You Have Ascended to the Top of the Mountain

Elaina Marshalek

NFTY-CWR RCVP

December 2006

(Adapted for Morning by Josh Levin)

Israel Meditation Service

Through the Years of Jewish History

You are tired after leaving home and walking, walking till sunset. Sleep settling in, you grab for a few rocks to rest your head on. Your eyes close and you begin to dream…a ladder set upon the earth, its top beyond sight, reaching to heaven itself. God appears before you, promising this very land to you and your descendants. You can hardly imagine that years from now, blessings upon your descendants will come from a man supposed to curse them as God fulfills his promise and your children return to the land. But arise Jacob, you must continue on your journey as your children will on theirs.

Ma Tovu

You have ascended to the top of the mountain. The path has been long, weeks of hiking, years of wandering, and lifetime of searching has led you here. As rocks crumble beneath your feet, you feel weight, age. But the more you search, the lighter you feel, as if you know where you are headed. This path seems to end here, but it is the beginning of something so much greater than you, the beginning of a people. You are Moses.

And the Lord said, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will assign it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.” (Deuteronomy 34:4)

You are barefoot, standing on holy ground. Step by step, you walk towards the view. The sun rises on the land of milk and honey, and you lay eyes on the Holy Land - - A land with an endless future, a land with endless meaning, and a land that no matter how the view changed, a land that was majestic, a land that we could one day call home.

Your journey so near its end, the words you recited to your people Israel echo in your mind:

“Give ear, O heavens, let me speak;

Let the earth hear the words I utter!

May my discourse come down as the rain, My speech distill as the dew,
Like showers on young growth,

Like droplets on the grass.

For the name of the Lord I proclaim;

Give glory to our God!” (Deuteronomy 32:1-3)

Barchu

Energy rushes into your fingertips, into your arms, chest, legs, feet. Your mind is cleared – now somehow pure from this sight of the holy land. The sun reflects off the land in the beginnings of its journey across the sky. As the land becomes clearer, you realize you are no longer staring at the end of your wandering years but at another foreign land.

The rays of the growing sun stretch down to a river, bubbling and rippling, singing a soft tune. You are no longer in the land of Israel, but far, far away.

By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat,

Sat and wept,

As we thought of Zion.

There on the poplars

We hung up our lyres,

For our captors asked us there for songs,

Our tormentors, for amusement:

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

How can we sing a son of the Lord on alien soil?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

Let my right hand wither;

Let my tongue stick to my palate

If I cease to think of you

If I do not keep Jerusalem in memory

Even at my happiest hour. (Psalms 137:1-5)

I praise You with all my heart,

Sing a hymn to You before the divine beings;

I bow to toward Your holy temple

And praise Your name for Your steadfast love and faithfulness,

Because You have exalted Your name, Your word, above all (Psalm 138:1-2)

For God has created the day and the night, and the whole world, from the midst of Babylon to Jerusalem itself, the whole world sharing the same sun, and the same day.

The sun rises father into the sky, the moon little but a memory.

Yotzeir Or

The sun begins to reach its most blazing point, a celestial inferno. This light turns into a small fire, into a torch. This torch multiplies into a force of a thousand suns, as you begin to see an army.

“And Mattathias answered and spoke in a booming voice: If all the nations that in the King’s dominions obey him and by forsaking every one of them the worship I and my sons and my brethren walk in the covenant of our fathers. Heaven forbid that we should forsake the Law and the ordinances!” (I Maccabees 2:19-21)

You are the son of Mattathias, Judah Maccabee, and with the words of your father, lead your people back to your homeland. As you walk with your torches up the Judean hills, you realized that you have reached home. After sweat and blood and pure determination, frustration and challenges beyond belief, you march to your destination. One more hill, three more steps, and you set eyes on the holy mountain to which you are returning. A rush of relaxation enters your body. Warmth fills you like you have never felt before, even as you stand on the cool crisp winter ground. A land you lived for, a land you would die for, a land that you could call your own and feel it more than ever before.

How unending is the love you have for this land! It is in this love that you feel God’s own love for your people. As you have fought years for the devotion to your God, and to your country, God has now returned his devotion and love.

Ahavah Rabbah

The sun crosses the middle of the sky, shining now not on a free Jewish people, but a Jewish people under rule of Rome. The sun beats down on Cesaria, a city far north of Jerusalem. You, a student of the great Rabbi Akiva, stand on the Day of Atonement to see him executed by the Romans.

You remember Akiva’s lead in the Bar Kochba Rebellion, a battle for Jewish freedom against the Romans, a battle that failed, and led Akiva to this very moment.

His teachings echo in your mind, the many words of Torah taught publicly, illegally.

You feel enlightened, lifted by these teachings; but a pit in your stomach brings you down. Your teacher is to be executed for his devotion to his people, and for freedom of study in the land of the Jewish people.

As the executioners bring out iron combs to tear Akiva’s flesh, your terror is overcome by the words of Akiva as the sun rises.

