Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt! (Haggada)
It happened in Jerusalem, one Shabbat afternoon toward the end of the Gulf War. Our family had gone to the Holy City to find peace. Instead we found ourselves in the midst of war. Within weeks of our arrival it became clear that the Middle East was yet again about to be engulfed in conflict. Iraq had invaded Kuwait and a massive international force led by the United States was ready to intervene. Israel was not involved, yet we knew it would be the primary target of Iraqi weapons. So it proved to be. Thirty-nine times during those weeks we heard the sirens wail their warning of Scud missiles. Each time we put on our gas masks and retreated to our sealed rooms, not knowing where the next attack would land or whether it would contain chemical weapons. It was another reminder that it is not easy to find peace as a Jew.
Yet as we stepped out into the Jerusalem sunlight there was peace. The city breathed the stillness of Shabbat. The late afternoon sun was turning the houses, of Jerusalem stone, into burnished gold. As we looked across the valley to the walls of the Old City we could understand why, long ago, people had called this the city of peace and why, even when it lay in ruins, Jews were convinced that the Divine Presence had never left Jerusalem.
We had been invited by our neighbors to Se’uda Shelishit, the third Shabbat meal, the meal that symbolizes the coming together of God and the Jewish people – “You are One, Your name is one, and who is like Your people Israel, a nation unique on earth?” (Shabbat liturgy) When we arrived we discovered that they had also invited a group of Rumanian Jews who had recently come to make their home in Israel. They had made the journey as a group because they were a choir. In Rumania they had sung the songs of Jewish hope and longing. Now, in Jerusalem, they began to sing again around the table, beginning with the twenty-third Psalm, which Jews have long been accustomed to sing on Shabbat afternoon: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me” (23:1–4). Those words, thousands of years old, caught the mood of the moment. This was peace in the midst of war, a pool of stillness in the turmoil of the world.
Then a rather moving thing happened. As the sounds of the choir reverberated around the alleyways of our quiet corner of Jerusalem, people from the neighboring houses began to appear, drawn by the music. One by one they slipped in through the open door and stood around and, hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, joined the singing. Here was an Israeli artist, there a new arrival from Russia, here an American investment banker, there a family from South Africa, and in the doorway a group of tourists who happened to be walking by and had stopped to see what was happening and then found themselves caught up by the embrace of the atmosphere. No one spoke; no one wanted to break the mood. We continued to sing the songs of Shabbat afternoon. As the sun began to set behind the hills, I could feel the Divine Presence among us, joining our words to those of a hundred generations of Jews, uniting them into a vast choral symphony, the love song of a people for God, and I sensed something of the mystery and majesty of the Jewish people, and I knew that it was this that I had come to Jerusalem to find.
We had come together, each of us as the result of a long journey, in some cases physical, in others spiritual, and in many, both. We each had stories to tell of how we came to be in Jerusalem that afternoon. But just as our individual voices had united to sing the words of our ancestors’ songs, so our stories were part of a larger story. Our personal routes were stages on the most remarkable journey ever undertaken by a people, spanning almost every country on the face of the earth, and four thousand years of time. If we had been able, then and there, to trace back the history of our parents and theirs across the generations, we would have been awestruck at its drama and scope. Was there anything that could remotely compare to the long Jewish journey to Jerusalem? Was this, I thought, not the most vivid testimony imaginable to the power and endurance of faith?
I thought back to the beginning of the journey, when God spoke to Abraham and Sarah and beckoned them toward an unknown land. Then, centuries later, with the Israelites enslaved in Egypt, God called Moses and told him to lead the people to freedom across the desert, to the land flowing with milk and honey. I thought of David, who consecrated Jerusalem as his capital and brought the ark of the covenant into the city, singing and dancing, and of Solomon, who built the Temple and asked God that it should become the home of the prayers of all mankind. I thought of Jeremiah, who foresaw its destruction, and Isaiah, who told the Israelites that they would one day return, and Ezra and Nehemiah, who led the people back. I thought of the Second Temple and its defilement, and of the Maccabees, who delivered it once again into Jewish hands, and of the terrible devastation that later occurred at the hands of the Romans. I recalled the story of the rabbis of the first century who wept as they saw a fox entering the ruined Holy of Holies, and of Rabbi Akiva, who comforted them and assured them that Jerusalem would one day be rebuilt.
