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was my first moment: that no love was Am Yisrael Chai. That was my second your father’s house”). That is what every
ever as strong as between the Jews and epiphany: the knowledge that what I one of those people in Yemin Moshe
Jerusalem. was seeing on that day in Jerusalem was that afternoon had done.
םי ִ ת ֵּ מ ַ ה תַּי ִ ח ְּ ת, a collective people being
The second happened on Jerusalem bought back from death to life. That was my third moment: never has
Day a few years ago. Standing on the a city had such power over a people’s
streets of the city, I watched as young- The third moment happened in early imagination.
sters from around the world, waving 1991. Having come to Israel prior to
Israeli flags, sang and danced with a joy becoming Chief Rabbi, Elaine and I Never did G-d love a people more and
that was overwhelming. As I watched found ourselves in the middle of the never were a people more loyal than
the celebrations, I was overcome with First Gulf War. Towards the end of the our ancestors who endured 20 centu-
emotion because suddenly I had a war, one late Shabbat afternoon, we ries of exile and persecution so that
vision of the 1.5 million children who were staying in Yemin Moshe when their children or grandchildren or
were killed in the Shoah. Not because we heard beautiful music coming from great-grandchildren could come home
of anything they had done, not because one of the houses a few doors away. We to Jerusalem, ׁש ֶ דֹ ּ ק ַ ה רי ִ ע (the holy city),
of anything their parents had done, but went to see what was happening and the home of the Jewish heart.
because their grandparents happened found a group of Romanian Jews – a
to be Jews. choir – who had just made aliyah that When we visit Jerusalem today and
week. Soon it seemed as though all the see a place of such beauty it takes your
I remembered how 26 centuries ago, residents of Yemin Moshe had been breath away. Jerusalem is the place
the prophet Ezekiel had a vision of the drawn to the sound, people who had where all the prayers of all the Jews
Jewish people reduced to a valley of dry come to Jerusalem from all four cor- across all the centuries and from all the
bones. G-d asked shall these bones live, ners of the world: America, Canada, continents meet and take flight on their
and Ezekiel saw them come together, Australia, South Africa, Eastern Europe way to Heaven. It is the place where
take on flesh, and begin to breathe and Arab lands. you feel brushed by the wings of the
and live again. G-d promised Ezekiel Shechina, the Divine Presence.
he would open his peoples’ graves and 26 centuries ago, the prophet Jeremiah
bring them back to the Land. said that a time would come when We have had the privilege to be born
we would not thank G-d for bringing in a generation that has seen Jerusalem
I remembered the first reference to us out of the land of Egypt, but rather reunited and rebuilt. We have seen the
Israel outside the Bible on the Mer- for bringing our people together from Jewish people come home.
neptah Stele, a block of granite all the lands of the earth. This second
engraved by Merneptah IV, successor exodus, Jeremiah described, would be Today, G-d is calling on us all to be
to Ramses II, thought by many to have even more miraculous than the first. Guardians of Zion. Never has this been
been the Egyptian Pharaoh at the time We lived to see this day, when Jews more important. We must all stand up
of the Exodus. from 103 countries speaking 82 lan- for the one home our people has ever
guages came to Israel to build not just known and the one city our people has
It was an obituary, Israel is laid waste, their lives but the Jewish homeland. loved more than any other. We are all
her seed is no more. After generations, it was Jerusalem that ל ֵ א ָ ר ְ ׂשִי תַני ִ ד ְ מ י ֵ רי ִ ר ְ ג ַ ׁש (ambassadors for the

I thought how some of the greatest brought Jews together from all over the State of Israel) and we must all make
empires the world has ever known – world as one people, in one voice, sing- Israel’s case in a world that sometimes
fails to see the beauty we know is here.
Egypt of the pharaohs, Assyria, Bab- ing one song.
ylon, the Alexandrian Empire, the Whenever Jews remember Jerusalem, Let us all take on that task. With G-d’s
Roman Empire, the medieval empires something good comes of it. When- help, we will succeed. And we pray that
of Christianity and Islam all the way to ever they forget Jerusalem, bad things the world make its peace with Israel so
the Third Reich and the Soviet Union happen. that Israel and Israel’s G-d can bring
– were the superpowers of their day peace to the world.
that bestrode the narrow world like a So long as Jews remembered Jerusalem,
colossus, seemingly invulnerable in we knew we were still on a journey, one
their time. And yet each tried to write in which the Jewish people has been on
the obituary of the Jewish people, and ever since the first syllables of recorded Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is Emeritus
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whilst they have been consigned to his- time: “ךי ִ ב ָ א תי ֵּ ב ִ מּו ך ְּ ת ְ ד ַ לֹו ּ מ ִ מּו ך ְ צ ְ ר ַ א ֵ מ ך ְ ל ך ֶ ל,” Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congre-
tory, our people can still stand and sing (“Leave your land, your birthplace and gations of the Commonwealth
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