The Place Where Peace is Visible

A piece from Cindy Ruskin's Pilgrimage Scroll

Dear friends, 

The night I was born, my parents, young North American Jews who had made Aliyah less than a decade earlier, walked to the Western Wall. It was Tisha B’Av, the fast commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple within it, and there were hundreds of other Jews gathered to pray. A few hours later I came out into the world. 

Growing up in that city, I fully believed the rabbinic expression:  
"עשרה קבין של יופי ירדו לעולם, תשעה מהם נטלה ירושלים ואחד כל העולם כולו" 
“Ten measures of beauty were given to the world; Jerusalem received nine while the rest of the world received one.” 
As those of you who have been there know, it is a beautiful city, with a strange power that seems to emanate outwards from the seat of holiness in the old city.  

This past year, I wasn't able to visit. To assuage my longing, I spent a few months exploring what is probably the most important Psalm about Jerusalem, Psalm 122.  

“Our feet stand within your gates, Jerusalem
Planted upon your wholeness:
Jerusalem, The city that was joined together.” 

I grew up on these lines without knowing where they come from. “The city that was joined together” wasn’t the expression of yearning for wholeness that it served as for 2000 years of Jewish exile, but a political reality that we lived with since 1967 when East Jerusalem was conquered and annexed. It went along with common slogans like “the eternal capital of the Jewish people.” 

This summer I finally made it back, and embarked on a pilgrimage of sorts with my parents to the place they visited the night I was born, the Western Wall.   As we walked into the space in front of the wall, I paused at the official sign: “Welcome to the Western Wall, remnant of the Holy Temple.” And right underneath it another line from Psalm 122: 

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem
Pray that all who love her will be well.
May there be peace within her troops
Tranquility in her palaces.” 

I touched the wall, prayed to my God, and then woke up from my dream and looked around. What I saw in front of me was so radically different from the faithful words of the psalmist; I felt rattled. Men with kipas and tzizis were walking around the men's section with rifles with the cartridge inserted, ready to shoot. Many of those that didn’t carry weapons wore t-shirts with militaristic jargon. Instead of “peace within her troops,” there was war within her citizens. The toxic blend of religion and power had never been so clear to me.  

Earlier that day I had been reading 18th century philosopher Moses Mendellsohn’s book Jerusalem: or On Religious Power and Judaism. Considered the prime early expression of humanistic Judaism, it is a treatise on separation of church and state.  

“When (church and state) go out into the battlefield against one another, humankind is the victim of this rivalry,” he wrote. “And if they live peacefully one with the other, the most valuable diamond of human happiness is lost.” 

It is the latter half of the sentence that I experienced at the Wall. Our beautiful jewel of a faith tradition had been fused with a political national project, and the result is ugly. In Israel it has produced a militaristic and exclusionary version of religious Judaism that has taken over the mainstream. In the US and the rest of the diaspora it's created a softer but equally sick version of what devout Judaism looks like.

For decades the State of Israel has been at the center of our Jewishness. Its flag has adorned our bimahs. At the moment of holiness, when the Torah is taken out of the ark, we have been speaking the “prayer for the state of Israel.” Standing in front of the Western Wall I saw the impact of that fusion of religion and state on our faith world. I saw the mistake of melding faith - an uncompromising striving for justice and truth, with politics - a necessarily compromised striving for functionality. What I saw at The Wall is the same thing Mendellsohn saw taking shape in Europe in the 18th century, and the same thing we see happening here in America. 

I know there were and are reasons for connecting Jewishness with Israel. I am not interested in litigating that history, nor in discussing its politics.  What I am interested in this year, quite desperately, is the following question: 

What are our guiding values -  What is the Jerusalem toward which we are striding – and what is not? What is Yerushalayim shel mata, earthly Jerusalem, and what Yerushalayim shel mala, Jerusalem above? And, as we seek to correct our misconceptions, illusions and mistakes – which parts of our faith world are directed toward the compassionate Holy One of Blessings, and which at something else, far more earthly? 

The Jerusalem I grew up in is beautiful. I love it and will continue to love it until the day I return my spirit to its source. But today I know that those nine measures of beauty didn’t all descend upon the physical Jerusalem. That city’s beauty is an emanation from a higher, deeper, more internal and far more abstract city that lives in our imaginations. When I pray, I pray not toward the city in which 40% of the population are not citizens and cannot vote in national elections, but toward the city where peace is visible. As a matter of fact, if the word Jerusalem could be translated into English it might be look like that: Yeru - to see, shalayim - peace. Together: the place where peace is visible.

These upcoming High Holidays we will search for that perfectly constructed ירושלים של אור, city of light, which will guide us in bringing light to our city here, and our world; it is that Jerusalem of the here and now that calls us to make the joyous pilgrimage of this season toward it.

I hope you can join me.

PS.
Thanks to those who joined me on the shopping fast yesterday.
Thursday, September 11th, please join me in a memorial fast, and at 6pm I invite you to join me at Prospect Park for an informal Slichot gathering on the grass by Grand Army Plaza. 

Shabbat shalom, 
Rabbi Misha