Today is an extremely important date in the Jewish calendar, as we celebrate Yom Yerushalayim. On the 28th of Iyar, in June of 1967, the State of Israel overcame tremendous odds and defeated the Arab armies around her. In the process, and without prior knowledge or thought that it would be able to do so, Israel regained full control of the city of Jerusalem, the first time in almost 2,000 years. Once, in 1948, and again in 1967, the Jewish people were witness to the fact that miracles indeed do happen.
In his 2013 work, Like Dreamers:The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, Yossi Klein HaLevi recounts the experiences of those soldiers who were responsible for re-uniting the city.
Let me share with you some of his words, in the moments during and after Israeli soldiers took control of the Old City of Jerusalem:
Arik Achmon circled the perimeter of the Temple Mount plaza: No Jordanians. Silence.
Motta Gur leaned against a wall, as if to steady himself. He took the radio: “Cease fire,” he ordered the battalion commanders. “All units, cease firing.” Then, radioing Uzi Narkiss, commander of the central front, Motta Gur said, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”(90)
Klein HaLevi continues the story a few pages later:
Motta Gur’s deputy, Moisheleh Stempel-Peles, along with several other paratroopers, was searching for a way down to the Wall…They came upon an Arab man (who) pointed them toward a fenced-off ledge.
The paratroopers stepped onto the ledge. Below them - the Wall. From his ammunition belt, Captain Yoram Zamosh extracted the Israeli flag, which was given to him just before battle by an elderly woman, and fastened it onto the fence. Then the men sang Hatikvah, the national anthem. (91)
Klein HaLevi recounts how a kibbutznik who had never heard of the Shema, but knew how to play the trumpet, blew the shofar while standing in the narrow spaces next to the Western Wall because Rabbi Shlomo Goren was too overcome with emotion to do so.
And then, concluding this chapter of events, Klein HaLevi shares the following:
Naomi Shemer was in a date grove in Sinai, waiting to sing for the troops, when she heard a radio broadcast of the paratroopers at the Western Wall. They were singing her song, “Jerusalem of Gold/Yerushalayim shel Zahav.” But the words of lament for the inaccessible parts of the city had become outdated; the song needed a new stanza.
Borrowing a soldier’s back, she wrote:
חזרנו אל בורות המים לשוק ולכיכר שופר קורא בהר הבית בעיר העתיקה
“We’ve returned to the wells/the market and the square/ A ram’s horn calls out on the Temple Mount in the Old City.”(98)
Today, our Seniors, you graduate on a day on which we say Hallel. It is a day of celebration, of joy and of remembering. A day, which 2,000 years ago in 70 CE, people may have thought would never be possible.
And while there are many messages that we can learn from the Six-Day war, from the reunification of the city of Jerusalem, and from the story which Yossi Klein HaLevi shares with us, I share the following one with you on this day of your graduation: Dream. Dream. Dream.
Never stop dreaming. Because we know as a people...our history teaches us...that some dreams do come true.
It may take time. It may take hard work. It may take sacrifice. But as we learn from our ancestors like Yosef, to our rabbis who constructed the prayers calling for a return to Zion, to those soldiers who secured the Old City for the Jewish people on this day in 1967, dreams can come true.
So never, ever, stop dreaming.
There is one more idea which I want to share with you. It is found in the prayer for the State of Israel, Avinu She’bashamayim.
The prayer begins with the following words:
אָבִינוּ שֶׁבַּשָּׁמַיִם, צוּר יִשְׂרָאֵל וְגוֹאֲלוֹ, בָּרֵךְ אֶת מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, רֵאשִׁית צְמִיחַת גְּאֻלָּתֵנוּ.
Heavenly Father, Israel’s Rock and Redeemer, bless the State of Israel, the first flowering of our redemption.
This prayer was composed in 1948, at a time when the secular and the religious leaders of the young State of Israel were still figuring out how to work with one another and what the infant state should look like. For the religious zionist camp, they struggled to understand the place of Israel’s establishment in God’s overall plan of redemption and the coming of the Messiah.
In this prayer, blessing the State of Israel, the leadership settled on the idea that this was not the ultimate redemption, but rather - רֵאשִׁית צְמִיחַת גְּאֻלָּתֵנוּ - the first flowering of our redemption. It was not the end of something. Rather, it was the beginning of something.
In his commentary on this prayer, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks shares the following:
“The first flowering of our redemption” means that the restoration of Israel as a sovereign nation in its own land was not merely an event in secular history...Israel’s independence was in itself a redemptive moment, a return to Jewish self-determination, self-government and self-defense under the sovereignty of God alone.”
But this return, as I just mentioned, was not the ultimate Geulah, the final redemption. It was the beginning, the רֵאשִׁית , of that process.
So too, today is not the final step of your journey. It is not the end, nor the culmination of all that you will do and all that you will become. It is the רֵאשִׁית - it is just the beginning - and as we have seen from our own history and through the past 68 years of Israel’s history, there is so much in store up ahead. No one knows what the future holds. But with today, your journey begins.
So as we celebrate your graduation today in tandem with Yom Yerushalayim, I pray that you internalize two of the important messages of the chag which we honor along with you:
Never stop dreaming and remember, today is just the beginning.
May your futures and the future of Israel always be bright.
B’hatzlakha, Kol Hakavod and mazal tov.
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