For nearly 2,000 years, Jews have fasted on Tisha B’Av to mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the loss of Jewish sovereignty, exile from Jerusalem, and a long chain of national tragedies.
Jewish tradition also teaches that the fast will not last forever. The prophet Zechariah envisioned a day when the fasts commemorating Jerusalem’s destruction would become days of “joy and gladness and cheerful festivals.” Many rabbis have understood that era to arrive with the rebuilding of the Temple.
No one knows when that day will come.
Yet the last century has witnessed changes that generations of Jews scarcely dared imagine.
The Jewish people returned to their ancestral homeland. The State of Israel was reborn (1948). Jerusalem was reunited under Jewish sovereignty (1967). For the first time in nearly two thousand years, Israel is home to the world’s largest Jewish population (2012).
Israel has also become increasingly accepted by its Arab and Muslim neighbors, establishing diplomatic relations with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), the United Arab Emirates (2020), Bahrain (2020), Morocco (2020), Sudan (2020, pending implementation), and Kosovo (2021). Meanwhile, the United States (2018), Guatemala (2018), Honduras (2021), Kosovo (2021), Papua New Guinea (2023), Paraguay (2024), and Fiji (2024) have moved their embassies to Jerusalem, while other countries (Slovenia and Nauru) are considering doing the same.
Last year (2025), more than 75,000 Jews ascended the Temple Mount – a modern record that would have been unimaginable only a generation ago.
The Golden Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City exterior wall (photo: First One through)
The Temple remains unbuilt and Tisha B’Av remains a day of mourning.
But it does raise a question that previous generations could scarcely have imagined asking: Will this be the last Tisha B’Av fast?
Perhaps Jews a century from now will still be asking the same question. Or perhaps they will look back and realize that ours was among the last generations to mourn the destruction rather than celebrate the restoration.
For almost two thousand years, that possibility seemed unimaginable. Today, it no longer does.
There is something profoundly human about gathering related things into a single vessel.
We do it with photo albums, where a lifetime of moments is gathered into one book. We do it with museums, where centuries of artifacts are brought together under one roof.
The Jewish calendar does the same with time.
Tisha B’Av is not merely the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Over centuries it became the vessel into which Jewish history poured its sorrows – from the destruction of the Temples to the expulsions from England and Spain, to catastrophes that culminated in the Holocaust. Generations found in Tisha B’Av a place large enough to hold them all.
The Nuremberg Chronicle showing the destruction of Jerusalem
The Temple Mount in Jerusalem became another vessel. Of place.
For much of history, Jerusalem was known as the city of the Jewish Temple. But over time it gathered far more meaning. It became the location of the near sacrifice of Isaac, the destination of pilgrimage, the focus of exile, and the direction toward which Jews have prayed for thousands of years.
Other faiths also poured meaning into Jerusalem. Christians revere it as the place of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Muslims honor it as the destination of Muhammad’s Night Journey. Layer upon layer, century upon century, Jerusalem became more than a city. It became a vessel carrying humanity’s deepest convictions, hopes, and conflicts.
Temple Mount at dawn (photo: First One Through)
And then there is a unique people.
The Jewish people became a vessel unlike any other. Across thousands of years they carried covenant, exile, learning, persecution, survival, and hope. They preserved ancient language, sacred texts, melodies, customs, and memory across continents and generations. They became the vessel through which memory survived when kingdoms fell, empires vanished, and even the Temple itself lay in ruins.
Every vessel carries something. Some carry water. Some carry treasure. Some carry ashes. The greatest vessels carry what cannot be touched: memory, identity, covenant, and hope.
And that is what the Jewish people, Jerusalem, and Tisha B’Av have become. Three vessels in one elaborate story.
Every generation poured something more into those vessels: not only grief, but hope.
Within them rests the hope captured in the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah: that the Jewish people will live as a free people in their own land, with Jerusalem at its heart.
And on Tisha B’Av in particular, the vessel holds one additional hope above all others: the rebuilding of the Beit HaMikdash. Not because Jews long merely for stones and walls, but because it represents the restoration of wholeness – between God and humanity, a people and their land, memory and redemption.
Every Tisha B’Av, Jews gather into one day the grief of centuries, turn toward one city, and renew one hope. As they do, they recognize that this is more than a story of three fused vessels. It is that together they carry one enduring promise.
