jerusalem day: if I forget thee

The power of identity. But is it about bolting it down to the weight of tradition or about creating a whole new world? We could begin by asking, using the theoretical base of Jean Baudrillard, to question whether Jerusalem even exists; an idea as representation of the world that appeals to us as authentic and genuine though it has little if no relation to reality. For Baudrillard, a common example would be God. That is, Jerusalem itself is a sort of mediated spectacle, a narrative of back to the garden proportions as if the Six Day War and Jerusalem’s capture preceded a reality , or hoped for reality that may never arrive.

As ideology this is quite useful as idea outside the limitations of our endlessly expanding cycle of consumption and the waste it exercises. To Baudrillard, Jerusalem would be a meaningless piece of hyper-reality that is part of a primitive society and efforts to defy this are mere manifestations of a philosophical anxiety about authenticity. The transfer by military prowess of Old Jerusalem being a matter of meaning and not use or utility in order to participate in a wider and expanding identity that would reflect both social and metaphysical concerns as well as critique of the same consumer driven civilization suffocating on its own meaninglessness. There is a direct line the language of symbols and raw and ruthless politics.

—Damascus Gate (Photo: Library of Congress)—

(see link at end)…Before there was a Jerusalem Day (Yom Yerushalyim), there was the day before. Yehuda Avner, then an aide to Israel’s prime minister, Levi Eshkol, has said, “An Arab sword of Damocles hung over Israel’s neck in June 1967, and so perilous was its blade that foreign capitals spoke chillingly of the country’s imminent slaughter.”

Just 23 years after European Jews dug their own mass graves, Israeli officials plotted out their own mass graves in expectation of the dead. Children filled sandbags. Glaziers at the Hadassah complex prepared for the removal of Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows, in advance of the bombs. With young men at the front, young women prepared shelters in the basements of Jerusalem. Bathtubs were filled with water, shops emptied of food and kerosene, with memories fresh of the devastating 1948 siege of Jerusalem that lasted for months.

—General Shlomo Goren, military chaplain, was one of the first Israelis to reach the Temple Mount in 1967. Two years later, he became Israel’s chief rabbi (1969–79). On June 7th he blew the shofar and prayed intensely. He also suggested to Major General Uzi Narkiss that the latter could go down in history by taking a hundred kilos of explosive and destroying the Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock.—click image for source…

On the West Bank, then part of Jordan, The New York Times reported young Arabs riding in trucks, “singing and waving flags as they are driven through Samaria and Judea [sic], through a countryside strewn with poppies and still lush from the spring rain. For them, the prospect of war seems glorious.” (Interestingly, the Times used “Samaria and Judea” on the eve of the Six-Day War, before the term describing the region became associated with Jewish settlers.)

In 1948, the war ended with Israel independent but incomplete. One Jordanian official declared, “for the first time in 1,000 years, not a single Jew remains in the Jewish quarter … and as not a single building remains intact, this makes the return of the Jews here impossible.” The 1967 war ended with the return to the Jewish Quarter, to the Kotel (the Western Wall), and the Temple Mount, the holiest site of all. “We are entering the messianic era!” cried Israel Defense Forces Rabbi Shlomo Goren. “We shall never leave this place.” He blew a shofar on the Temple Mount, controlled by Jews for the first time in 1,897 years.

In Jerusalem, Jews, emerging from their near-death experience, felt buoyant, weightless, as if in Chagall’s stained glass. Wire services reported that Israelis “hugged and kissed each other,” how they “laughed, shouted and danced in the streets.” Jerusalem seemed sprinkled with a magical dust, a love potion. In Meah Shearim, ultra-Orthodox Jews, who before the war threw rocks at non-observant Jews, now threw flowers at the feet of Israeli soldiers. Secular soldiers at the Wall, wept and sang Hallel, Psalms of praise and thanksgiving, usually recited on holy days.

At the Wall, the Times reported, “never in the long history of the ancient shrine, have so many unbelievers responded with such gratitude and fervor.”…Read More:http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/jerusalem_day_needs_miracle

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Goren’s biggest stroke as a thinker was yet to come. It was, he argued, only the loss of political sovereignty in 70 C.E. that had compelled the rabbis of the Talmud to recast ideas of military power in spiritual terms—for instance, by emphasizing the miracle of the oil on Hanukkah and neglecting to mention the Maccabees’ battlefield victory over the Greeks. But, he contended, the rabbis never meant to replace the military with the spiritual; for them, rather, military virtue was a means, not an end in itself.

In composing his code of Jewish military law, Goren surmounted the difficulty presented by the lack of rabbinic legal material by expanding the boundaries of the canon and utilizing ancient historical and apocryphal sources like the works of Josephus Flavius and the Book of Maccabees. What emerged was nothing less than a new religious-national template for an era in which political sovereignty had been regained: a vision of the ideal Jew as, at once, spirited and spiritual. By means of such insights he hoped, especially after becoming Israel’s chief rabbi in 1973, to influence the national consensus of the Jewish state.

…The tragedy of Goren’s career is that his devotion to Torah and intense—some would call it fanatical—piety contributed to his ultimate marginalization. In 1967, after the Six-Day war, he climbed Mount Sinai and re-enacted the giving of the Torah. In his own mind, he may have been making a statement that Israel’s victory constituted a revelation of divine power; in the mind of the public, he had pulled a foolish stunt. At the same time, and more seriously, ostensibly trustworthy sources charged that, in the wake of Israel’s conquest of the Temple Mount, Goren had called for blowing up the Mosque of Omar. He denied the claim, but, justly or not, the allegation helped create an image of him as a messianic zealot.

By the end of his career, Goren found himself cut off from the corridors of power, without a public following, and, in the last year of his life, left to rage from the sidelines against the Oslo accords. While his name is still respected in religious-Zionist circles, very few today engage with his writings and teachings. This is a great pity. Read More:http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/752/features/the-warrior-rabbi/