IN HONOR OF YOM YERUSHALAYIM

28 Iyyar 5782 
43 Days of the Omer

An Internal Mental Account of the Attitude Towards Jerusalem Day

Whoever is truly anxious for the glory of God in the world knows that just as he is commanded to fight all the evil that is here, so is the commandment to be thankful for all the good that God has showered on us  (Note: This is an auto-generated translation)

Rabbi Yehuda Epstein 

22 Iyar 5752 - 23/05/2022

In a few days, Jerusalem Day will be celebrated, marking the 55th anniversary of the liberation of our Temple, the place of inspiration of the Divine Presence and the place to which our eyes have been fixed for nearly two thousand years, and we could only dream of it. Apart from this, we will also mention the miraculous salvation from death to life, as everyone who knows a little about the history of times knows. The adults among us can even tell from personal experience the terrible feeling that accompanied the settlement in those days before the war, when only a little more than twenty years after the Holocaust of European Jewry, there was a grave fear that even the Holocaust would perish, and the cruel and savage Arab enemy did not even try to hide it. But under the gas chambers of the 'enlightened' Germans, their Ishmaelite allies presented us with knives and axes in the best of their tradition. And here, as if in a flash of a moment - everything turned upside down! Not only did they not succeed in their plot, but we were privileged to destroy the enemy armies, and first and foremost the Egyptian Air Force, we tried them backwards, and conquered vast expanses in our holy land, those parts we failed to conquer in the War of Independence, And first and foremost - the place of our temple, the pet of our eyes. It was not for nothing that the Mashgiach from Ponivez, one of the greatest believers in the generation, the late Rabbi Yechezkel Levinstein, said at the time that the miracles we saw did not fall from the parting of the Red Sea! It was an uplifting and wonderful feeling, to see the providence of God with our own eyes, to feel the faith in the senses, to say with a heart full of longing - if our mouths were full of singing ... we are not enough ... ".

In those days there was a real sense of exaltation among the public, and especially among the God-fearing public, who know how to thank those whose confession. Over the years, however, an unfortunate accident has happened to us, the ultra-Orthodox public, and we see the results in one of the sins that Sages have exacerbated, and that is the lack of gratitude, and in its most serious form - the lack of gratitude towards Shamaya. We have forgotten that God performed miracles for us, and if he chose secular personalities to clothe those miracles in the ways of nature - we say this every morning in prayer - "and who will tell you what you will do?" And so an absurd situation is created, that if an ultra-Orthodox person is ambushed by terrorists and is a step between him and death, and suddenly an IDF jeep emerges and saves him - he will bless the retribution and make a great confession, and often praise the same miracle. , And not only did we take advantage, but we gained those glorious achievements, and we received the place of our temple as a gift from God - there the degree of "frumkeit" is measured by the degree of ignoring the miracle! And you have no better overturning than this!

It's time to know how to look at reality in a mature and informed way. It's time to know how to distinguish in each area, to differentiate between different topics. It is time to realize that even if we are in a bitter war against the government's attempts to change our lifestyles and harm all that is sacred and precious, this has nothing to do with the fact that God brought us into his land in visible miracles, we were immediately saved from the cruel Arab enemy -So we must thank him with a full mouth!

Even if it can be argued that a secular state was established on May Day, and there is a bad day involved in the good end of British rule and the establishment of Jewish rule in Israel, and even if it is difficult for some people in our public to rejoice on Independence Day due to the negative diagnosis. Sleeping so as not to celebrate Jerusalem Day? A day full of thanksgiving to God for the miraculous salvation and the tremendous salvation! It is known that many of the great men of Israel did celebrate that day, and the great genius Rabbi Chaim Shmuelevich, Rosh Yeshivat Mir, the giant of Torah and piety, was holding a special feast that day, and many did well, but those with a certain view took care to silence the matter. And dwarf it, and thus built for them a world of their own, in which the perfect Tzaddik is the one who atones for the good of a place, while the one who thanks God for most of his goodness and grace is considered one who 'cools the bath', half-Zionist.

But the truth is Torah through it, and anyone who is truly anxious for God in the world knows that just as he is commanded to fight all the evil that is here, so is the commandment to be thankful for all the good that God has showered on us despite, not because, of secular rule.

"This is the day that HASHEM has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it."