It was the last thing one could expect an ultra-Orthodox scribe to say in the cramped attic where he eked a living writing Torah scrolls and tefillin: “Stevie Wonder says music cuts across borders and languages.”
The statement, recounted in Abraham Rabinovich’s classic Jerusalem on Earth (Free Press, 1988), was made by quixotic rebel and amateur philosopher Leib Weisfish, while explaining, almost in one breath, his hostility to the Zionist idea and adoration of Friedreich Nietzsche.
With a revised edition now available on Amazon (Jerusalem on Earth: Clamoring for Heaven’s Gates – Post-Six Days War Jerusalem, Independently Published, 281 pages) this journalistic masterpiece and literary gem is an enlightening document and entertaining read any day, but doubly so these days, as the horsemen of the apocalypse converge on the City of God.
Rabinovich – who joined this newspaper after the 1967 Six Day War and became its best writer in its 90-year history – met Weisfish well after the great dramas of his life, which included an infiltration into Jordan in the hope of igniting an Arab-Jewish, anti-Zionist attack.
The attack – unlike the jail time Weisfish did on both sides of the border – never happened, and by the time Rabinovich met him in 1980 had been forgotten. The two could thus look back peacefully at an unusual life, the like of which only Jerusalem could produce: a pious Jew whose hero declared God dead – and as a convict befriended his prosecutor, Justice Haim Cohen, in conversations where they debated their inverted interpretations of the German philosopher.
Weisfish, who had 11 children, including one who became a model, was the kind of religious eccentric that Jerusalem mass-produces and Rabinovich portrays while blending curiosity, lucidity, compassion, and respect. They can generally be divided into three groups:
Some, like Sister Abraham– the Danish-born Kristen Pedersen who became the Ethiopian Church’s first white nun – were harmless. Others, like Weisfish, had bad intentions but still harmed no one. And some, like Denis Rohan, an Australian Christian who in 1969 set fire to al-Aqsa Mosque, shook heaven and earth.
Rohan was clearly deranged, but Rabinovich, after describing his crime stage-by-stage, as would befit the police reporter he was at the time, uses the arsonist’s trial to enter his mind and soul. The result is a compassionate portrait of a believer who thought he was to be the king of Judah, and his ulpan teacher Tzipora – who heard this in court “bewildered” – was to be its queen.
Jerusalem inspired such religious delusions not only among drifters, but also in ministers and kings.
BYZANTINE KING Heraclius was so excited by his conquest of Jerusalem in 630 CE that he personally carried “the true cross” on his back through Jerusalem’s alleys to the Holy Sepulchre, convinced his victory was God’s will. Reality arrived hardly seven years later, when a Muslim army conquered Jerusalem, fully agreeing that God chooses Jerusalem’s rulers, but insisting he prefers not Christianity, but its nemesis.
This is how Jerusalem kept replacing divinely chosen rulers – Abbasids, Umayas, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and Brits – all of whom were imperialists, but none of whom faced a Jewish state. Now Jerusalem faces new imperialist hallucinators, the ayatollahs whose yearning for Jerusalem is second in its passion only to their quest to destroy what Zionism built.
So obsessed are the mullahs with our capital that they even created a holiday – Quds Day – designed to transmit their own Jerusalem Syndrome to the Iranian masses that they routinely abuse.
As with the rest of Jerusalem’s hallucinators, the extent to which the ayatollahs fully believe their messianic rhetoric is unclear. What is clear is that it does not sit well with their own nation’s history.
Persia ruled here twice: in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The medieval stint was a 16-year occupation that ended when Heraclius retook Jerusalem. That episode is telling because it was Persia’s last attempt to spread west to the Middle East. Those Persians were pagan. Islamic Iran’s current effort to dominate the Middle East is, therefore, a throwback to pagan Iran’s legacy. It’s unnatural.
Light in the dark
Having said this, there is an optimistic part to this history, a legacy that hides in Jerusalem’s other Persian period, and also in Rabinovich’s book.
BIBLICAL-ERA Persia, as the books of Ezra and Nehemiah make plain, was a paragon of toleration.
The empire that returned Jerusalem to the Jews and encouraged them to rebuild their Temple, invented the concept of multiculturalism, the system of self-rule, and the attitude of live and let live. That is what the Edict of Cyrus was all about.
It was this combination of toleration and flexibility that made ancient Persia’s rule here last some two centuries. Clearly, anyone out to govern Jerusalem’s spiritual volcano must cultivate the kind of humanism, humility, tolerance, and pragmatism that to the ancient Persians were an ideal and to Iran’s Islamists are anathema.
There was a time when modern Jerusalem was run this way: The era of Teddy Kollek, which Rabinovich sketches vividly, an epoch in which Jerusalem’s ruler did not impose himself, or his faith, on any of its other faiths, fostering instead religious autonomy and communal self-rule.
Writing affectionately about the relentless builder who “regularly fell asleep on public platforms in full view of the audience,” Rabinovich notes that the era of political quiet Kollek gave Jerusalem ended after 20 years, with the outbreak of the First Intifada, after which the fabled mayor’s timeline for a solution to the Mideast conflict “shifted from generations to centuries.”
Next Monday night, as Jews throng to the Temple’s ruins under Armageddon’s menace, it will be hardly two generations since Kollek’s disillusioned prediction. Between Temple Mount’s Iranian, Palestinian, and Jewish arsonists – Cyrus will be no closer than Stevie Wonder’s borderless world.
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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.