Yerushalayim, Your City

T

wo thousand years of galus has left its imprint in innumerable ways. We are so far removed from the reality of Geulah, we’re often indifferent to the miracles the Redemption vows to fulfill. I’ve had difficult conversations with students who struggle to understand how Yerushalayim, vibrant and bustling with people, is currently in a state of destruction. And truthfully, with new buildings going up on every corner, shuls and yeshivos filled with pious Jews, and shops catering to every whim and desire, it’s challenging to reconcile a typical Yerushalayim street scene with ruin and desolation.

Whether we call Yerushalayim our permanent home, or reserve apartments and hotel rooms for Succos, it’s easy to forget that modern Jewish sovereignty over the city is a substandard surrogate for the authority we’ll have when Mashiach arrives.

I have a friend who, upon purchasing and renovating her apartment in Yerushalayim, deliberately hung multiple pictures of the Beis Hamikdash on her walls, a reminder that His home is yet incomplete.

Another, perhaps more dramatic expression of this sensitivity, is the story of Rav Mordechai Gifter, who moved to Telz Stone in the late 1970s to establish a branch of the Telshe Yeshivah on holy soil. Two years later he was recalled to America, where he was handed back the reins of the Cleveland yeshivah following the sudden petirah of Rav Boruch Sorotzkin. But upon returning to America, after living with both the glory of Eretz Yisrael and the devastation of a Shechinah with no home, Rav Gifter refused to occupy a permanent address. He chose instead to live out his days in an apartment within the yeshivah building. If the Shechinah was homeless, how could he dwell in a permanent abode?