Jerusalem of Iron, Jerusalem of Gold (2nd day Rosh HaShanah 2017 / 5778)
Much of the first part of this sermon is adapted from the account in Yossi Klein Halevi’s masterful book about the Six Day War, Like Dreamers , which devotes significant attention to the life and work of Meir Ariel, and from a video interview with Israeli composer Gil Aldema, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7KZO-jMdck . Many thanks to the United Synagogue of Hoboken Choir for singing so beautifully during this sermon! Plenty of songwriters start out with the intention of writing a truly iconic song, but few actually succeed. And no songwriter can count on writing a true classic. But let me tell you the story of one of the most well-known Hebrew songs of all time, an instant classic, and how it came to be written. It was early 1967. The state of Israel was 19 years old, and life in Israel felt as precarious as it ever had. Whatever hopes that the new State of Israel would be welcomed into the middle east had not been realized. Both Syria and Egypt were using increasingly di