For many people, Jewish holidays are family traditions: apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, a Passover Seder, Hanukkah candles, or a sukkah in the backyard. Yet beneath these customs lies the deeper reality that every major Jewish holiday is connected in some way to the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Temple was not simply a house of worship. It was the spiritual, national, and legal center of Jewish life. Pilgrimages, sacrifices, priestly service, national assemblies, and the calendar itself revolved around Jerusalem. Even after the Temple’s destruction in 70CE, the holidays preserved its memory and continue to point toward it.
Rosh Hashanah marks the Jewish New Year and the sounding of the shofar. In Temple times, witnesses testified before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem to establish the new month, and the shofar echoed through the Temple courts. Today, Jews still pray that God’s kingship will once again be recognized from Zion.
Yom Kippur is inseparable from the Temple. The High Priest entered the Holy of Holies only once a year to seek atonement for the nation. Modern synagogue services painstakingly recount the Temple ritual, preserving the memory of the day’s most sacred service.
Sukkot was one of the three pilgrimage festivals when Jews ascended to Jerusalem. The Temple hosted the joyous water-drawing ceremony (Simchat Beit HaShoeva), accompanied by music, dancing, and water libations on the altar. Rabbinic tradition describes it as one of the greatest celebrations ever witnessed.
Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah conclude the festival cycle begun at the Temple with Sukkot. While Simchat Torah developed later, it celebrates the Torah that was publicly taught and read in Jerusalem.
“Ki mitzion tetze torah” (כִּי מִצִּיּוֹן תֵּצֵא תוֹרָה). “For instruction shall come forth from Zion, The word of God from Jerusalem.” – Isaiah (Chapter 2, Verse 3)
Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple after it was reclaimed from the Seleucid Greeks. Every candle recalls the restoration of Jewish worship in Jerusalem.
Tu BiShvat, the New Year for Trees, determined agricultural laws whose tithes and first fruits were ultimately brought to the Temple.
Purim is the only holiday without a direct Temple ritual, yet its story ensured the survival of the Jewish people who would rebuild and worship in the Second Temple. Jerusalem itself celebrates Purim a day later, preserving its ancient status as a walled city.
Passover was the greatest pilgrimage festival. Hundreds of thousands ascended to Jerusalem to offer the Passover sacrifice before gathering in homes throughout the city for the Seder. Even today Jews conclude the Seder with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
Tens of thousands of Jews at the Kotel Plaza in the Old City of Jerusalem during Passover, as they cannot ascend to the Temple Mount today
Shavuot celebrated the first fruits brought to the Temple in elaborate processions from across the Land of Israel. Farmers entered Jerusalem carrying decorated baskets while choirs sang Psalms of thanksgiving.
Tisha B’Av mourns above all the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. It is the day on which Jews sit on the floor, recite Lamentations, and remember the loss of Jerusalem’s spiritual heart.
Even holidays with no formal Temple ceremony ultimately orbit Jerusalem. They celebrate the survival of the Jewish people, the covenant, the Land of Israel, and the hope of restoration.
Jerusalem is not merely Judaism’s holiest city; it is the organizing principle of the Jewish calendar itself. The cycle of holidays begins and ends with memories of Temple worship, pilgrimages, offerings, repentance, thanksgiving, and national gathering in one place.
For centuries Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, broke a glass at weddings to remember its destruction, left part of a home unfinished in mourning, and ended the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur with the same aspiration: “Next year in Jerusalem.”
The Jewish calendar is more than a record of sacred time. It is a map whose destination is Jerusalem, carrying the memory of the Temple from one generation to the next.
This week, the UN will commemorate the genocide at Srebrenica under the theme “From Words to Violence.“ The lesson is that language is never merely language. The words societies choose shape how they understand people, history, and ultimately what actions become acceptable.
That lesson should not stop with Srebrenica.
Over the past month, another campaign of words has accelerated – not directly aimed at the destruction of lives, but at the erasure of history.
A month ago, I wrote about the battle over Solomon’s Pools. At the time, the concern was that one of Judaism’s great archaeological treasures was being detached from the people who built it.
Today, the campaign has moved far beyond stewardship.
The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, now repeatedly describes Solomon’s Pools as “Palestinian archaeological and heritage sites,” “Palestinian cultural heritage,” and “an integral part of the Palestinian people’s national identity.” It accuses Israel of attempting to erase the site’s Palestinian identity while announcing plans to seek UNESCO protection for that very narrative.
This is historical revisionism.
