If the place chosen by God your
Lord to be dedicated to His name is far from you, you need only slaughter
your cattle and small animals that God will have given as I have commanded
you. You may then eat them within your gates in any manner you desire. Deuteronomy
12:21
“Far
from you” – but you are not far from the place Alshikh
|
In
the four (Hebrew) words of his comment, Alshikh teaches an important lesson
about the attitude of Jews towards the place which God chose, the Holy City of
Jerusalem. Even when a Jew is physically far from Jerusalem, he must never be
emotionally or spiritually far from her. As God Himself has inscribed Jerusalem
on the palms of His hands and has her walls continually before Him [Isaiah
49:16], so too, we, the sons of His chosen nation, must always “see” and
remember Jerusalem. [based upon Rashi’s elucidation of the verse]
Indeed,
for a traditionally observant Jew, the maximum amount of time which can pass
without mentioning Jerusalem is from the recital of Shema on one’s bed
until the morning prayers. The names Jerusalem and Zion (the second most
frequent of Jerusalem’s seventy names) appear in the daily prayers
approximately thirty times! As well, one who says the Grace After Meals prays
for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Under the bridal canopy, the groom raises
Jerusalem above his greatest joy [Psalms 137:6] and breaks a glass as a sign of
mourning the destruction of Jerusalem. Even those who are less traditionally
observant do not ignore Jerusalem. The majority of Jews celebrate some form of
the Paschal Seder and sing “next year in Jerusalem.” As well, in
synagogues throughout the world, at the end of the Yom Kippur prayers, before
breaking the fast, Jews dance around the synagogue singing “next year in
Jerusalem.”
One
who studies Jerusalem realizes that one of the most consistent lessons of the
city’s history is that all those foreigners who captured her sooner or later
disappear from history, while we, Jerusalem’s children, have been privileged
through God’s grace to return to her. Indeed, in our parents’ generation, we
returned following an absence of almost fifty generations. To me it is clear
that the reason we have been privileged to return is the simple fact that we
never left Jerusalem. Even during the period when the law forbade Jews entering
Jerusalem, under penalty of death, we did not forget the place which is “Beautiful
in elevation, the joy of the whole earth” [Psalms 48:3], the light of the world [Yalkut
Shimoni, Isaiah 501], God’s city. [Psalms 48:9]
Shai
Agnon expressed the point well in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when he
said:
As a result of the
historic catastrophe in which Titus king of the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and
exiled Israel from its Land, I was born in one of the cities of the Diaspora.
But always, and at all times, I have considered myself one who was born in
Jerusalem.
Agnon’s words are the practical
application of Alshikh’s enlightening comment.
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