The Challenge of Jerusalem

by Dr. Israel Eldad z"l
ZFA

(The following is an excerpt from Dr. Israel Eldad’s book The Challenge of Jerusalem)

On the Temple Mount and below it, there occurred one of the most exciting and odd events. General Motti Gur, the conqueror of the Temple Mount, reports: "The Mountain is in our hands." The Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces (Rabbi Shlomo Goren), gripped by enormous emotion, blows the shofar at the Western Wall. With fluttering heart, the Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, speaking from the heart of the entire nation, pronounces the "shehechianu" blessing. Shehechianu - "Who kept us alive and sustained us" - to stand again before the Wall. The Wailing Wall - a memorial of the destruction. An Israeli soldier pressed against the Wall and bathed in tears became the symbol of victory.

What is going on here? At the Wall? Why not on the Temple Mount? Who at that time thought of Halachic restrictions? Certainly not. Gur and Eshkol and the weeping soldier and those masses that began to flow to the Wall. It was not Halachah that prevented them from ascending and celebrating on the Mount. Two thousand years of EXILE channeled them and us and the river of their - our - stormy emotion to the Wailing Wall, a truly surrealistic spectacle. Here was rationality inside the irrationality of the miraculous victory. A forced emancipational Zionism overcame a Redemptional-historical Zionism.

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