Jerusalem of Gold

Perhaps the most important thing to say about the spring of 1967 is just how different the world was then than it is today. The memory of the Holocaust – the six million murdered at the hands of the Nazis while the world stood by watching – was a wound still fresh. Israel was a mere nineteen years old, a fledgling experiment in Jewish nationalism. There was no Birthright, no Start-up nation, no Gal Gadot; AIPAC was a hint of what it is today. All that we take for granted today regarding Israel’s security, Israel’s place on the world stage, the political muscle of American Jewry – none of that existed in 1967. Today we see a Middle East in disarray and at odds with itself, the continued ripple effect of the now seven-year-old Arab Spring (or Winter, depending on your point of view). In 1967, the Arab states were united in their hatred for the Zionist entity in their midst and the shared hope to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean. As for the movement for Palestinian liberation, remember that from 1949 through 1967, if the West Bank was occupied, then it was not by Israel, but by the Jordanians, who never once sought to establish a sovereign Palestinian state. Nor, for that matter, did the Egyptians who governed the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem was divided, Jewish holy sites off limits –Israel was a vulnerable and isolated Jewish state in the very inhospitable neighborhood called the Middle East.

Had it only been the case that, in the shadow of the Shoah, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser made repeated genocidal calls for Israel’s destruction – dayeinu. That, we could say, would have been enough to provoke Israel to act in self-defense. So too, the repeated and increasingly deadly border incursions into Israel that spring, the ominous Egyptian and Syrian troop build-ups, or the fly-overs over Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility – all these aggressions, among others, rendering evident the belligerent intentions of Israel’s enemies. And then the two precipitating events that would escalate the situation into a full-blown crisis. First, on May 19, Nasser expelled the UN peacekeeping force from the Sinai Peninsula, an eviction that deprived the region of the one thing capable of diffusing the regional powder keg. Second, just a few days later, on May 22, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran, blocking the Gulf of Aqaba to any shipment bound for the Israeli port of Eilat. With the Arab street whipped into an anti-Zionist frenzy, Israeli leadership looked understandably to their allies for support. Neither the British, nor the French, nor the Soviets, nor the Americans responded to Israel’s entreaties, led by Foreign Minister Abba Eban. The magnitude of the existential crisis took its toll on Israeli leadership: Yitzhak Rabin’s nervous breakdown, Levi Eshkol’s stumbling national address, and infighting within a deeply frazzled cabinet. Israeli historians refer to these weeks as the Hamtanah, “the Waiting,” as the Israeli public experienced the rising tensions in an increasingly untenable position. Reserves were called up, gas masks hoarded, and in addition to trenches, thousands of graves were dug in anticipation of the coming onslaught.

Some here may well remember those weeks leading to the outbreak of the Six-Day War, fifty years ago this week. I encourage you to listen to the sermons delivered by Park Avenue Synagogue’s Rabbi Judah Nadich, z”l, available on our website – sermons that capture the anxiety-ridden mood of the time. My parents, here with us this morning, were engaged to be married in London and clearly recall the desperate feeling of a Jewish people on the precipice of another Holocaust - a sentiment no doubt shared by all of world Jewry. The Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Immanuel Jakobovits, called for an emergency solidarity rally to be held at the Royal Albert Hall. The fate of the Jewish people hung in the balance and all those in attendance were called on to do one of three things. First: If one could go to Israel and defend the Jewish state, then one must do so. Second: If one could not go, then one must make it one’s obligation to ensure that the interests and affairs of those who were going would be tended to in their absence; their jobs, their businesses and livelihoods to be assured upon their return. Third, if one was not able to perform the first or the second task, then one must give of one’s resources to support those efforts aimed at defending Israel in its hour of need.

As it happens, the three professions most needed by Israel were truck drivers, anesthesiologists, and general surgeons. My father, a surgeon who attended the London rally, got on a plane from London to Israel(hopefully after consulting with his fiancée, my mother). As the flight began its descent into Tel Aviv, two Israeli fighter jets escorted the plane to the airport. Abba Eban, it turned out, was on that same flight returning to Israel, though my father continues to believe the Air Force escort was for him. Throughout the war and in the following weeks my father worked in Israeli hospitals performing skin grafts, reconstructions, and other trauma-related surgeries at Tel HaShomer hospital, meeting both Ben-Gurion and Rabin when they visited wounded soldiers. My mother soon followed, my parents just two of many diaspora Jews who stepped up in Israel’s dark hour.

My favorite part of their story is what happened in the days following the war. Unlike this year, with the holiday of Shavuot now in the rear view mirror, in 1967, the Six-Day War immediately preceded the festival. My grandfather’s dear friend Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz, knowing my father had come to Israel, invited him to Jerusalem, explaining that there was something he really needed to do. And so it was that on the morning of June 15, 1967, just six days after the liberation of Jerusalem, Rabbi Rabinowitz took my father into the Old City, winding through the narrow streets towards the newly liberated Kotel to celebrate Shavuot. Throughout the night, until the rising of the sun, some 200,000 Jews – secular, religious, old and young – my father one of them, were able to do what Jews had aspired to do for millennia: to visit our most sacred site, to dance, to pray, to sing, with the Torah and with each other, in a sovereign Jewish nation. The dawn, literally and figuratively, of a new day. Our people, our capital, our Torah unified, a breach in Jewish history mended; a tikkun in the historical, geopolitical and theological drama of our people. What a feeling it must have been for my folks to stand under the huppah shortly thereafter, recalling Jerusalem by breaking a glass as had Jewish couples for centuries, only they were doing so with still-fresh memories of having been in a united Jerusalem just a few months before.

