Lying in the Street Unafraid
FACKENHEIM, EMILL
ON MY MIND Lying in the Street Unafraid My first Yom Kippur in Jerusalem was in 1988. Although we made aliyah five years ago, I had always gone back to participate in services in Toronto. I...
...Have Israelis forgotten what happened on Yom Kippur 1973, the first day of the Yom Kippur War...
...The time is . . . now...
...However casual Israelis are in observing most laws, they are said to be the only people in the world who obey the law against jaywalking...
...Terrible things have happened since the 1920s, when Rosenzweig wrote this...
...On Yom Kippur, however, there is no news at all...
...the time to favor her is now...
...But now accusations come from friends as well: the accusers are the world, or nearly all of it...
...I wondered what Jerusalem would be like with my family on Yom Kippur—in 1988...
...On Kol Nidre night, however, it's different, as it is for the rest of Yom Kippur...
...Even if you can ignore them all, you cannot escape the news on the buses...
...No radio...
...On Shabbat and other festivals, no newspapers are published in Israel...
...Have they forgotten that just one day before this Yom Kippur the Seoul Olympic committee, under political pressure, deleted its listing of Jerusalem as Israel's capital...
...One passage in the liturgy penetrates my heart and will not let go: O Lord, remember the love of Jerusalem...
...What Jewish Jerusalem-ite could suffer from any such delusion...
...If there were buses (which of course there are not) there would be no news for the drivers to turn on every hour on the hour...
...All along the way, as we walk home, leisurely pedestrians, looking neither right nor left, are crossing and walking in the streets...
...every hour on the hour the bus drivers turn on the news...
...This is the Jewish return to Jerusalem...
...During Yom Kippur I saw only one moving vehicle, an ambulance...
...The time to favor her is now...
...The Babylonians did it the first time—in 586 B.C.E...
...The "Edomites" (a code word for the Romans) did it the second time—in 70 C.E...
...Ever since December 9, 1987, this people finds itself accused...
...And now the PLO is clamoring for a state that must, it says, include Jerusalem...
...It is accustomed to accusations from its enemies...
...Thou wilt rise to have mercy on Zion...
...The newspapers, the radio, the TV always bring you back to reality...
...During the year, tensions between the religious and the non-religious sometimes threaten the peace of Jerusalem...
...As we near what is usually a busy intersection, we see a boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old, lying on his back in the middle of the intersection— resting, enjoying the air—fearless...
...Emil L. Fackenheim...
...Speaking of none to make them afraid...
...But it is nevertheless a fact that they don't jaywalk...
...Some are relevant as ever...
...One need not be paranoid to believe that at least the part of the intifada that takes orders from the PLO wants to do it again—not now, but later...
...Kol Nidre service is over, but these words stay with me...
...Of some of the sins we may be guilty, and of these we do well to repent...
...But on Yom Kippur, he had no fear of cars at all, either non-religious or religious...
...It is well that we spend our holiest days confessing our sins—even though, ever since the Holocaust, this people remembers how it was more sinned against than sinning...
...In 1948 the Jordanians also did a pretty thorough job of it, destroying synagogues and desecrating Jewish cemeteries...
...O Lord, remember the day of Jerusalem's fall against the Edomites, who shouted: "Destroy it, destroy it, to the very foundation...
...No TV...
...True, when Yom Kippur is over we shall learn all too bitterly that these are not the messianic times, as we fight with each other about how, and how not, to deal with our enemies...
...Who are those people who pontificate that Israel is about to lose her soul, is losing it, has lost it...
...The time is . . . now...
...Is it still tenable...
...As we walk home I notice that we are walking, not on the sidewalk, but in the middle of the street...
...But Yom Kippur in Jerusalem is a messianic moment, assuring us that, having returned to Jerusalem after an exile that ended with unspeakable horror, we have come back to stay...
...And then this is the year of the intifada...
...So is everyone else...
...Whoever said that ' 'nonreligious" Israelis are not religious...
...others are not...
...Franz Rosenzweig once wrote that Yom Kippur is the one day of the Jewish year on which a Jew is beyond time, anticipating Eternity...
...I noticed something else about Yom Kippur 1988, more astonishing still...
...Are these the messianic days...
...On Yom Kippur, however, a messianic peace reigns...
...Of course not...
...Everyone is enjoying the one day in the year when they can be in the middle of the street...
...And this year the news has included riots and strikes in Jerusalem itself...
...If nowhere else, at least, so it seems in Jewish Jerusalem...
...But what the accusing world—its hostile part, consciously...
...Speaking of each sitting under his vine and his fig tree...
...What with Israel's driving habits, this may be no more than self-preservation...
...Even on Shabbat this boy would have to fear "non-religious" cars...
...I go with my family to shut on Kol Nidre night and chant the litany of sins "we"—the Jewish community—are supposed to have committed...
...its friendly part, unconsciously—regards as our fundamental sin is no sin at all but, on the contrary, the performance of a mitzoah...
...After the Holocaust it may well be the foremost among all the milzvot...
...I walk home with my wife and son in the balmy Jerusalem night...
...That, of course, is because there are no cars in the street...
...never forget the love of Zion...
Vol. 13 • December 1988 • No. 9
