Evyatar Kerner
Shaliach in Montreal (2025–2026)
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For translation to Spanish and Português
There are moments in history that look like a miracle, but when you look closely, you discover they are a miracle resulting from human action. The result of a choice by one nation that chose it thousands of years ago, and kept it with a stubbornness that has no parallel in human history.
The empires that conquered the world—Rome, Babylon, Greece—and ruled the world by force, today not even dust remains of them. Whereas a small nation, which each of them tried to erase whether by millions of deaths or by hundreds of thousands of exiles sold into slavery, by setting their Temple on fire, by erasing their name from the map—that same nation, persecuted and despised, returned to its land thousands of years later while preserving its tradition and knowing exactly where the keys are located.
When the exiles went out to all corners of the world, they clung to one thing and swore an oath that became their very lifeblood: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill; let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember thee, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.” This was not just an expression of longing; it was a legal declaration of a people toward their homeland. A contract signed on the banks of the rivers of Babylon, and kept in every generation, in all exiles and through all conditions of suffering, with a validity and power that did not fade over the years.
The sages of Israel knew that an oath alone is not enough and that an oath that lives only in the mouth dies with the first generation. If you want the oath to live forever, you must bring it to life every day anew and instill it into the body, into the routine, and into the moments that life is made of, and so they sewed it into the fabric of life.
At the greatest moment a person experiences, on his wedding day, when his heart is whole and his world is full, a glass is broken. At the most broken moment, when the mourning is too heavy to bear and there are no words, we comfort: “May you be comforted among the mourners of Zion.” Joy? Jerusalem. Mourning? Jerusalem. As if to say: no matter what happens to us, no matter which end of the world we find ourselves in, we do not leave Jerusalem.
And from the fixed liturgy, the yearning burst forth into poetry as well. Poets from Ashkenaz and Spain, from Morocco and Yemen, from Kyiv and Baghdad—people who never met each other, who spoke different languages and wore different clothes and ate different food—all poured their souls into words that spoke of the same home.
This was not nostalgia. Nostalgia is longing for a past that ended. This was the certainty of a future. The prophets promised, the sages established, the poets sang, and the people in all corners of the world repeated the same point: we are returning. Not “maybe” returning.
And on the day of 28 Iyar 5727—a day that is not a “day” but a code name for a miracle, where one battle closed a circle of thousands of years. 28 Iyar is not a coincidental day; it is the very same date on which the people of Israel fought their first war against Amalek, still on the way from Egypt to the Promised Land. Then, for the first time, a young Hebrew nation stood and fought for its right to be free and won. And thousands of years later, on that same date, Israeli paratroopers broke into the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem and returned to the Western Wall, to the stones over which their ancestors wept in their dreams from Baghdad to Warsaw, from Marrakesh to Kyiv.
After all the prayers, all the liturgical poems, all the broken glasses at weddings, and after all the tears in mourning, when Motta Gur shouted “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” he did not know he was closing a sentence that opened on the banks of the rivers of Babylon. An oath kept through the Inquisition and pogroms, through Auschwitz and the killing fields, through thousands of years of wandering, was fulfilled. In one moment. By a people who refused, in all generations, to forget.
On Jerusalem Day, we do not only celebrate a military victory. We celebrate that there are nations that cannot be expelled from their homeland, even when they are expelled. That a homeland cannot be erased as long as there are people who refuse to forget it. That the oath “If I forget thee, Jerusalem” was not broken—not by the hand of Rome, not by the hand of history, and not by the hand of anyone who thought this story had come to its end.
And we, going out on Shlichut to the ends of the earth, carry with us that same key that was kept for thousands of years. We travel to remind every Jew we meet in Montreal, in Paris, in Buenos Aires, in Tokyo, in Johannesburg, that he is part of this story. That the oath is still in effect. That the fire is still burning.
The story did not come to its end.
Rather, it has returned home.
For comments: evyatar.kerner@ktmmtl.org
