On Sunday night, July 6th, we went to see fireworks.
With us, it seemed, at least half the city had gone. Even an alien who had stumbled into the city from another planet had the same Lakewood trails at that hour, as all the roads led to the lake, above which the show was taking place. People were streaming in from all directions, on foot and in vehicles, to one place. The police had prepared in advance and closed off all the small streets on the lakeshore, so that no parking would be allowed, only pedestrians. On every street corner stood families, all of them ultra-Orthodox, waiting to cross the main road on their way to the lake.
Due to the massive street closures, we continued on the main road until we reached a commercial parking lot, where we finally stood, along with several dozen other families from our Beit Israel brothers and several more families of those who serve as the city’s woodcutters and water carriers – the Mexicans. Everyone’s faces were focused on the lake, anticipating the spectacle they get once a year. At exactly the appointed time, 9:15, the faces of the East and the faces of the spectators alike lit up, facing the enjoyable spectacle.
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What does this do to joy? The answer is the foreign date I started with. I don't usually use a foreign date and I make sure to use the calendar of our Holy Torah, but this time it was the cause. The Fourth of July is American Independence Day, celebrated with traditional barbecues (mangal, in spoken Hebrew) with friends and family, shopping trips due to the real discounts of the Summer Peak Sale, and culminating at night with fireworks displays all over the United States. In a place like Lakewood, where there is some source of water, the show will take place over the water, with the reflection of thousands of dazzling colorful sparklers adding to the celebration.
But this year, the Fourth of July falls on a Friday, and the "holiday's end," or the culmination - the fireworks displays, are scheduled for Saturday night in most cities in the United States. So we weren't surprised when, during the meal, the echoes of fireworks could be heard from Jackson, the nearby city.
But not in Lakewood. The city, which has transformed from a small, upscale resort town into a residential city, is expanding at a tremendous pace thanks to the yeshiva brought to it by the late Rabbi Aharon Kotler, does not desecrate Shabbat with such events. In the great, free, religiously separated United States, a major city postponed the fireworks display to Sunday night because holding them on Shabbat night or the night after would have desecrated Shabbat, since due to the late sunset, it would not have been appropriate to hold the event even after Shabbat ended.
I couldn't help but immediately reflect on Jerusalem and Nir Barkat. Jerusalem, the city became the heart of the world not because of the performances that took place there in the days when it was called "Antioch" or "Aelia Capitolina" under the occupation of the Greeks and Romans, respectively, but rather because of holy acts that took place there, in its heart, in the heart of the people of Israel – in the Temple. Without the Temple, the place to which the people of Israel and the world are turned, without this place being holy, Jerusalem would be just another city like all cities, perhaps even an abandoned and forsaken city. It was not theatrical performances or light shows that caused Muslims to fight for it again and again and the Crusaders to die for it in their thousands, and it was not dancing in the streets of the city that caused Jews to devote their entire lives to it. If the Holy Temple Mount had not stood at its center, it would not have developed into what it is today over the past 200 years.
But Nir Barkat, his eyes are glazed over. He wants New York, he wants Tel Aviv, he doesn't want Jerusalem. He wants Zumba on the streets of the city and precisely on the path where thousands of worshippers walk every day on their way to the remains of our temple. He despises the city just as the statues of Antiochus or the men of Hadrian despised it. These three leaders have one thing in common: Barkat, just like the other two, is trying with all his might to separate the city from what it is – the Holy City. Barkat is ashamed of the fact that this is what made Jerusalem what it is. He wants a different city, exactly the kind of city that we mourn and lament with "lamentation." Barkat does not have the Jewish pride that the people of Lakewood have, who know how to say "no" to the desecration of the Sabbath without offending the city's non-Jewish residents in the least, and he is doing everything he can to make us forget who this city is, dear to our hearts.
Maybe we should send Barkat on vacation to New Jersey, to teach him how to run a Jewish city, one that's not trying to become New York and yet has the 7th highest growth rate in the United States. That might not be a bad idea at all.
