Rabbi Shmuli Halpern on the Parsha

The Test of JerusalemYom YerushalayimAsk almost anyone who has stood at the Kotel what it felt like. The answers vary in detail but not in substance. The noise stops. Not just outside — inside. Every competing claim on your attention, every divided loyalty, everything you have been quietly serving alongside G-d — it falls away. And there is only one thing left.One G-d. Yours, and you are His.That experience is not a side effect of being in Jerusalem. It is Jerusalem. To understand what the city is — and what Yom Yerushalayim is really asking of us — we have to understand what has always kept us from it, and what has always brought us back.In Bereishit chapter 21, Avimelech approaches Avraham with a request. He has watched Avraham. He has seen that G-d is with him in everything he does. And he says: swear to me — by G-d — that you will not deal falsely with me, nor with my son, nor with my grandson. And Avraham swears. A covenant is made.Many commentaries explain that it is this covenant — this pact between Avraham and Avimelech — that keeps the Jewish people out of Jerusalem for hundreds of years after they enter the land.That seems strange. A diplomatic agreement with a foreign king locks the door to the holiest place on earth?But look at what Avimelech actually represents. Avraham and Sarah spent their lives digging wells. Chazal tell us those wells are a metaphor — sources of living water, of Torah, opened in the souls of the people around them. They converted thousands. They built an entire world of ethical monotheism from scratch.And Avimelech's servants kept filling those wells back in.Every person Avraham brought to the service of the one G-d — the surrounding culture reached in and closed that back down. That is Avimelech. He is not simply a foreign king. He is the force of compromise, of dilution, of mixed devotion. He serves the supreme being — and he serves everything else alongside it.A covenant with Avimelech is not just a peace treaty. It is a joining of forces. And that joining — that spiritual compromise, however understandable — becomes the blockage. You cannot bring undivided devotion to the Infinite while you are in partnership with the force that divides it.Fast forward to Shmuel II, chapter 5. David is king. He marches to Jerusalem — still held by the Yevusi, descendants of that same Avimelech. They taunt him. The blind and the lame will stop you. But David and Yoav find a way through, and the city falls.What breaks the pact? David's devotion is undivided. There is no room in his heart — and no room in Jerusalem as he understands it — for a mixed altar. Jerusalem is not the place where every spiritual force gets its due. It is the place where a finite human being stands before the Infinite and discovers that the Infinite is all there is. The city does not bring G-d down to a finite address. It strips away the illusion that anything else is real.Now go to the book of Ezra. The Jewish people have returned from Babylonian exile. Cyrus has issued his famous proclamation. They begin rebuilding the Beit HaMikdash. And then the Kutim — the Samaritans — show up with a proposal: "Let us build with you. We seek your G-d just as you do."They are not lying, exactly. They do serve the G-d of Israel. They also serve their idols. They want to build a house of worship that holds all of it — a place where every kind of prayer finds a home.The Jewish people say no.The Kutim then spend the next twenty-plus years doing everything in their power to halt the project. And they largely succeed. The building stops.The Malbim points to something fascinating in the opening verses of Ezra. Cyrus, in his proclamation, cannot stop repeating a single phrase: "the G-d who is in Jerusalem... the G-d who is in Jerusalem." The Malbim explains: Cyrus believed in the supreme being. He also believed — like the sophisticated idolaters of his age — in the spiritual forces governing the practical world. The sun, the rain, the G-ds of Persia. He served all of them. And yet he understood, with remarkable clarity, that what was happening in Jerusalem was different. The Jews were serving only the Infinite. No coalition. No blended theology. One G-d, full stop.That is why the Kutim's proposal is not just unwelcome. It is disqualifying. What they want to build is not Jerusalem. Jerusalem is not the chapel at the airport where every traveler finds their G-d. Jerusalem is the place where we discover there is only one G-d to find.The Rambam teaches that genuine teshuvah has a test. We fall in a certain area — and then Hashem places before us, under similar circumstances, a similar choice. If we get it right that time, the teshuvah is real.The return in the time of Ezra is