Jerusalem

The only gift that time does not supply is more time.

King David – for reasons not known – established the city of Jerusalem as the capital.  Until then, it was just another town in Israel.  With great fanfare the King paraded and danced as the hewn stones from Sinai were carried into Jerusalem to make it official.

In the next generation, Solomon went a step further: he built the Temple.  On Mount Moriah the glistening edifice was testimony to a unified universe.  Three thousand years ago there was peace in the land.  With Jerusalem as capital of Israel, leaders traveled leagues to gain inspiration and insights from Solomon’s breadth of knowledge.

Three millennia later we again find ourselves gazing at Jerusalem as the pivotal core of the world.  There is no strategic reason for this.  Israel does not sit on any natural deposits that make it indispensable.  It simply lies amid an ocean of oil-rich Arab states.  Nothing more.

Astride the ancient outer wall of Jerusalem, the Kotel, there is a place reputed to be the place where Jacob has his vision of a ladder that reached from earth to heaven.  In his vision, the patriarch saw angels climbing and descending.  According to the Sages, this was the doorway to the Upper World.  Jacob’s inner vision enabled him to see what others could only vaguely sense.  The name for this passage is gevilon.  The gevilon, or hole in the firmament, allows the souls of this world to sense something infinitely greater, more wondrous than their physical senses would allow.  Jerusalem is that point of conduit.

The name Jerusalem comes from two words which, when joined together, mean “City of Peace.”  Can there be such a place, especially in this time of great pain?  The city seems to be misnamed.  Yet, pilgrims continue to gather at the foot of the kotel and insert notes of hope and prayer into its crevices.  Countless people have collected at the Wall, each coming away awed and inspired.  Nations wrestle with the future of this impractical city.  In fact, the world seems poised, breathing anxiously, over its fate.  Perhaps they suspect what our tradition indicates.

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning.”  Frankly, this old Biblical proverb is a self-fulfilling aphorism.  Once Jerusalem has been forgotten, once the gevilon has been ignored, our life’s meaning has been lost. 

Jerusalem is about peace and yet it so often has become the center of anguish.  Perhaps people become too confused when they reflect on the city’s proximity to God.  Perhaps they become fearful that they will lose the ability to own “holiness.”  Whatever the reason, I eagerly await the day when the nations of the world can allow healing and wholeness to traverse the gevilon one again.  Then perhaps once more Jerusalem shall be known as the “City of Peace.”