By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — Regardless of the eventual political outcome, and assuming that an Iranian nuclear missile doesn’t vaporize the Holy City and the millions of Jews, Muslims, and Christians who inhabit it and the greater biblical land—we Jews will mention the city several times in our weekly Sabbath prayers that begin at sundown every Friday.
That’s because no other people have ever maintained a federal capital in Jerusalem since time began, nor sent nationally elected representatives to its glistening golden hills in order to make laws, levy taxes, and adjudicate a civilization. Nor has any other people ever inspired its religionists to make quarterly harvest pilgrimages to its environs and calibrated a calendar completely dedicated to the making of sacrifices upon its heavenly gates and scriptural stones.
Nor has any other people since God first took a breath and made the light of Creation ever been biblically mandated to build a divine Sanctuary atop its highest slopes and create a Holy of Holies thereon that is so inviolate that no one dare saunter across its center and thereby be struck by angelic paralysis.
Jerusalem, indisputably and historically recognized as the city and citadel of David, who founded it circa 1000 BCE, and whose son Solomon completed the construction of its timeless Temple, is mentioned in the Hebrew Scripture no less than 700 times. In the Holy Quran, there is not a single reference to it.
And yet today (Tuesday, Dec. 14) , the leader of Hamas again bellowed the Palestinian position that they will never, ever recognize Israel and that their intent is to wipe away the Jewish state from the face of the earth. Never mind that the Iranian nuclear missiles that they so venerate would also obliterate the Palestinian people.
Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified and was transformed into a beacon hero of the ages, and where Muhammad the Prophet is believed to have risen to the heavens, is nonetheless marked as a capital by neither the Christians nor the Muslims. The Church has Rome, Islam retains Mecca, even as the Jewish people have maintained our theological and even provincial hub in Jerusalem for three thousand years.
Sometimes, we Jews tire of the relentless compromises we are forced to make to the tyrannies of blood, bigotry, and bondage. Regardless of how Jerusalem will ultimately be partitioned to accommodate both the opportunism of late-coming claims and old anti-Semitic viruses, Jerusalem is ours. When the still-fledgling State of Israel reunited the ancient city in 1967 (after 19 years of brutish Jordanian occupation in the eastern section), it did so only in response to Jordanian shelling of the western side in tandem with the general invasion of Israel’s sovereignty by a combined five Arab armies.
The Palestinian claim to Jerusalem as a capital is one of the most gratuitous, out-of-context assertions made since the territorial exacerbations of World War II—even if it winds up being the practical solution to an emulsion of blatantly anti-Semitic and short-sighted agendas derived by the exhaust of post-Holocaust demons.
In over three thousand years, only one people have TWICE responsibly created a federal capital atop Zion. But as someone once said, “To be a Jew is the same as anyone else, only more so.” In other words, what is absurd for others is normal for us.
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Rabbi Kamin is based in San Diego