has given us the strength for two thousand years to illuminate the darkness of exile, and light up the way Home. This is why Jerusalem matters.