As I sat ruminating on a topic for this article I was vacillating between writing about current events or a penning a Torah thought of inspiration.
I took the classic Jewish approach , chose to write about Yerushalayim and basically do both. Truth be told, my real impetus to write about Yerushalayim grew not so much from my need to start writing, but from the fact that I spent this past Shabbos in Yerushalayim celebrating with my children the birth of my first grandchild .Holding your first granddaughter for the first time is an intensly moving moment of life .Grandchildren reinforce our sense of both mortality and eternity, as we see ourselves aging reaching a new milestone of life and at the same time we are thankful to Hashem for being blessed with a new generation connecting ourselves to the future. Holding a grandchild born in Yerushalayim creates in ones heart the additional awareness that our lives are eternily bound with the destiny of our people and its history .
My mother and father were children of young parents who left Europe to North America years before the war to allow both of my grandfathers to escape conscription into the Polish and Russian armies respectively. When they left , families and friends left behind in the” heim,”worried for their future and practically mourned their departure . We all know the tragic end of who mourned whom. My mother in law escaped the destruction in Europe as a young child hidden with a gentile family in her native Romania, coming to Canada with her parents who miraculously also survived the war.My father in law emigrated with his family from Iran first to Eretz Yisroel and than to New York , escaping the devastation and upheaval that would find itself to that world decades later. My son in laws’ grandparents are all survivors of the death camps who came to this country with unshakable faith in Hashem unwavering commitment to their traditions and with superhuman determination rebuilt their lives and familes .
All of these unique stories of the diaspra came together two weeks ago to create delicious little girl, a new chapter in those stories, , this time being written in Yerushalayim . When the diplomats and politicians negotiate the rights of Jews to live in Yerushalayim ,when prime Minister Netanyahu meets with Abbas or Clinton or even Obama , I think my granddaughter should join that conversation and remind the foreign ministers and presidents that the true reason she was born ,,lnot in New York or Hungary ,Poland or Teheran but in the eternal homeland of our people is because that our people for over two thousand years never ever forgot their true home. The Polish tailor ,the Hungarian shopkeeper the Iranian artisan the Brooklyn lawyer or accountant all kept the psalmists cry “If I forget thee Yerushalayim let my right hand forget its cunning” in the fore front of their hearts and lives and as the central focus of their prayers and hopes for the future . Every Tisha B’av when Jews sit as mourners , at every wedding where ash is placed on the head of the groom and a glass is broken just as the couple begin their lives together, Yerushalayim is not forgotten.
The great irony of history and current world politics is that this fact of religious Jewish history is the most powerful claim Jews that have to the holy city .Arnold Toynbee the English historian in a public debate with Rabbi Yaakov Herzog tzl( who was at that time the Israeli ambassador to Canada ) over fifty years ago claimed that Jews were a fossilized nation; who by the rules of history should have disappeared centuries ago and thereby have no claim to the land of Israel. Rabbi Herzog responded that our existence in the face of historical norms is due to the protection of G-d ,and the unceasing desire of the Jewish people to return to Eretz Yisroel throughout the millennia kept us very much alive with legitimate historical rights to our ancient homeland .
It is this historical reality that President Obama chooses to ignore in discussing the rights of Jews to their own land arguing that our rights to a homeland is only as a result of the Holocaust. His intent is to lesson our claim to Yerushalayim or any part of our land that doesn’t fit his vision of Pax Obama ; and it is exactly this argument that Prime Minister Netanyahu will repeat again and again .I don’t know if my granddaughter is quite up to joining those discussions (she isn’t all that interested in politics anyway)however I do believe that into those rooms behind the closed doors will sneak many of the Neshamos ,souls, of the of those tailors shopkeepers and artisans who throughout their lives kept the hope and yearning for Yerushalayim alive. They will be smiling knowing that what they did is now the true basis for our right to have little Jewish girls born again in our home.
