Page 5 - TORCH Magazine #17 - Autumn 2020

Jews and Jerusalem, tshe greatest love
“tory in history
Jerusalem is the beating heart of the Jewish people... there has never been a love story like it in all of history, the love of this people for that city.
Jerusalem is mentioned more
than 660 times in the Bible and even though the Temple was destroyed twice and even though the city has been besieged 23 times and captured and reconquered 44 times, Jews never ceased to pray for Jerusalem, about Jerusalem and facing Jerusalem. Somehow it was where every Jewish prayer met and ascended to heaven.
Jews only have this one city. A tiny city but somehow it was the place from which the divine presence is never exiled.
Jews would never give up on hope on Jerusalem. We never allowed
it to escape our minds, in any of
our prayers, at our weddings, we remember Jerusalem. Every time we comfort mourners we say, “Ha’makom yenahem etkhem betokh she’ar
avelei Tziyonvi’Yerushalayim.” (May God console you among the other
mourners o”
f Zion and Jerusalem). Jews are a circumference whose centre is
Jerusalem.
Rabbi Sacks explained that after the Six Day War, when Jerusalem was liberated, he visited Israel and gazed upon Jerusalem with his own eyes for the very first time. It was here that he realised the faith that the Jewish people had in returning to Jerusalem, even after 2,000 years of being scattered around the world, a faith that never wavered, “was the most powerful testimony of faith I know.”
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