For eighteen centuries, Jews were scattered across the world, but they never forgot Jerusalem. They prayed toward it. They mourned it even during their celebrations. Each year, on the ninth of Av, the anniversary of the destruction, they sat and wept as if they had just been bereaved. Like the survivors of an earlier catastrophe, they said, “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill, may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy” (Ps. 137:5–6). Each Pesaḥ at the climax of the seder they said, Leshana haba’a biYerushalayim habenuya, “Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt.” The next year they said the same.
I thought of the Jews of the Middle Ages – among them Judah Halevi, Maimonides, and Nahmanides – who journeyed there, often amidst great danger. I thought of my great-grandfather who made the journey there in the 1870s, traveling from Lithuania with a sefer Torah in his arms, and who wrote one of the great histories of Jerusalem. I thought of those who fought in Israel’s wars, in 1948 to defend the newborn state from destruction, and who, in 1967, reunified the divided city. And I thought of us, gathered there that Shabbat afternoon singing songs of faith, finding peace in the midst of battle, and converging from our many countries of origin on the place to which Jews had so long prayed. I understood then that to be a Jew is to be part of that journey, begun by Abraham and Sarah and continued by their children ever since – not just to a place but to a set of ideals, a way of life, a state of collective grace – and that I had caught a glimpse of the eternal people joining their voices across space and time and singing its never-ending song.
At any time in those long centuries the journey might have ended. It might have done so at the very beginning, when Abraham arrived to find the land starved by famine and was compelled to travel to Egypt. It might have done so half a dozen times during Moses’ leadership when the people, fatigued and frightened by the journey, wanted to turn around and go back. It might have come to a close with the destruction of the First or Second Temples, had there not been prophets and sages to lift Jews from the abyss of despair. In their long centuries of dispersion Jews might simply have abandoned thoughts of return. But Jews are an obstinate people, and were never reconciled to the loss of Jerusalem. They carried with them the pain and the hope, the memory of the ruins and the vision of a city rebuilt. Never, after that afternoon, could I treat lightly the ideas of memory and prayer and faith. Jews never forgot Jerusalem. They prayed for it. They believed they would return. Had even one generation failed to do these things, the journey would have ended and much of Jewish history would have come to nothing. Faith had brought us to that time and place to see the fulfillment of our ancestors’ dreams.
Jerusalem is a place, but it is more than a place. It became a metaphor for the collective destination of the Jewish people. A city is what we build together, individually through our homes, collectively through our public spaces. So Jerusalem became a symbol of what Jews were summoned to build by creating a city of righteousness worthy of being a home for the Divine Presence. Its stones would be good deeds, and its mortar, relationships of generosity and trust. Its houses would be families; its defensive walls, schools and houses of study. Shabbat and the festivals would be its public parks and gardens. For Jews believed that, even in a violent and destructive world, heaven could be built on earth. It was their most daring vision. The architect of the city would be God. The builders would be ordinary men and women. It would be a Jewish city, but it would be open to all, and people from all faiths would come and be moved by its beauty.
So Jerusalem, the “faithful city” (Is. 1:21), became the destination of the Jewish journey, which began with Abraham and Sarah and will be complete only at the end of days. This is how the prophet Isaiah envisioned it, in words that for millennia have captured the human imagination:
In the last days
The mountain of the Lord’s Temple will be established
As chief among the mountains;
It will be raised above the hills,
And all the nations will stream to it.
Many peoples will come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
To the house of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us His ways,
So that we may walk in His path.”
For the Torah shall come forth from Zion,
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He will judge between the nations
And settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
These words, among the most influential ever written, sum up much of Jewish faith. They epitomize what it might be like to “perfect the world under the sovereignty of God” (Aleinu). And as they journeyed through the centuries and continents, Jews carried this vision with them, believing that their task was to be true to their faith, to be loyal to God, to exemplify His ways to mankind, and to build a world at peace with itself by learning and teaching how to respect the freedom and dignity of others.
As I remembered all this, I wondered at the tenacity of our ancestors. At times it must have seemed a vain hope. How, given all their suffering through the ages, did they continue to believe in the possibility of a city “redeemed by justice” (Is. 1:27), whose name was peace? Was their faith blind, or was it something else, a faith so strong that it was capable of surviving catastrophe and still believing that people could change, and therefore the world could change? Perhaps there never was a more revolutionary faith. Certainly no people has ever held to its beliefs with more tenacity.
And as the singing ended, and Shabbat drew to a close, I understood that to be a Jew is to join the journey of our people, the story of Pesaḥ and the long walk across centuries and continents from exile to homecoming. There is no story like it, and the journey is not yet complete.