If I Forget Thee…
Friday, May 15, 2026 – כ״ח אִיָּיר תשפ”ו
Today, Israel marks Jerusalem Day (well, actually yesterday because of Shabbat).
Few cities occupy the Jewish imagination as much as Jerusalem does. It lives in our prayers, our poetry, our liturgy, our grief, and our dreams. Three times a day, Jews turn toward Jerusalem. At weddings, we break a glass in memory of Jerusalem. At our moments of greatest joy, we are commanded never to forget her. The Psalmist tells us:
“אם אשכחך ירושלים תשכח ימיני…”
(תהילים קל”ז)
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither…” (Psalm 137)
And yet perhaps no city forces us to confront harder truths about ourselves than Jerusalem does.
Jerusalem Day was established to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem following the Six-Day War. For many Jews, it symbolizes return, survival, sovereignty, and the extraordinary arc of Jewish history. After two thousand years, Jews once again found themselves with access to the Old City, the Kotel, and the beating heart of Jewish memory.
There is something undeniably miraculous about that story.
But over the years, Jerusalem Day has also become increasingly painful for many of us. Not because our connection to Jerusalem has weakened, but because our love for Jerusalem compels us to look honestly at the city as it actually exists.
This week on The Pluralist Podcast, Orly Erez-Likhovski and I spoke with journalist Nir Hasson, one of the most important chroniclers of Jerusalem today. Nir has spent years documenting Jerusalem not as myth or slogan, but as lived reality: beautiful, holy, fractured, unequal, exhausting, and at times surprisingly hopeful.
He spoke about the gap between the Jerusalem many Israelis imagine vs. the Jerusalem that people actually inhabit every day.
The rabbis spoke of two Jerusalems: ירושלים של מעלה ושל מטה — the Heavenly Jerusalem and the Earthly Jerusalem.
There is the Jerusalem of dreams and prayer, the symbolic Jerusalem suspended above history, carrying the weight of Jewish longing and redemption.
And then there is the Jerusalem of infrastructure, policing, schools, housing permits, garbage collection, public transportation, demographics, and politics. The Jerusalem where nearly 40% of the city’s residents are Palestinians, most of whom are not citizens of Israel. The Jerusalem where East Jerusalem neighborhoods have faced decades of underinvestment and neglect. The Jerusalem where Jews and Palestinians often live within minutes of one another, while experiencing entirely different realities.
Too often, we speak only about ירושלים של מעלה while refusing to confront ירושלים של מטה.
But Jewish tradition never asked us to choose between them.
In fact, perhaps holiness begins precisely when we refuse to separate the dream from the reality.
The Jerusalemite poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote:
“Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.”
And elsewhere:
“The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over industrial cities.”
Amichai understood something essential about Jerusalem: it is impossible to disentangle holiness from humanity here. Jerusalem carries all of it simultaneously — memory and violence, sanctity and nationalism, transcendence and brokenness.
Nir spoke painfully about covering the annual Flag March (which took place yesterday) through the Muslim Quarter year after year — watching groups of young Jewish Israelis chant racist slogans, assault Palestinian residents and journalists, vandalize shops, and transform what should be a celebration of Jewish connection into a day associated with fear and humiliation for many Jerusalemites.
We should have the moral courage to say clearly: this is a חילול השם. A desecration.
A Jerusalem whose holiness cannot recognize the dignity of all who live within it ultimately betrays the very vision the city is meant to embody.
And yet Nir also shared something that surprised me. After spending the last two years covering the devastation and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, he told us that Jerusalem is paradoxically one of the only places where he still finds some hope.
Because despite everything, Jerusalem remains one of the few places where Israelis and Palestinians still regularly encounter one another as human beings. At Hebrew University. In hospitals. On the light rail. In cafes, shops, and workplaces. In all the messy, imperfect, ordinary ways, human beings share space together.
That fragile reality matters.
Our beloved Israel Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism continues working toward a different vision of Jerusalem — through legal advocacy, public pressure, education, and coalition building.
This week, our Movement participated in a Knesset discussion addressing violence against Christians in Jerusalem and the growing racism surrounding the Flag March. They appealed to police and educational authorities to act decisively against incitement, violence, and humiliation. Yesterday, many in our Movement joined the annual Flower March in the Old City, distributing flowers and messages of coexistence in response to hatred.
These are small acts. But Jerusalem is built through accumulated acts of moral imagination.
The Jerusalem we pray for will not emerge automatically from Jewish sovereignty alone.
It depends on the kind of society we choose to build here.
Jerusalem forces us to wrestle with some of the deepest questions facing Israel and the Jewish people right now: Can power remain tethered to moral responsibility? Can Jewish particularism coexist with democratic equality? Can holiness survive nationalism untethered from humility? Can we hold both security and dignity at the same time?
Those questions live in Jerusalem more intensely than anywhere else.
And still, even now, I cannot give up on Jerusalem.
Not ירושלים של מעלה.
And not ירושלים של מטה either.
Because to love Jerusalem honestly means refusing both romanticism and despair. It means insisting that the earthly city, with all its fractures and failures, can still move a little closer to the heavenly one.
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…”
The deeper challenge may be this:
What does it mean to truly remember her and to work for her future?
Shabbat Shalom and Hodesh Tov!