A-Z OF JEWISH VALUES -

J IS FOR JERUSALEM

KI MITZION TETZEH TORAH

It was a peaceful Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem. We were there last week visiting our son who has just made Aliyah. We were there overlooking the old city Mt Scopus the Mt of Olives, Abu Tor and the surrounding hills and valleys when suddenly the atmosphere changes. The peaceful calm is interrupted. The tranquillity is shattered. Traffic had been diverted on the road past the Mt Zion hotel where were staying. No cars had been allowed down the stretch of road leading past the walls of the Old City, since the morning of that day for security reasons. Now we knew why. The gardens below had been taken over by a rock concert. Church bells in the late afternoon could not be heard above the din. Muezzins from the mosques, usually audible everywhere were drowned out.

It was nice beat music I have to say. But intrusive in that setting. I wondered how far away could it be heard. The sages say that when the shofar was blown in Zion it could be heard as far away as Jericho.

Later that night, as we said our goodbyes to our son I understood something more. His last words were ‘Bye-bye. Yom Yerushalayim tov’. Then the penny dropped. So that was it – this was a Yom Yerushalayim celebration. I had lost track of time. Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) celebrates the unification of the old and new cities in June 1967. The following day our taxi driver – an Israeli Arab, told us that he had so much trouble getting through the Jerusalem streets that he just had to stop work that afternoon and evening and go home. Most of the Jerusalem taxi drivers that day would have faced the same problem. And anyone wanting to attend a place of worship in peace, or simply to enjoy the tranquillity of the eternal city would at the very least require earplugs.

Jerusalem! City of contrasts and contradictions! Where else in the world is there a city that has been so much the focal point prayers from so many faiths and over which so much blood has been spilt? Now is not the time to go into the fraught question of how on earth the rival claims could be settled in any peace solution. But in a spiritual context - What is the value of Jerusalem for us (as Reform Jews)? Yom Yerushalayim doesn’t figure on our calendars. OK – it marks a political event. But Jerusalem is so much a point of orientation – people symbolically face Jerusalem in prayer. We say Leshanah haba’ah biYerushalayim at Seder and again on Yom Kippur. The Hebrew name of Jackson’s Row, which appears on our letterheads, is Sha’ar Zion, the Gate of Zion, a name which we share with the first Reform synagogue in this country, West London Synagogue. Hopefully when our new Shul is built we will use the beautiful white Jerusalem stone for the interior.

Jerusalem, the City of David was always the nucleus of Jewish spiritual aspirations. In exile we yearned to return. It was not so much the city as the Temple at its heart which held our hopes. 3 fasts a year commemorate its destruction. Reform only observes one of them, Tisha B’Av and only because it marks other tragedies besides the destruction of the Temple. We do not regard ourselves as being in mourning for the Temple until such time as it is rebuilt. At every Jewish wedding we break a glass to commemorate the destruction of the Temple too. That one we do observe (we are not completely consistent) – and it can be given other meanings relevant to the precariousness of human life.

Jerusalem holds great value – for Reform Judaism. There has been a change. It was significant when in the 1970’s the World Union for Progressive Judaism moved its HQ from New York to Jerusalem. We have a rabbinical college there and our students are encouraged to spend a year in Jerusalem. Shnat Netzer the gap year between school and university which our youth movement runs includes a 4 month option in Jerusalem. It is very central for us. But it wasn’t so from the beginning.

With the beginnings of Reform many references to it were expunged from the Siddur. And over recent years have made reappearances. This has left its mark. For example, why do the choir sing those words which are not in the Siddur ‘tivneh homot Yerushalayim’? (Rebuild the walls of Jerusalem?) - Because it’s in the music we use, composed for other prayer books. Other examples exist aplenty. Especially in the Birkat hamazon (Grace after meals). There we have compromises. Reform versions omit mentions of the Temple but keep the references to Jerusalem.

