I’m sharing with my class today (“Modern Israeli Culture”) about the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967… We’re watching a documentary produced a couple of years ago by CNN – only a little bit “slanted” :) – and on comes a snippet of a song written by Israel’s late “poet laureate,” Naomi Shemer, the famous “Jerusalem of Gold” (ירושלים של זהב).
Written that very year, 1967, the song is actually a lament, bemoaning the fact that “we no longer go down to the Dead Sea by the road to Jericho.” The sad reality was that from Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, until the Six Day War, East Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and the ancient road leading down past Jericho to the Dead Sea, was cut off to Israeli Jews. All through history, even while the land was ruled by one occupying power after another, Jews could always reach their holy sites, even as far as ancient Jericho.
But dividing the land between Jews and Arabs (the effective result of the 1948 war) meant an ongoing, ugly reality, in which Jews had even less freedom to travel than they enjoyed before there was a Jewish state. And Naomi Shemer was reflecting the sadness in her classic song, written for the Israel song festival in the summer of that year. Suddenly, in six days, the reality on the ground was completely transformed. Jubilation was in the air. Naomi Shemer realized that her “lament” was just as suddenly irrelevant! So, she went back and changed the words … to “AGAIN we go down to the Dead Sea by the road to Jericho!” “Jerusalem of Gold” WON at the Israeli song festival, becoming the modern “anthem” of the UNITED city. No more lamentation. No more division. No more barbed wire. No more mine fields. No more no-man’s lands. Will Jerusalem be divided again, just to please the near unanimous voices at the U.N. (who can be expected to vote on the issue in September)? Not on Bibi’s watch! And now you know … the rest of the story…
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