Yesterday, Israelis together with Jews around the world celebrated Jerusalem Day, marking the anniversary of the Old City’s recapture during the Six-Day War. Jonathan Sacks writes (2015):
No people ever loved a city more [than Jews love Jerusalem]. We saw Jerusalem destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, and yet in all those years, wherever Jews lived they never ceased to pray about Jerusalem, face Jerusalem, speak the language of Jerusalem, remember it at every wedding, in every home they built, and at the high points of the Jewish year.
I ask myself how could Jews believe so much in a city they had been exiled from for so long? The answer, of course, is very powerful and is contained in two words in the [biblical] story of Jacob. Recall, the brothers return home and show Jacob the bloodstained coat of Joseph. Realizing Joseph is gone, Jacob weeps, and when the brothers move to comfort him we are told [that] Jacob “refused to be comforted.” Why? There are, after all, laws in Judaism about the limits of grief; there is no such thing as a bereavement for which grief is endless. The answer is that Jacob had not yet given up hope that Joseph was still alive. To refuse to be comforted is to refuse to give up hope.
That is what Jews did with Jerusalem. They remembered the promise that the people of Israel had made by the waters of Babylon, “If I forget Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning.” We never forgot Jerusalem. We were never comforted. We never gave up hope that one day we would return and because of that Jews never felt separated from Jerusalem.
Read more on Rabbi Sacks: http://www.rabbisacks.org/we-never-forget-jerusalem/