In a March 2016 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, Donald Trump declared that if he became president, he would “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” His choice of phrase—“eternal capital”—perhaps bears some reflection. We should have respect for the capital cities of the world, in nations large and small. Yet we would describe very few of them as “eternal.” Ottawa, Amsterdam, Caracas—most modern capitals cannot carry the civilizational weight of such a phrase.
But Jerusalem is no ordinary capital. It is a political center with theological significance. And as the debates swirl around us about the geopolitical implications of President Trump’s recent decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem—will it lead to terrorism and riots? will it undermine the “two-state solution”? will it give America new leverage over the Israeli government?—we should pause to consider the deeper meaning of Jerusalem, the city of Jewish hope.
For two millennia, the Jewish people were in exile. Jerusalem remained a real place—often a bloody crossroads of God, war, and politics—but it was also a dream in the Jewish mind, sustained across the generations through prayer: “Next year in Jerusalem!” The usual telling of how that prayer came to be answered focuses on the late-19th through the mid-20th centuries, and how great political and military leaders like Herzl and Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion and Dayan, founded modern Israel. But to understand how Jerusalem came to be returned to the Jews, we must look also to philosophers, prophets, and poets from that same period who envisioned this rebirth and understood its deeper significance.
Consider Moses Hess, an acculturated French-German-Jewish disciple of Marx. He eventually broke with his socialist peers, giving up on their universalist dream of a post-national age, as he realized that national attachments shape men’s souls. He hoped that the Jewish nation would rise again—as both a normal nation with a land and government of its own and an exceptional nation with a unique place in the history of mankind. As he put it in Rome and Jerusalem (1862):
Among the nations believed to be dead and which, when they become conscious of their historic mission, will struggle for their national rights, is also Israel—the nation which for two thousand years has defied the storms of time, and in spite of having been tossed by the currents of history to every part of the globe, has always cast yearning glances toward Jerusalem and is still directing its gaze thither.
Hess never became a religious Jew. But he understood how powerfully the Jewish people believed in their “cultural and historical mission to unite all humanity in the name of the Eternal Creator” and how these national and religious hopes were bound “inseparably with the memories of [their] ancestral land.” He understood how Judaism’s rituals, codes, and liturgies—with the longing for Zion always at the center—kept the Jewish spirit alive, like a hard shell protecting the divine spark from the extinguishing waters of history.
Or consider the great British novelist George Eliot. She was not Jewish, but her 1876 masterpiece Daniel Deronda is the crucial intellectual precursor to the modern Zionist movement. The hero of the book is a religious Jew named Mordecai who quietly waits for a disciple who can bring his vision of a restored Jewish nation to life. Mordecai is a prophet of Jewish nationalism; he knows what Israel means to the world. But he also knows that he lacks the arts of statesmanship—the gifts of the political founder—needed to realize his dream.
Perhaps the most powerful scene in the novel is an argument at a club between Mordecai and various skeptics. It is almost like a debate you might hear today at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton—the Jew vs. the leftist, the Jew vs. the cosmopolitan, the Jew vs. the nihilist—except at a much higher level. As Eliot wrote, in the voice of her pre-Herzl literary creation:
I say that the effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality. That is the fulfillment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people, whose life has made half the inspiration of the world. What is it to me that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the children of Judah have mixed themselves with the Gentile populations as a river with rivers? Behold our people still!
Mordecai argues that the cultural situation of European Jewry—and modern Europe in general in the mid-to-late 19th century—makes possible a new birth of Jewish freedom in the Hebrew people’s historical homeland:
There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amidst the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defense in the court of nations. . . . And the world will gain as Israel gains. . . . I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people, and the work will begin.
That “organic centre” was—and will always be—Jerusalem. Eliot’s novel ends with Mordecai’s followers heading off to the promised land.
Or consider the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, whose stories collected as Tevye the Dairyman (popularized and deformed as the musical Fiddler on the Roof) are probably the most penetrating account of the modern Jewish condition of exile. Tevye has endured the tragedies of the diaspora—poverty, to be sure, but also the spiritual loss of his daughters to socialism and intermarriage. His beloved wife dies, and he has reached the end of the road in the Old World. And that is when his wealthy and soulless son-in-law suggests that he should move to America. Tevye dismisses the suggestion with disdain, saying that “you can’t make a fur hat out of a pig’s tail.” To which the son-in-law replies, without missing a beat: “If America is out, how about Palestine? Isn’t that where all the old Jews like you go to die?” Here is Tevye’s response:
The minute he said that I felt it drive home like a nail. Hold on there, Tevye, I told myself. Maybe that’s not such a weird idea. There just may be something in it. With all the pleasure you’ve been getting from your children, why not try your luck elsewhere? You’re a jackass if you think you have anyone or anything to keep you here. Your poor Golde is six feet under, and between you and me, so are you; how long do you intend to go on drudging? . . . I always had a hankering to be in the Holy Land. I would have given anything to see the Wailing Wall, Rachel’s Tomb, the Cave of the Patriarchs, the River Jordan, Mount Sinai, the Red Sea, the Ten Plagues, and all the rest of it with my own eyes. In fact, I was so carried away thinking of that blessed land of Canaan where the milk and honey flow that I had all but forgotten where I was when [the son-in-law] brought me back to it by saying, “Well, how about it? Why not decide pronto.”
That particular Tevye story was published in 1909, when the Jewish situation had already taken a turn for the worse, both in Russia and in Europe. Tevye himself does not finally end up in Palestine—the painful realities of the diaspora summon him back. It is too late for him, alas, and too early for his people. But Sholem Aleichem saw the return to Jerusalem as the answer to the tragedy of the Old World diaspora and as the fulfillment of the Jews’ deepest longings. Palestine was not where old Jews go to die. Jerusalem is where young Jews go to live—and to flourish—and to fight.
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These literary and intellectual visionaries were hardly cut from the same cloth—a former French-German socialist, a world-famous British novelist, a Yiddish humorist who was one of the most serious Jews of the modern age. But they knew—or hoped—that Jerusalem would come back to life as the eternal capital of the Jews.
Every day, multiple times a day, observant Jews recite a prayer for the restoration of Jerusalem:
To Jerusalem, Your city,
May You return in compassion,
And may You dwell in it as You promised.
May You rebuild it rapidly in our days
As an everlasting structure.
The mystery and pain of Jewish history should keep us theologically modest in claiming to know God’s will or to understand the full meaning of the Jewish journey through time. But we can say this: The resurrection of Jerusalem—after centuries of wandering and after the near-death experience of the Holocaust—eludes simple rational explanation. It so defies the odds that one might understandably believe that the divine dealer knew the cards all along, even if we can never fully grasp the rules of God’s providential game.
To say that Jerusalem is the “eternal capital” of the Jews is not merely to say that it is, in this temporal world, always and forever the Jewish capital city. No, it is to stake a larger claim: Jerusalem is where the Jew most directly experiences eternity. In walking where our biblical ancestors walked, in praying where the ancient Israelites prayed, in governing where they governed—the Jew in a sense leaves time itself. He transcends history. Abraham and his descendants stand equidistant together before the eternal. Then becomes now, now becomes then, and the eternal mystery of God’s election of the Jewish people is experienced in the flesh.
Eric Cohen is executive director of the Tikvah Fund.