Why the differences between Reform and Orthodox in this matter? In the prayers, "Jerusalem" refers to the future city--and its Temple--rebuilt when the Mashiach comes. Most traditional Jews feel quite comfortable expressing this as at the end of each Shabbat at Havdalah singing the hope that Eliyahu Hanavi should come accompanying the Messiah "speedily in our days." And Israelis say "next year in Jerusalem, the rebuilt" implying a rebuilt Temple.

But many Reform Jews do not accept the idea of the Messiah and the return to a Temple-based Judaism focused on Jerusalem. The phrase "next year in Jerusalem," however, can be interpreted in many different ways. These words convey a web of meaning from concrete to abstract, and from earthly to holy.

Jerusalem, as well as being the site of the two Temples, was regarded as the centre of the ancient world. The Kodesh Kodashim, the Holy of Holies within the Temple was the physical space where human and divine would meet, once a year, at Yom Kippur. The Cohen Gadol would approach the inner altar to ask forgiveness for Israel's sins from God's Shekhinah, the indwelling Presence of the divine. (Some say the Shekhinah still dwells near the broken Western Wall of the Temple).

I can never look at that enormous square in front of the Kotel where people mass in prayer without comparing it with the scene I saw just over a week following the 6 Day War in 1967. It was a very much smaller space then. Arab homes had to be bulldozed to make room for the public square. Do you need bulldozers to make room for the Shechinah?

Regardless of where we stand on issues of politics and how to solve Jerusalem's problems, we look to the Land of Israel with sorrow at the ongoing bloodshed and hatred there. Is there a way to reconcile the extremes so that all Jews can look to "next year in Jerusalem" with hope and not despair?

Midrash gives one possible response. Yerushalayim's name is seen as a combination of yerushah, or inheritance, and the dual plural ending, ayim, suggesting a "double" inheritance. Add to this, a midrash which creatively interprets Psalm 122, "Jerusalem built up, a city knit (connected) together," (Yerushalayim habenuyah, iyr shechubra lah yachdav).This was taken to mean there are two Jerusalems. Yerushalayim Shel Matah - the earthly Jerusalem, which may be the object of our ambivalence but is also the source of Torah, and Yerushalayim Shel Maalah, the upper Jerusalem--a heavenly version relieved of the contradictions of human life.

Jewish teaching is that the two Jerusalems have to be brought together before the reign of peace can begin. In our Torah service we have the famous passage found in two prophets Isaiah and Micah about nations beating ‘swords into ploughshares’. (I call it the ironmongery). You only find this in British Reform Siddurim. It’s a vision of all nations flocking to Zion, to Jerusalem to serve the one God. Reform put it in out of a universalist tendency – that’s to say the urge to emphasize values shared by all peoples rather than restrict ourselves to what concerns Jews to the exclusion of all others.

As we are approaching Shavuot, it’s appropriate to quote in this context the midrashic observation that the Torah was not given on Mt Zion, but on Mt Sinai- why? Because if it had been given in Israel people would think its teaching were only for the Jewish people. It was given in the desert, in no-man’s territory indicating that its message was to be universal.

You can’t come away from Jerusalem today without a sense of the universality of the city. The new Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre (only a few weeks old now) which is a harrowing experience, leaves you with one ray of light at the end – the righteous of other nations who risked their own lives to save Jews and others who were victimized.

I used to think that Jerusalem could be a model for co-operation between a multiplicity of peoples. The more you get to know the place, however, the more you realize how strong is the tendency for each grouping, including amongst the Jewish community, to keep itself to itself- and this goes back deep into history. There are deep divisions.

But if there can’t always be co-operation, one can at least aim for peaceful co-existence.

And that is the model for life as a whole. Jerusalem is the world in microcosm. It is us, having to live with people of sometimes widely differing views. It is metaphorically the place we have to build in England’s green and pleasant land –

And here too in Jackson’s Row, Sha’ar Zion the Gate of Zion, rediscovering tradition, accepting and respecting our differences aiming for peaceful co-existence, to bring the heavenly closer to the earthly and the earthly to the heavenly.