exactly that test. Avraham made a covenant with Avimelech. Now the Jewish people face the modern-day Avimelech — enormous pressure, a stalled project, an offer of partnership that would cost them everything Jerusalem is supposed to mean. And they hold firm.That is the teshuvah of Ezra. The repair of the original covenant. Jerusalem, once again, belongs only to the Infinite.Which brings us to today.The return of a unified Jerusalem to Jewish hands in our generation is, by any honest accounting, staggering. We have lived to see something generations of Jews wept and prayed and died hoping for. The fact that we are still there, still thriving, still growing despite everything — it is mind-boggling. We cannot let it become ordinary.But Yom Yerushalayim is not only a day of gratitude. It is also a question.The test — Avraham's test, Ezra's test — does not end. It is the perennial Jewish test. Are we serving the Infinite with full devotion? Or have we, quietly, over time, allowed other forces to fill the wells? Other aspirations. Other things we have elevated, almost without noticing, to the level of our ultimate concern?We say it twice a day: Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad. One G-d. Our entire focus. Our entire service. Jerusalem is the place that makes that feel obvious — where everything else just falls away. The question Yom Yerushalayim asks of us is whether we are living that way when we are not standing at the Kotel.The Malbim adds one final note of extraordinary hope. Cyrus knew that the time had not yet come for the Beit HaMikdash to be what Yeshayahu describes: "a house of prayer for all the nations." That day is still ahead. But it will come — the day when the whole world recognizes that there is only one place to lift your eyes in hope, only one G-d to call out to. And through our devoted, undivided service of Hashem, we bring that day closer.We hope and pray — and hope and pray means we work, in our own hearts — that having Jerusalem is a milestone in that journey. That each of us, in our own life, is digging back the wells. Clearing the compromises. Moving, one step at a time, toward the clarity that Jerusalem makes so obviously, achingly true.There is only one G-d. May we be worthy of the gift we have been given, and may we see very soon the full redemption of Am Yisrael.Yom Yerushalayim Sameach.

Parshas Behar-Bechukosai: The Land That ReachesOf all the things one might expect to need a Shabbat, the land is perhaps the last. The human being, pulled between the spiritual and the material, tempted, prone to envy and anger, addicted to work and laziness, certainly needs a weekly pause. But the land? Inanimate, solid, and fixed — why exactly does it need to rest?Yet Parshat Behar opens with the mitzvah of Shemita, the Shabbat of the land. Six years of working the soil, and then a complete rest — Shabbat l'Hashem. And then the mitzvah goes further: seven cycles of seven years. Then the fiftieth, Yovel, the Jubilee, a year the Sages describe as, kullan taivin le'atreihu — all things return to their place, to their root, to their source.The parallel to Sefirat HaOmer is hard to miss. We too are counting — seven weeks, seven times seven — building toward a fiftieth day that transcends the system that produced it. Ordinary Shabbat cycles back around every seven days, renews us, and then the week begins again. But Sefirah does something different: it counts, and counts, and then reaches beyond. Day fifty is Matan Torah, a completely different order of existence.Why does the land experience a higher Shabbat than we do?The answer begins with the word eretz itself. We tend to think of land as the most inert thing imaginable, the ground beneath our feet, solid and unmoving and simply there. But eretz carries within it ratzon, will and desire, and rutz, running toward something. The land is not passive. It strives. It yearns.Kohelet tells us: V'yitron eretz bakol hu — the advantage of eretz is in everything. Even the king, who holds the accumulated dreams and ambitions of an entire nation, is indebted to the field. The most physical thing in creation already contains, built into its very name, an infinite reaching toward its Source.This is what the Gemara means when it calls the land of Israel Eretz HaTzvi — like the skin of a deer, it stretches beyond what its natural dimensions allow. It is called Eretz HaChaim, the Land of Life — not a land that simply is, fixed and finished, but a land that lives, that grows, that is by its very nature bigger than itself.The Torah describes creation with a curious phrase: ki sheishet yamim asah Hashem — for six days God made heaven and earth. Chazal notices something odd: shouldn't it say b'sheishet, in six days? The answer: what