Eastern Promises

[Rav Yossie Bloch]

But Zion said, “LORD has forsaken me, and Lord has forgotten me.”

“Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you. Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms; your walls are continually before Me. Your children hurry; your destroyers and devastators will depart from you."
Yeshayahu 49:14-17


These words are read in public as words of comfort on the second Shabbat after Tisha Be-Av (Haftara of Ekev). On a day like today, with Jerusalem crying after a terrorist rammed his bulldozer into two public buses and several cars on Jaffa Street, killing four and wounding three dozen, we need such words of comfort.


However, Yeshayahu (Isaiah) is not only a prophet of consolation; he is, originally, a prophet of rebuke. Indeed, this passage can also be read as a rebuke; instead of rendering the last two words as "will depart from you," they can be translated as "have come out of you"—in other words, Jerusalem's destroyers come from within. That interpretation changes the whole tenor of this passage: accused of forgetting Jerusalem, God responds that His city is always on His mind. It is Jerusalem's own children who wreak havoc upon it. In fact, today's terrorist carried a "blue card" as a resident of East Jerusalem; he was not a citizen of the State of Israel, but he was a citizen of Israel's capital, giving him freedom of movement. What really sends a chill down the spine is the alternative reading of the beginning of the verse, from the Dead Sea Scrolls—"your builders" instead of "your children."


We do not yet have the full background of this attack, but what we do know is eerily familiar after the similar incident at Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav earlier this year—an Arab worker from East Jerusalem attacks a vulnerable and highly symbolic site in Jerusalem, and only the quick actions of security forces who happen to be on the scene stop his murderous rampage by shooting him dead.


Our primary response must be to pray for and help the victims, while pursuing any accomplices of the terrorist. Nevertheless, once again, we are forced to ask the question: how long will we pretend that Jerusalem is a united city? For all the great investments in Yehuda and Shomeron (the West Bank), the number of Jews there is about a quarter of a million; meanwhile, in our capital, we have a quarter-million non-citizen Arabs. Is this a reality that we can maintain? Will we end up with the ludicrous situation of standing agreements with Hamas, Hizbullah and Fatah, while there are still Arabs in East Jerusalem trying to murder their neighbors?


What is the solution? In the second-to-last verse, God describes how He sees Jerusalem always: "Your walls are continually before Me." Jerusalem has always been a city of walls, but do we really want that wall to seal us our "destroyers and devastators" in with us?