The Marvel, and the ‘Scandal,’ of Jerusalem

Thousands of religious Israelis are celebrating Jerusalem Day, which began Thursday at sundown. On Friday morning at the Western Wall, they will recite psalms of thanksgiving commemorating the moment in the Six Day War of 1967 that Israeli soldiers conquered the ancient city of Jerusalem, making it the heart of Israel’s capital. Those assembled won’t merely mark a military achievement 56 years ago. Their minds will travel back to the earliest origins of the sacred city, to its conquest by King David and to the empires that have destroyed it, only to have it rise again from the ashes. They will ponder how Jewish Jerusalem reflects the miracle of Jewish existence: one that allows us to understand why, for better or worse, the world’s attention remains riveted on Israel.

No city in the world has a history like Jerusalem, and no other people has a relationship to a location like the Jews do to it. To study Jerusalem is to study the story of the world: from Egyptian pharaohs to Mesopotamian kings, from Greek and Roman emperors to kaisers and sultans. They, and others, sought to end Jewish presence in the ancient city permanently. Yet Jerusalem is a Jewish city restored, while other ancient cities of biblical past—Babel, Pi-Rameses, Nineveh—are in ruin.

As Norman Podhoretz once put it, Jerusalem reflects “the scandal of Jewish particularity”: The uniqueness of one city in world history testifies to the enduring nature of one people on this earth. Established as Israel’s capital when now-extinct empires bestrode the world, it was toward Jerusalem that the Jews prayed in exile, binding themselves to it as empire after empire became the Ozymandias of its age. Jews celebrate the anniversary of the Jewish return to ancient Jerusalem not only because it is central to their spiritual lives but also because it is a reminder of God’s providence in the history of their people and of the world.

Jews will gather from across the nation a week after hundreds of missiles rained down on the land from Islamic Jihad. Herein lies an irony: Some of the early Zionist leaders sought, in a Jewish state, a “normalization” of the Jewish people; the end of statelessness, they hoped, would produce the end of anti-Semitism. But only when we ponder the miracle of Jewish eternity can we understand the hatred Jews face.

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