For more than two thousand years, Solomon’s Pools have been recognized as part of the ancient water system that supplied Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Yet the new narrative increasingly erases that Jewish history while attempting to replace it with a Palestinian Arab one.
That is how historical erasure begins, with words.
It continues with cultural appropriation – taking another civilization’s achievements and presenting them as one’s own. A site built to sustain Jewish Jerusalem is no longer described as part of Jewish civilization, but as an expression of “Palestinian national identity.”
Solomon’s Pools is not an isolated example.
Over the years, Palestinian rhetoric has increasingly described biblical figures and ancient Jewish sites through a Palestinian national lens.
The Jewish Temples are falsely described as being located in Yemen.
Ancient Jewish heritage sites have increasingly been recast as Palestinian heritage, such as the Jewish Temple Mount being only called the “al Aqsa Complex” and as a purely Islamic site to prevent Jews from praying at their holiest site.
Individually these statements may appear rhetorical. Collectively they reveal a sustained and malicious effort to replace one people’s historical memory with another’s national story.
When a people’s documented history is systematically erased, it reveals a bigotry directed not only against living Jews but against Jewish civilization itself. It reflects national chauvinism, elevating one national identity by absorbing the achievements of another.
And it does this with particular purpose: to strip Jews of their indigeneity in their holy land, to recast them as interlopers and “European settler colonizers” which is deeply infused with a righteous sense of xenophobia.
That is why UNESCO’s role matters.
An organization created to preserve humanity’s cultural heritage should never become an instrument of historical revisionism. If it legitimizes narratives that obscure the well-documented Jewish origins of sites like Solomon’s Pools, it is no longer merely protecting monuments. It is helping redefine what future generations believe those monuments represent.
Turkish media TRT lies to the world that Solomon’s Pools are a 6,000 year-old Canaanite site, as Palestinian Arabs have attempted to recast themselves as ancient Canaanites to pre-date the Jewish forefather Abraham
The danger is larger than a single archaeological site. Words are attempting to erase Jewish history and heritage throughout the Jewish homeland.
The United Nations is correct: words can lead to terrible consequences.
And these words and actions have a particularly dangerous strain of antisemitism. It does not involve attacking Jews physically, which Palestinian Arabs have done repeatedly at scale. It is an insidious attempt to get the world to endorse a narrative that Jews are foreigners in the land to frame a future without the Jewish State. This is the destruction and genocide that emerges from language.
When international institutions lend their authority to that process, they cease to be guardians of history and become participants in its erasure.
Outside the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, the day unfolds with layers of complexity. The stone walls, ancient and storied, bear witness to the lives that pass through.
On this morning, an Arab man stands near the portal entrance, his posture slumped, eyes lowered. His expression speaks of a quiet sorrow—perhaps personal, perhaps born of circumstances beyond his control.
Picture amalgam of four different scenes, presenting a view of the entry portal of the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, Israel (by First One Through)
Meanwhile, just feet away, an Orthodox Jewish man, dressed in traditional black attire, moves with purpose. He hurries toward his daily prayers at the Kotel, following a routine as old as the stones beneath his feet. The rhythm of Jerusalem’s life, with its sacred moments, continues without pause.
Standing between them is a medic from Magen David Adom. His presence is a testament to the tension that often simmers beneath the surface of the city. He watches both men—attentive, calm, ready to act if needed. His role is not in the realm of politics or faith but in the safeguarding of human life.
This moment encapsulates the juxtaposition of daily routines—spiritual devotion, personal struggle, and the ever-present readiness to heal. In Jerusalem, where layers of history meet contemporary reality, even the quietest scene can tell a deeper story.
In July 1980, the Knesset passed the Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel. Its opening declaration remains one of the clearest statements of Zionist purpose ever enacted by the State of Israel:
“Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.”
The law settled a question that had haunted Jewish history for centuries. Jerusalem would never again be divided by barbed wire, minefields, and sniper positions. The city reunited in 1967 would remain the political and spiritual heart of the Jewish state.
Forty-six years later, it is worth asking a simple question:
What does “united” mean?
The answer cannot be limited to municipal boundaries. It cannot be measured solely by roads, tax collection, or police jurisdiction. A united city is ultimately a civic reality. It is a city whose residents share a common framework of governance and belonging.
Image of man walking through Herod’s Gate in Old City of Jerusalem (FirstOneThrough with AI)
When Israel reunited Jerusalem in 1967, the decision to grant permanent residency rather than citizenship to the Arab residents made practical sense. The future of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict remained uncertain, and the status of Jerusalem itself was still contested internationally.