“All my life I have been troubled by this verse, 'You shall love God
... with all your soul'. As I have explained: even if they take your
life. I have always wondered: will I ever have the privilege of
fulfilling this mitzvah? Now the opportunity has finally arrived,
shall I not seize it?" [Berachot 61b]

Slowly, and ever so meaningfully, your teacher speaks out to all the peoples of Israel with what some consider the most important words uniting the Jewish people.

In the moments of his death, Rabbi Akiva recited these words:

Shema V’ahavta

As the sun sets, the light shrinks, smaller, tinier, and starts to shine. It is the light on the water, the ocean. As the waves pass, you find yourself on a boat, finding your way to shore.

You have just left your home in Kishnev Russia amidst the turmoil of pogroms, death, and destruction.

Pass over the shattered hearth, attain the broken wall
Whose burnt and barren brick, whose charred stones reveal
The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending
Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal.
There will thy feet in feathers sink, and stumble
On wreckage doubly wrecked, scroll heaped on manuscript,
Fragments again fragmented—
Pause not upon this havoc; go thy way.

Then wilt thou leave that place, and go thy way— And lo— The earth is as it was, the sun still shines: It is a day like any other day. (Chaim Nachman Bialik)

You have left the violence behind,

Left the corruption and tyranny behind.

You have made your way to freedom.

Mi Chamocha

Still you see the ocean, no longer from a boat, but standing on the land you now call home. You have not escaped from a pogrom in Russia, but from the turmoil of Poland. Tears well up in your eyes as you realize what you’ve escaped from – a Holocaust that only left you with hope for a future.

Hatikvah

Kol ode balevav P'nimah – Nefesh Yehudi homiyah

Ulfa'atey mizrach kadimah
Ayin l'tzion tzofiyah.

Ode lo avdah tikvatenu
Hatikvah bat shnot alpayim:

L'hiyot am chofshi b'artzenu -
Eretz Tzion v'Yerushalayim

As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,

With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,

Then our hope - the two-thousand-year-old hope - will not be lost:

To be a free people in our land, The land of Zion and Jerusalem

As you whisper those words, you can remember life as a kid in Poland singing that song and dreaming of a home of your own. Looking at the glistening water, you remember the ashes of your family in Auschwitz the concentration camp, dumped into the river as if it were sawdust. As the water flows by, you reach the land. A landyou turned to and hoped for in times of death, times when there was almost no light left, the worst of times. A land that had kept you alive, a land with a dream that kept a people alive. As you watch, you see the land develop, as the light on the river moves, new houses appear, buildings, trees, green, a flag of blue and white, and an anthem – the song of hope you have always known, a song that has kept you alive. And this hope has kept you alive—kept you safe. You take this moment and pray.

Amidah (silent except for first 3)

Oseh Shalom

You remember the work of your people in this land, your land. Those who have come before you are not to be soon forgotten since the greatest work of our land and our people, the Torah, refuses to forget them.

Torah Service

The light focuses, becoming a round ball, a light bulb in a crowded room. You lift your head up, and see a determined man, David Ben Gurion. He is nervous, excited.

You have never felt this way in your life—today is a day of great change, of revolution. Finally, the land that you have always known will be yours again.

ERETZ-ISRAEL, the land of Israel, was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE'S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

Tears well up in your eyes as you stand together with your people in the land of Israel. A dream of thousands of years has finally come true – you are home. You are Jewish, part of a Jewish people, part of a Jewish state.

Aleinu

The land of Israel has come at a price. You have just faced the six longest days of your life – six days of war defending your country. So many have died—so many people whom you loved, all for this country we take pride in. You race into Jerusalem, and arrive.

The troops have finally reached the western wall.

This wall has heard many prayers
This wall has seen the fall of many other walls
This wall has felt the touch of mourning women
This wall has felt petitions lodged between its stones.
This wall saw Rabbi Yehuda Halevi trampled before it
This wall has seen Caesars rise and fall
But this wall had never seen paratroopers cry.
This wall saw them tired and wrung out
This wall saw them wounded, mutilated
Running to it with excitement, cries and silence.
And creeping as torn creatures in the alleys of the Old City
And they are covered with dust and with parched lips
They whisper, "If I forget thee, if I forget thee Jerusalem."
And here they stand before it and breathe in dust
Here they look at it with sweet pain
And tears run down and they look at one another perplexed
How does it happen that paratroopers cry?
How does it happen that they touch this wall
With great emotion?
How does it happen that their weeping
Changes to song?
Perhaps because these boys of 19,
Born at the same time as the state,
Carry on their shoulders - 2,000 years.

Mourner’s Kaddish

This light, this ever eternal light, guides your way now. You are one of the Jewish people. Maybe you have been to Israel, maybe not. Still you carry the Jewish people, you carry the Torah, and you carry the Jewish land of Israel. How the days will dim and dawn are up to you for your country, so let us join together and sing the song of our country. Hatikvah is on page __

Hatikvah

(Note: All text in italics is from various sources, the rest has been written by the CWR RCVP)

(Note 2: Some Text has been edited for the adaptation to a morning service in this version)