On Yom Yerushalayim—which celebrates the liberation of the historic Jewish capital from Jordanian occupation—Haviv Rettig Gur laments how the holiday has become politicized and too often focuses attention away from shared national joy to internecine divisions. Gur looks to the day’s history, along with the poetry of Ḥaim Ḥefer and Yehuda Amichai, to recover its true significance:
In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Jerusalem Day, first formally observed in 1968, was a holiday of liberation. More specifically, it was a day of gratitude established by a people that felt itself to have been rescued from the jaws of death. Until the Six-Day War, Israelis did not really understand that they had become a powerful nation. They faced the run-up to the war with existential dread.
And that made the astonishing successes of the IDF something far larger than mere military victory. It was for ordinary Israelis an emergence from a long dark tunnel, a glimpse of the sunlit pastures of strength and safety. The first Jerusalem Day meant different things to different people. But at its core, it was for most Jewish Israelis a celebration of a sudden lifting of the great burden of fear, a discovery of one’s own power not yet sullied by the use of that power.
Three generations later, Jerusalem Day should be about more than remembrance and relief. It must be an expression of love—love not only for the abstract Jerusalem of our imaginations, but for the reality that surrounds us. It is a day that must turn our gaze to our own time and place, to our neighbors, to the real living city that must find a way to thrive amid and despite the whirlpool of sacred abstractions that surrounds us.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-day-needs-to-get-back-to-its-human-story/