The 43rd day of the Counting of the Omer begins on Tuesday night. Tonight we count six weeks and one day of the Omer. Today is Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. It is the holiday that commemorates the anniversary of Israel taking control of East Jerusalem at the end of the Six Day War in 1967.

This is the day of Chesed within Malchut, love within nobility. On this day, I think about how we often believe that the "noble thing to do" is to act tough-minded and dispassionately. We fail to recognize that our compassion and instinct toward kindness and forgiveness is also what makes us noble.

On this date on the Hebrew calendar, the Israeli army overcame Jordanian forces to capture the Old City of Jerusalem and reclaimed the holiest site in Judaism, the Western Wall. The move into the Old City came after Israel had told King Hussein of Jordan that Israeli forces would not move into Jerusalem if there was no aggression against Israel along that front. Despite the warning, Jordan began shelling Israeli civilians on June 6, 1967. Before the end of the following day, Israel had captured East Jerusalem. The war was over. For the first time in two millennia, the Jewish people had sovereignty over their holiest site.

Moshe Dayan, Israel's Defense Minister, famously declared, "We have united Jerusalem." He assured the Arab states that Israel would allow the Muslim and Christian holy places in the Old City to remain under the control of the religious authorities of their faiths. Israel has kept that promise to this day. However, there is something in Dayan's pronouncement that does not ring true – or, perhaps, that seems unfulfilled.

Jerusalem today is not united. In fact, Jerusalem has become less and less united in the decades since the Six Day War. Today the city is divided with entirely separate sections and neighborhoods for Jews and Arabs. Very few Jews wander into the Arab neighborhoods and few Arabs wander into Jewish neighborhoods. 

It is not only ironic, it is painful and heartbreaking that on the day of "love in nobility" there is little love or nobility on either side of the divide. In recent years, some Jews have used Yom Yerushalayim as an occasion for loud and provocative marches through Arab neighborhoods that are designed to infuriate and humiliate Arabs. Many Arabs have a parallel observance on the Muslim calendar, called Quds Day, to denounce Israel and call for its destruction.

I hope for the day when Yom Yerushalayim is not a day for Jews to gloat and incite hatred over the defeat of the Arabs; I hope for the day when Arabs do not see this as a day to swell in their prideful anger. Yom Yerushalayim should be a day, as Moshe Dayan declared, for Jews and Arabs to dwell together in unity. That is a much greater nobility than the hatred and recrimination that defines the divide today.

On this 43rd Day of the Counting of the Omer, I pray for the nobility to have compassion, even for enemies. I commit to opening my heart in genuine caring and forgiveness and to find a bit of the nobility that is lacking in this fractured world.

May this be a day in which you discover the love that is at the heart of the highest nobility.


For the introduction to the Counting of the Omer, click on this link:
The First Day of the Counting of the Omer

Its hard to say anything about the Six Day War without offending somebody. Even the name, "Six Day War," is loaded. That is the name that the Israeli general, Yitzhak Rabin, gave the war to evoke "The Six Days of Creation." To the Arab world, the war is called, an-Naksah, "The Setback." To say that the war began as a pre-emptive strike garners criticism, too. To Arabs, Israel was an unjustified aggressor. 

There is, however, one thing on which everyone agrees: The Six Day War changed the entire power relationship among the nations of the Middle East. The war made Israel a major military power. It gave Israel control of the most sacred site in Jewish tradition. Israel's leaders allowed Moslem religious authorities to retain control of the top of the Temple Mount with its venerated Al-Aqsa Mosque, but they swore that they would never give up Jerusalem again. The Six Day War gave Israel control, also, of the Golan Heights and the West Bank of the Jordan River, enhancing the nation's security and its ability to defend itself. 

On the other hand, the Six Day War also gave Israel its greatest problems to this day—an Arab population that regards Israel as a conquerer and occupier. It gave the Arab and Islamic world a cause  to inflame their rage. The liberation of Jerusalem, or al-Quds, became a rallying cry from Morocco to Tehran. Israel's enemies have been skillful in using the occupation as a tool to turn world opinion against the Jewish State.

As Jews in the contemporary world, it is difficult for us not to have some mixed feelings about the Six Day War. It was Israel's most brilliant military moment, one that transported the Jewish State, in the blink of an eye, from the threat of extinction to unimagined victory. It also was the moment that created the uncomfortable world in which Israel has had to live ever since. For forty-five years, Israel has battled internally and with the rest of the world over what to do with the lands it won in the Six Day War, and what to do with the Arab population in those territories.

People will argue—and it's true—that the world already was difficult enough for Israel before the war. Israel's neighbors did not need a humiliating defeat to hate Israel and seek its destruction. That hatred was, of course, the reason why the war happened in the first place.

However we choose to understand the events of the Six Day War, and all that has followed, the real challenge now is to respond to the situation as it is today. The overwhelming opinion of Israelis and of successive American governments, Republican and Democratic, is that the only longterm solution is to have two states—Israel as a Jewish state and Palestine for the Arabs.

Israel and Palestinians need a divorce—one that will divide Israel from most of the territories it captured in the Six Day War and the Arab population it contains. Like any divorce, it needs to be negotiated with terms that will satisfy the most important needs of both sides, but which probably won't make either side happy. The hard part, of course, is how to do it. How does Israel allow a state on its border that will include people who still are pledged to its destruction? How will the Palestinians accept a state that is less than half of what they claim as their rightful possession?

The practical and political solutions to the conundrum far exceed the scope of this blog. I am not going to draw lines on maps, plan evacuation of Jewish settlements, or explain how Jerusalem could be the capital of two countries. I'll leave that to others. What I will say, though, is that the puzzle created by the Six Day War has to be solved according to the values that make Israel, first and foremost, a Jewish state. 

There is no point in solving Israel's greatest challenge in ways that defy the teachings of our tradition. If it were to be done that way, what would we be fighting for? A country that happens to have a lot of Jews in it, but which exchanges "Love your neighbor" for "Might makes right"? That cannot be.

We would not be Jews if we did not insist on justice for the Palestinian people at the same time that we take steps to ensure the safety of our own people. We would not be lovers of Torah if we did not give the Palestinians a chance to create a viable state while we defend the borders of our own state. We are still commanded, "Justice, justice shall you pursue" (Deuteronomy 16:20).

The Torah, as has been said, is not a suicide pact. It does not require us to defend people who seek to kill us. On the other hand, Torah also does not permit us to assume that we can never live in peace with people who were once our enemies. We have a sacred obligation to pursue peace, even when it appears unlikely. We are obliged to see all human beings as we see ourselves, created in the image of God.

Forty-five years is a long time to wait. It is too long to remain prisoners of our own fear. It is too long for both sides in this conflict to continue to spill blood and to say "no." It is too long to continue to hide behind the excuse that the other side is more at fault. 

We are commanded to pursue justice. If we are serious about that, we will demand an end to the untenable status quo of the world after the Six Day War. Arabs will say "enough" to leaders who make empty promises to destroy Israel, and leaders who would rather play the innocent victim than negotiate. Israelis will say "enough" to leaders who are too cowardly to confront the settler movement and too stubborn to face the reality that Israel cannot be both a democracy and an occupier. 

Forty-five years is long enough for war and destruction. It is time that both sides worked instead toward creation.