But those residents’ children are no longer children.
An Arab born in eastern Jerusalem in 1981 is now in his mid-forties. He has spent his entire life under Israeli administration. He attended schools in Jerusalem, received healthcare through Israeli institutions, worked in Jerusalem businesses, and raised a family in Jerusalem. For an entire generation born after the Jerusalem Law, the temporary arrangement has become a permanent condition.
An Arab born in Nazareth in 1981 became an Israeli citizen at birth. An Arab born in Jerusalem in 1981 generally remained a permanent resident. Both have lived under Israeli sovereignty their entire lives. One votes in national elections while the other does not.
If Jerusalem is truly united, how should that distinction be understood nearly half a century after the Basic Law was enacted?
The question is no longer theoretical. In recent years, thousands of eastern Jerusalem Arabs have applied for Israeli citizenship, reflecting a significant shift from earlier decades. The demand exists. What many applicants encounter instead is a cumbersome process that can stretch for years.
The issue has taken on added significance since October 7.
Hamas named its attack the “Al-Aqsa Flood” because it sought to seize sovereignty in Jerusalem. For decades, Hamas and other rejectionist movements have portrayed Jerusalem as a city temporarily under Jewish control and awaiting liberation.
A confident nation answers such claims by strengthening the institutions of sovereignty.
The ramifications would extend far beyond voting rights in Israel.
The Palestinian Authority presents “East Jerusalem” as the capital of a future Palestinian state. International organizations continue to describe “East Jerusalem” as occupied territory, while critics accuse Israel of apartheid and permanent disenfranchisement.
Yet what would happen if large numbers of Arabs born in Jerusalem after 1980 chose Israeli citizenship?
Hamas would struggle to explain why residents supposedly awaiting liberation had instead chosen participation in Israeli democracy. The Palestinian Authority would find it difficult to claim as its constituency citizens voting in Israeli elections. International institutions would confront a reality more complicated than diplomatic formulas unchanged since 1967. Critics would have to reconcile accusations of apartheid with a policy that expands citizenship and voting rights.
Jerusalem also offers a practical test for Israel’s broader sovereignty debate. Politicians who advocate annexing parts or all of Judea and Samaria should first explain their position regarding Arabs born after 1980 in Israel’s declared and united capital. If no consensus exists in Jerusalem, it is difficult to imagine one elsewhere.
Every party seeking to govern Israel should therefore answer a simple question: Do you support an expedited path to citizenship for Arabs born in eastern Jerusalem after the passage of the Jerusalem Law?
Such a program could include security screening, an oath of loyalty to the State of Israel and its laws, and a streamlined administrative process. Those who prefer permanent residency could retain it. Those seeking citizenship would no longer spend years navigating bureaucratic obstacles.
Jerusalem was reunited in 1967 and anchored in law in 1980. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Jerusalem Law approaches, Israelis should decide whether the next step is to complete the city’s civic integration.
The question is larger than citizenship. It is about the meaning of a united Jerusalem and the confidence of a sovereign nation in its eternal capital.
Sunrise on the Mount of Olives facing the Temple Mount is one of Jerusalem’s great experiences.
Because the sun rises from behind the mountain, the first light does not strike the Temple Mount itself. Instead, it touches the higher elevations to the west. For a few moments, the city reveals an unexpected truth: despite its name, the Temple Mount sits lower than much of the surrounding Old City.
One by one, Jerusalem awakens.
The first rays illuminate the new tall buildings in the west and slowly reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and domes of the Hurva Synagogue and the newly rebuilt Tiferet Israel Synagogue in the Old City. Then the golden Dome of the Rock catches the morning light. Soon after, the ancient walls of Jerusalem glow softly, followed by the gray dome of Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Jerusalem at dawn, June 2026 (photo: First One Through)
The city appears to come alive in stages.
There is something fitting in that. The most famous places in the city do not receive the first light. The sun touches distant rooftops and forgotten hills before reaching the mount that has occupied the prayers of generations. Jerusalem seems to offer a quiet reminder that holiness is often revealed gradually, not all at once.
You might imagine crowds gathering on the stone promenade built for precisely this view. Even on a cool, windy morning, one would expect visitors eager to witness the sunrise over one of the most consequential pieces of land on earth.
Yet there were surprisingly few people.
A single bus of Asian tourists arrived to take photographs. Some stared in awe. Some stretched. Some danced gently to greet the morning.
