Why is Jerusalem the most important city for the Jewish people?

Certainly as a people, we never passed beyond Jerusalem, and although our time with it was relatively short, it left us forever scarred and ruined, unable to accept any other substitute. We are left always pining for it. We end every Seder and Yom Kippur service with the refrain “Next Year in Jerusalem!” We mention Jerusalem countless times in our daily prayers. We cannot eat a meal or enjoy a cookie without mentioning our hope to return to Jerusalem in the subsequent grace.

We Jews have had romances with other great cities around the globe – Alexandria, Pumbedita, Aleppo, Barcelona, Fez, Vilna, Warsaw and New York to name just a few; but they never took the place of Jerusalem.

You might think it was our first love, and everyone remembers their first love, but alas, the Tabernacle stood in Shiloh for close to four centuries, and we have no such connection to it.

What is it about Jerusalem that attracts us? The sages tell us that 10 portions of beauty fell to the world, and Jerusalem took nine. And while they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I think we can all say that that is neither objectively nor factually true. I have walked the streets of many cities in the world, some, dare I say, more charming than Jerusalem. I’ve walked through cities in Europe that looked like they were the set for a Disney film, and yet they are all lacking in comparison to Jerusalem; but it’s not beauty that is missing.

And while the climate of Jerusalem, in my opinion, surpasses that of the rest of Israel, there are definitely better and more comfortable climates to be had in other cities.

So again, what is it about Jerusalem that attracts us so?

I, like many of you, can’t help but to wander the streets of Jerusalem, trying to get lost in a city I know too well. I delight in finding a new alleyway. It is the only city in the world where I can sit on a bench without a coffee or even a coffee shop and just sit and take it all in. I love learning about Jerusalem; even the mundane fascinates me. Street names enchant me, and the discovery of a new building enthralls. The sounds and smells are unlike any other city in the world.

In Jerusalem, I see the fulfillment of 2,800-year-old prophecies. It is a place where the fabric between the spiritual and the material is so thin that it elevates everything.

I remember, as a teenager on a trip to Jerusalem, trying not to walk on manhole covers that had the word “Jerusalem” engraved on them, out of a feeling that trampling on the word “Yerushalayim” written in Hebrew was some sort of desecration. I remember I saw a parking ticket with the Lion of Judah symbol of Jerusalem printed on it and felt awe. (Especially as I was not the one who had to pay it.)

Things clicked for me when I visited London. And yet, even as a history buff, I did not feel, nor did I discern from anyone else, any feeling of awe that I was walking the same streets as King Henry V, King Charles II, Oliver Cromwell, Richard the Lionheart, or Shakespeare. I have stood in awe at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, but it was the monument that accomplished that, not the ground itself.

So, in answer to our question, I just don’t know. But I do feel it.

Nobel Prize winner S.Y. Agnon wrote: “There are places in Jerusalem that I am familiar with and visited before, but when I happen upon them I feel like I’ve never been there before. Yet, in contrast, there are places in Jerusalem that I have never visited and when I happen upon them I feel like I am home.

“And because I have wandered the streets of Jerusalem by day and by night, I did not have time to study a trade. Worse than that, I did not study Torah, and a Jew who did not study Torah is admonished in his heart: And what will you say on the Day of Judgment, when they ask if you studied Torah?”

And what will I say? I will say I studied Jerusalem and the matter chides me not.■

The writer holds a doctorate in Jewish philosophy and teaches in post-high-school yeshivot and midrashot in Jerusalem.