This is what Yerushalayim can do to a Jew
There is a story about a man who did not want to come to Israel.
He was around 70 years old, newly retired, and had dreamed for years of celebrating with a trip to Las Vegas. His wife had other ideas. She wanted Yerushalayim. He resisted for as long as he could, and then, as sometimes happens in these negotiations, he lost. So off they went, not to the neon lights he had imagined, but to the ancient stones of the Old City.
He arrived muttering.
When the tour brought him to the Kosel HaMaaravi, he slowly walked toward the Wall and placed his hands on the stones. He wept like water pouring from a broken fountain, uncontrollably, with no warning. Later he told his rabbi what had happened.
“I suddenly realized,” he said, “that my father, and my grandfather, and his father before him, would have given everything they owned to stand in this place. This was their longing. Their dream. The prayer they whispered every single day of their lives.”
This is what Yerushalayim does to a Jew.
Not only to someone deeply religious or emotionally prepared for the moment. Even to a man who had to be dragged there and arrived annoyed. Something deep within him recognized where he was, and it broke open without his permission.
The very name of the city contains the explanation.
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The Midrash in Bereishis Rabbah teaches that Yerushalayim is a combination of two earlier names. After the Akeidah, Avraham called the place “Hashem Yireh,” meaning “Hashem will see” (Bereishis 22:14). Shem, the son of Noach, had already called it Shalem, as we find in the reference to Malki Tzedek, Melech Shalem (Bereishis 14:18). Hakadosh Baruch Hu did not want to disregard either name, so they were joined together into one eternal name, Yireh-Shalem, Yerushalayim.
These two words contain the entire spiritual reality of the city.
Yireh means to see. In Torah, seeing means far more than physical sight. It means recognizing something beyond yourself worth seeing. Yerushalayim is the city that opens a person’s eyes to what life is truly about.
Shalem means wholeness. Every human being spends a lifetime searching for shleimus, hoping to feel complete. Yet the Torah suggests that true wholeness begins not with achievement but with acknowledgment.
The Hebrew root of the word modeh carries two meanings simultaneously, to give thanks and to admit. A person cannot genuinely thank someone until first admitting that one needed them. Dependence is not weakness. It is the beginning of real connection.
Standing before the place where the Shechinah rested, a person feels with a clarity that needs no argument how much he needs the Ribono Shel Olam. In that recognition, something becomes whole.
Yerushalayim is where those two ideas meet. The place where a person learns to see beyond oneself, and where that vision carries one toward wholeness.
Perhaps nowhere was this more visible than during the return to the Kosel in 1967.
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On the 28th of Iyar, Israeli paratroopers entered the Old City through the Lion’s Gate. Secular soldiers, kibbutzniks, religious Jews, Holocaust survivors, ran toward the Kosel together. Motta Gur declared over the radio, “Har HaBayis b’yadeinu.” Rav Shlomo Goren stood before the stones sounding the shofar while soldiers wept openly.
Before the war, the army had reportedly prepared 10,000 wooden coffins near Har Herzl, anticipating catastrophic losses. When the fighting ended and the miracle became undeniable, the wood was repurposed to build sukkos, echoing the pasuk in Tehillim 76:3, “vayehi b’Shalem sukko (His sukkah is in Shalem).”
What those soldiers felt with their hands pressed against those stones is the same truth the man who wanted to go to Las Vegas discovered the moment he touched the Wall. It is what generations of Jews cried for in every corner of exile. There is something alive inside every Jewish soul that remembers where home is. It can lie buried beneath decades of distraction or distance. But when a Jew encounters Yerushalayim, the soul remembers what the mind forgot.
That is Yerushalayim. The place of seeing and the place of wholeness. The city that finds you even when you were not looking — and it returns something you did not know you had lost.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach www.bachlongbeach.com.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