Jerusalem at dawn, June 2026 (photo: First One Through)
But they were there.
Most had traveled thousands of miles to reach this spot. They all stood facing the same holy sites whether or not they shared any of the three monotheistic faiths, waiting for the same sun. The same moment of inspiration.
The quiet was perhaps the most surprising part. At an hour when millions of people around the world were asleep, one of the holiest and most contested places on earth belonged to a few dozen strangers sharing a sunrise. No speeches. No arguments. No headlines. Just the wind, the light, the sound of roosters, and a city slowly waking beneath them.
Before them stood the Temple Mount, the focus of Jewish longing for nearly two thousand years. Below them stretched the ancient cemetery of the Mount of Olives, where generations of Jews chose to be buried facing Jerusalem, believing they would be among the first to witness redemption. Around them stood a city sacred to billions, where history, faith, conquest, destruction, and renewal are layered one upon another in stone.
Jerusalem at dawn, June 2026 (photo: First One Through)
As the sunlight slowly spread across the city, it became clear why people return here again and again. Jerusalem does not reveal herself all at once. Like the sunrise itself, she emerges gradually – first one dome, then another, one wall, one hilltop, one memory at a time.
As I turned to leave, the city was waking to another day. Yet for a brief hour on the Mount of Olives, surrounded by centuries of Jewish memory and facing the skyline of Jerusalem, the city felt less like a place on a map and more like a conversation between heaven and earth, carried on in stone and sunlight for thousands of years.
In 1979, archaeologists excavating a burial cave at Ketef Hinnom, on a hillside overlooking the Old City walls of Jerusalem, discovered two tiny silver scrolls. When carefully unrolled, they revealed words that Jews still recite today.
Ketef Hinnom scrolls
The scrolls, engraved more than 2,600 years ago, contain the priestly blessing from Parshat Naso:
“May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His face upon you and grant you peace.”
They are the oldest known biblical texts ever discovered.
Every year, Jews encounter these verses when Parshat Naso is read in synagogue. Parents recite them over their children on Friday nights. In Israel, kohanim still stand before congregations every day and deliver the same blessing first commanded to Aaron and his descendants in the wilderness.
What makes the Ketef Hinnom discovery extraordinary is not only its age, but its location.
The silver scrolls were found only a short distance from the Temple Mount, where priests once pronounced these words over the people of Israel. Few archaeological discoveries draw such a direct line across three millennia. The oldest surviving biblical text was found almost within sight of the place where it was commanded to be spoken.
The content of the blessing is equally remarkable. The oldest biblical inscription yet discovered is neither a king’s decree nor a military victory. It is a passage from the Bible that culminates in a single aspiration:
Shalom. Peace.
The prayer asks for blessing, protection, grace, and ultimately peace itself. Those hopes remain as familiar today as they were to the Jerusalem resident who carried the silver amulet twenty-six centuries ago.
The scrolls from Ketef Hinnom remind us that Jerusalem, the Bible, and the pursuit of peace have stood at the center of Jewish life for thousands of years.
“May the Lord bless you and keep you.”
The empires of the ancient world survive in ruins. This blessing survives in a people.
The Associated Press did not cover Jerusalem Day as a story about Jews returning joyfully to the holiest city in Judaism after nineteen years of exclusion under illegal Jordanian occupation. It covered it as a story about Jewish menace.
That framing decision is visible before readers even reach the second sentence.
“Ultranationalist Jews chant racist slogans during annual march into Jerusalem’s Old City.”
The rare racist chants reported at the march were ugly and deserve condemnation. But AP transformed the fringe into the essence of the event itself. Tens of thousands of Jews marched peacefully, sang, danced and celebrated Jerusalem Day. Yet readers encountering the article for the first time would assume the defining feature of the event was racist hooliganism when in fact it was joyous celebration.
Every descriptor pushes readers toward the same emotional conclusion: Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem is dangerous, aggressive and destabilizing. Palestinians are the natural residents and Jews are interlopers who threaten violence.
The false narrative erases the actual historical meaning of the day.
Jerusalem Day marks the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 after Jordan’s nineteen-year occupation of the eastern part of the city. During those years Jews were expelled from the Jewish Quarter, synagogues were destroyed, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and Jews were barred from praying at the Western Wall despite explicit guarantees of access under the armistice agreements.
Without that context, Jewish celebration is transformed into something alien and sinister. Readers are shown Jews marching through Jerusalem, but never fully told why entering the Old City carries such emotional and historical weight in the first place.
