How can so many people who have never been
to this city, love this city?
That is the mystery of Jerusalem.
Few places loomed so large in so many imaginations
for so many thousands of years.
For more than 3000 of those years
Jerusalem has been the Jewish people's capital city.
The Bible refers to it 823 times.
And every day, wherever Jews are, whenever they pray,
they pray in the direction of Jerusalem.
For 2000 years, Jerusalem has been the founding city
of the Christians.
And whenever they think of Jesus,
they think of him living,
preaching and dying in Jerusalem.
And for 1400 years, Jerusalem has been one
of the three holy cities of Islam,
with Muslims all over the world today,
viewing the Dome of the Rock
as symbolizing Jerusalem, al-Quds in Arabic.
Next year in Jerusalem, (foreign phrase).
Jews have shouted this for thousands of years
and still end every Passover seder by singing it,
expressing an eternal hope of return, of redemption.
And in the 1970s, when Rastafarians wanted
to express their longings, their hope,
they put Psalm 137 to music, singing,
"By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,
and there we wept, when we remembered Zion",
the central mountain of Jerusalem.
One way of understanding Jerusalem's magic pull
is to consider four of its nicknames.
3000 years ago it was the City of David, the Jewish capital,
the city that King David United in 1000 BCE,
the city where King Solomon built
the first holy temple 40 years later,
the city that became the symbol of the Jews' love of God,
of the Jews' unity throughout the ages,
of the Jews' national values.
And through two destructions and years of exile
the universal Jewish symbol of loss and sorrow.
Shortly after one of Napoleon's great victories,
he passed by a synagogue,
filled with Jews crying and howling.
"Why aren't they celebrating?",
Napoleon asked his lieutenants.
"They're Jews.
This is the day they all mourn the destruction
of Jerusalem and their two temples
more than 1700 years ago".
Impressed, Napoleon said,
"A people who remember their past so intensely
will surely return to Jerusalem and rebuild it".
The name Jerusalem, Ir Shalom, City of Peace,
evokes the mystical calming power so many Jews felt in it
that Jesus preached about and that Mohamed dreamed about.
On an earthly level, it doesn't make sense.
Other cities are more lush,
nourished by mighty oceans or rolling rivers.
Other cities are more grand,
defined by magnificent monuments or majestic towers.
Jerusalem is a desert city,
in a mountain range most famous for its stones.
And for most of its many years,
the natural beauty of its surrounding
clashed with the Jewish tragedies reflected in its ruins.
The founder of the modern Zionist movement,
Theodore Herzl himself, disgusted by the musty deposits
of 2000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and uncleanliness,
which lie in the foul smelling alleys,
said after his one visit to the city in 1898,
"When I remember thee in days to come, oh, Jerusalem,
it will not be with pleasure."
But perhaps it is in the city's very sandy, rocky simplicity
in the absence of some overwhelming natural
or manmade presence, that so many people could put
material concerns aside and find a sense of godliness,
of the supernatural.
And the magic certainly lies in its extraordinary ability
to be a blank canvas, steering people's dream
and moving them to make it their own.
That spiritual pull that also made Jerusalem
the Crossroads of the World, its third name.
It has long been a central trading route,
an intellectual center, and alas,
a corridor of power for empire after empire to plow through.
This then has been the great cost of being Jerusalem.
During its long legendary history,
the city has been attacked 52 times,
captured and recaptured 44 times,
besieged 23 times, and destroyed twice.
The Babylonians and the Romans,
the Byzantines, the Muslims, the Crusaders,
the Mamluks, the Ottoman Turks, the British,
all came, ruled, and went.
Each empire left something behind
after it was conquered, making Jerusalem one
of the great archeological tells,
or mounts of debris in the world.
This has kept Jerusalem history alive and layered,
a reflection of so many peoples across the world
and throughout the ages.
And finally, a fourth name of so many, Tsion, Zion,
again honors King David
for he first conquered that mountain.
The name invokes Jerusalem's latest incarnation
as the old and new capital
of the democratic Jewish state of Israel,
now symbolizing the Jews return to their homeland,
and the sense that today, after thousands of years,
Jews still feel connected to one another
and to Jerusalem, their capital city
and Israel, their homeland.
And just like it's history over thousands of years,
Jerusalem's history over the last hundred years
has been a roller coaster ride too.
In 1948, Jews couldn't believe it,
just three years after the Nazis killed 6 million
of their people, Israel was reborn.
They had dreamt of this day for nearly 2000 years.
But amid all that joy, when Israel's war of independence
ended in 1949, losing part of Jerusalem
left a hole in so many Jews' hearts.
Israel won, successfully fighting off six Arab armies,
but it lost the old city of Jerusalem,
including the Kotel, the Western Wall,
and the entire temple Mount, Jerusalem's holiest site.
"Even your foes knew you as the children
of the loftiest Mount", the poet, Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote,
"And your kings' psalms spring fourth from their mouths.
Israel without the Mount, is not Israel."
For 19 years the new city of Jerusalem, West Jerusalem,
grew and flourished like the rest
of the new country of Israel.
But day by day the old city, East Jerusalem,
languished, was neglected, and vandalized.
The Jordanians who controlled the old city
banished the Jews who had lived there for centuries,
blew up ancient synagogues, defiled hundreds of holy scrolls
and desecrated the Mount of Olive Cemetery,
where thousands of Jews had been buried for centuries,
using many Jewish tombstones to pave new roads.
Popular legend has it that only one
out of the old city's 35 synagogues, remain undamaged.
The Arab custodian whose family had taken care
of the synagogue for decades, continued doing his job,
telling no one he had the keys.
All that pain, all that destruction, all that frustration,
is why 19 years later in 1967,
when Israel fought off another joint Arab attack,
in just six days, reuniting Jerusalem,
the liberation felt so miraculous to so many people,
Jews and non-Jews around the world.
Recognizing the city's international importance,
democratic Israel wisely allowed Jews to administer
the Jewish holy sites, while Muslims and Christians
each administer their own holy sites.
To Jews, Israel with a full Jerusalem,
represents the ancient heart and soul restored
to the renewed body of the Jewish people.
Today when most people enter Jerusalem's old city,
they don't walk alone.
They wander around imagining someone from history
on their shoulder, be it religious figures
from Mary Magdalene, the follower of Jesus,
to Mathias, the high priest
and the father of the Maccabees,
or friends and relatives, a grandmother,
a great-grandfather, who dreamt of visiting the holy city,
but never actually made it.
So when Jews enter Jerusalem today,
they also do not walk alone.
They dance with King David, judge wisely with King Solomon,
they purify the temple with the Maccabees
and live simply like millions of their ancestors.
They model a new approach of protecting the holy sites
of their Christian and Muslim neighbors.
And they dream of ever improving this ancient city
that now houses high tech firms and cutting edge hospitals
along with government offices and educational institutions.
In short, they swim in Jewish history,
steep themselves in Jewish values,
absorb the glory, the dreams, the ideals, the values,
the stories, the heroes, and the pain of Jerusalem.
The City of David and Ir Shalom,
the Crossroads of the World, and Zion itself,
the holy, ancient, modern city,
which is the forever capital of the Jewish people,
while precious to humanity all over the world.