G-d created is the six days. Not a collection of finished objects, but a process. Time, space, cause and effect — these are what was made.Science has arrived at a somewhat similar understanding. Reality is not static matter but energy and process, everything in motion. And yet even this insight can describe a closed system — a process that circles endlessly within itself, going nowhere in particular. Profound, but still without a ‘beyond’.Shmitta teaches us otherwise. The process has a tachlit, a destination. The six years of working the land are not a loop. The finite is not self-contained. Live a life of Torah, absorb the kedusha of Eretz Yisrael, and you discover that the finite is rooted in the Infinite. In the place where heaven meets earth, earth can become heaven."When Moshe stands at the burning bush, his question is simple and overwhelming at once: who shall I say sent me? What name do I bring to a people who have been waiting, suffering for so long?" Hashem's answer is two words: Ekyeh asher Ekyeh. I will be what I will be.The Maharal describes Ekyeh as the root of the tree — the hidden, ever-renewing source of existence beneath the surface. Havaya, the name we do not pronounce, is the crown of that same tree — the full, revealed glory toward which all of history moves. The name Ekyeh carries two tracks at once. The first is the track of survival in darkness — Ekyeh imahema b'galus, I will be with them in exile. Whenever we call, Hashem answers. This is the promise that has held us through every generation of suffering: that distance from our Source is never abandonment. From the depths, mimamakim karaticha Hashem, there is always a response.The second track runs deeper. The very distance between finite creatures and an infinite Source — that gap, which feels like exile — is not a flaw in creation. It is the point of creation. Because each step we take toward Hashem opens onto a view we couldn't have seen from below. The horizon keeps moving. The closer we come, the more we discover how much further there is to go. And that discovery, rather than discouraging us, pulls us higher still. This is the purpose of existence: an endless, joyful journey toward our Source — one level of connection opening into the next, forever.The mitzvah of Shemita is the door to this second track. The farmer who lets his land rest on the seventh year is not simply following a rule. He is declaring something: that the earth beneath his feet is not a closed system. That it reaches. That even the most physical thing in creation yearns for its Source. And when that door goes unopened — when the land is treated as just land, and we treat ourselves as just another nation — something shifts. The first track of Ekyeh opens instead. Not through Shemita and the joy of reaching for the Infinite, but through suffering and exile. The Talmud records the accounting precisely: for each Shemita year not observed, a year of exile followed. Same Ekyeh. Same love. A different door — and a far harder one.This is why Hashem's first words to Avraham about the land matter so much: el ha'aretz asher ar'eka — go to the land that I will show you. Not a fixed address. Not coordinates on a map. A land that is always being revealed, always beyond the last horizon.That is the essence of Eretz Yisrael. It is the place in this world where heaven and earth meet — where plowing a field is a spiritual act, where the material and the infinite are not in contradiction but are the same reality, seen from different vantage points.There is something deeply tragic about reducing Eretz Yisrael to a coordinate, a border, a fact on a map. That reduction is not just a political mistake. It collapses the very structure the land was created to embody.The prophet Yirmiyahu is uncompromising on this. The worst suffering comes when the Jewish people say sni'hiyeh k'chol hagoyim bais Yisrael— let us be like all the other nations. But there is no such option. We do not exist as a nation like any other. We exist only when we are who we are — a people whose presence in this land is meant to show that the world is not a closed system, that the Infinite finds expression through the finite, that eretz, earth itself, reaches beyond its fixed nature toward its Source.We are here, counting. Seven weeks of Sefirah, building toward Shavuot. Seven years of Shemita building toward Yovel, when everything returns to its root.The name Ekyeh is with us in both its meanings, as it always has been. We call out, and Hashem answers. We reach, and the horizon opens. The land — the most physical thing we can imagine — is still reaching, still running, still yearning toward its Source.And so must we.Shabbat Shalom.

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