Friends, it is indeed true that the world in the spring of 1967 was very, very different from the world today. And it is because it is so very different that we must recall our history, personally, proudly, and unapologetically. First and foremost, we must do so, because in our Etch-A-Sketch era where the retrieval of history is as fleeting as a Facebook feed, where Israel is labeled as Goliath and not David, our children and children’s children must understand that the aggressions of the Middle East did not begin with Israel, but with a hostile Middle East that repeatedly denied the right of the Jewish state to exist. For the enemies of the Jewish people, the rewriting or denial of history is never a mere parlor game or intellectual exercise – but an ideologically driven effort to undercut our right to a Jewish national home. To recall the Six-Day War as a bellicose act by Israel in order to deny the Palestinians statehood is both untrue and representative of a nefarious agenda to delegitimize Israel. “There are those,” writes David Harris, “who wish to rewrite history,” who would have the world believe that were it not for Israel’s settlement policy, peace would break out, swords turn into plowshares, and lions lie down with lambs. If nothing else, the occasion of fifty years since the Six-Day War serves as a wake-up call for us all to spend the summer ahead, to spend the year and years ahead committed to learning our history, for in that learning, we will find not only the truth, but find ourselves to be better advocates on behalf of the Jewish state.

Second, and here let me tread carefully, we must know our history because we must know how very different the world is today than it was fifty years ago. Israel today is not the Israel of 1967, and that is exactly the point. The question of Israel’s policies toward the settlements and toward nurturing a two-state solution is a question whose answers lie in part but not entirely in Israel’s hands. Like the biblical Samson about whose origins we read this morning, Israel must be cautious lest it cause the edifice to tumble down upon itself. To insist on framing our present moment as akin to 1967 is to do ourselves an intellectual and moral disservice in that it provides Israel a free pass on the manifold challenges presently on its docket. If we truly want our children and children’s children to arrive fifty years from now with the hoped-for outcome of an Israel at peace with her neighbors, then Israel and the pro-Israel community must stop viewing the world through the prism of 1967, 1938, Masada, and otherwise.

On this, the eve of the fifty-year anniversary of the outbreak of the 1967 war, we must recommit ourselves to knowing and telling our history. We must do so in order to remind ourselves of the justness of our cause. We must do so in order to remember the degree to which the solutions of our era must differ from those of times past. Most of all, as Jews we must know and tell our history because it is in the repeated engagement with our narrative that our story is transformed into memory. It is not enough simply to say the Exodus happened, rather every generation must see itself as if it departed Egypt. It is not enough to say that Torah was given at Mount Sinai; as Jews we make the claim that each and every one of us was present at Sinai. This is the secret sauce, if you will, of Jewish identity: that moment when our history – joyous or somber, redemptive or calamitous – becomes collective memory. It is at that moment that we ourselves are written into the story of our people. On this, the anniversary of the Six-Day War, it is incumbent on us to remember the facts, to be at home in our history, to make that history memory, and to weave ourselves into the eternal tapestry of our people.

A final image: Yesterday morning, my daughter returned home from a semester in Jerusalem. This past Wednesday morning at about 3:30 am, she and her friends walked to Jerusalem’s Old City in order to celebrate the festival of Shavuot. As they neared the Jewish quarter, the crowds swelled as more and more people joined them, and with the first rays of sunlight, they arrived en masse at the Kotel. And there, at the egalitarian section of the Kotel, my daughter chanted Torah, read from the book of Ruth, and in the midst of a mixed multitude of secular and religious Jews, felt joy and appreciation for the gift of being able to do that which Jews had longed to do for so many thousands of years – what my daughter’s grandfather had done fifty years ago to the very moment.

Today, as son to my father and father to my daughter, knowing both of them would be here in shul this morning, I thought of the golden sunrises they both experienced standing at the Kotel, and I wondered. I wondered if the thought ever crossed my father’s mind in 1967 that fifty years later a granddaughter of his would stand in that very spot. And I wondered if my daughter could imagine what it was like for her grandfather to have stood at that very spot on that historic Shavuot of liberation fifty years earlier. And then I wondered further. I wondered if any of their ancestors, exiled for thousands of years, could ever have imagined that their descendants one day would rejoice in ir asher badad yoshevet, u-v’libah homah, in the solitary city in whose heart lies a wall. And I smiled inwardly with pride at the thought of what these ancestors would have to say if they knew that my daughter stood at the Torah in her tallit as an equal in the eyes of God. And then, I wondered even further; I wondered so much that I began to dream, only no longer about the past, but about the future. I dreamt of a day fifty years from now, when one of my grandchildren will stand at the Kotel, God willing, in Jerusalem undisturbed, in a Jewish state which, after meah shanim shel herev, “one hundred years of war,” lives at peace with her neighbors. It is a day of which I dream, a day for which we all pray. It is a day that we commit to working toward, doing all that is in our power to make happen. No different than generations before, as diaspora Jews we must always be ready to step up for Israel. That day, that golden sunrise signaling a new era, is not yet here. Like Jerusalem of Gold, its outline sits on the horizon just beyond our reach. And yet, in the darkness of the night its light still beckons. Distant as it is, it beckons us to draw near, as we ever so slowly approach to greet the dawn.