Erased from the narrative is the uncomfortable fact that Jews were once the excluded population in the very places now described almost exclusively through Palestinian identity.
The asymmetry in labeling is impossible to miss. Arabs in Jerusalem are described as “Palestinians” or “Palestinian residents,” language that subtly implies an already-existing Palestinian sovereignty over the city. Jews, meanwhile, are repeatedly subdivided into ideological categories: “ultranationalists,” “hard-line,” “settlers.”
One side receives an organic national identity. The other receives political suspicion.
AP even refers to “Palestinian areas” of Jerusalem while never acknowledging the basic legal and political reality that these residents are primarily Israeli citizens or permanent residents under Israeli administration. There is no Palestinian state governing Jerusalem. Yet the article’s language continuously nudges readers toward imagining Jews as intruding into someone else’s sovereign national space.
Even the treatment of the Temple Mount follows the same pattern. AP describes MK Itamar Ben Gvir’s visit as “provocative” before readers are even reminded that the site is the holiest place in Judaism, where the biblical temples once stood.
Imagine covering Muslims praying in Mecca or Catholics gathering in the Vatican first through the lens of how upsetting their presence might be to others.
Buried later in the article is a participant explaining that the racist chants came from “a small minority” of marchers. But by then the framing work is complete. The reader has already absorbed the article’s core emotional message: Jewish nationalism itself is the problem.
There is a profound difference between reporting that some participants at a massive public gathering behaved disgracefully and presenting those fringe elements as representative of the gathering’s essential character.
One reports misconduct. The other assigns collective identity.
And the asymmetry becomes impossible to ignore when comparing coverage standards. When participants at a pro-Palestinian rally praised terrorism or chanted genocidal slogans, major international outlets avoid headlines assigning those slogans to Palestinians collectively. Readers would receive sociological context, political nuance and careful distinctions between extremists and the broader movement.
Jewish events rarely receive the same interpretive charity.
The deeper issue exposed by the article is not merely media bias. It is discomfort with Jewish sovereignty itself.
Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is welcomed when it is passive and distant. The moment it expresses sovereignty, history or power, the vocabulary changes. Then Jews become “ultranationalists.”
The article unintentionally reveals a larger truth about modern international discourse surrounding Israel. Jewish history is acceptable. Jewish prayer is acceptable. Jewish suffering is acceptable. What remains difficult for much of the international press is Jewish power: Jews governing Jerusalem, policing Jerusalem, marching through Jerusalem and refusing to behave like temporary guests in their own civilizational center.
In the Hebrew Bible, Abraham, the father of monotheism, is tested ten times. The biblical commentator Rashi (1040-1105) lists them out, and it is curious to line them against the ten nations that inhabit the land that God promises to Abraham.
10 Tests according to Rashi
10 Nations in the promised land
Abraham hid underground for 13 years from King Nimrod, who wanted to kill him.
Kenites
Nimrod flung Abraham into a burning furnace.
Kenizzites
Abraham was commanded to leave his family and homeland.
Kadmonites
As soon as he arrived in Canaan, he was forced to leave to escape famine to Egypt.
Hittites
Sarah was kidnapped by Pharaoh’s officials.
Perizzites
The 4 kings captured Lot, and Abraham went out to war to rescue him.
Rephaites
God told Abraham that his offspring would suffer exile and slavery for 400 years initially four monarchies.
Amorites
At 99, Abraham was commanded to circumcise himself and his household.
Canaanites
Abraham was instructed to drive away Ishmael and Hagar.
Girgashites
He was commanded to sacrifice Isaac.
Jebusites
The Torah never tells us to match them one by one, but two of Abraham’s tests align so precisely with two of those nations that they reveal the architecture of the covenant itself: one in the flesh, one on the mountain.
The first is brit milah and Canaan, what we know of today as the bulk of the land of Israel.
When God first expands Abraham’s promise of land in Book of Genesis 13, He tells him to rise and walk it: Arise, walk through the land, its length and breadth, for I will give it to you.
Abraham walks the land before he owns it.
But in Genesis 17, when the covenant is deepened through circumcision, the order changes. God commands Abraham to mark the covenant into his own body and then immediately ties that mark to the promise of land: I will give to you and your descendants after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan.
The sequence is striking.
First Abraham walks the land. Then Abraham marks the flesh. The lesson is deeper than ownership. You cannot carry covenantal land unless the covenant is carried within you.
Before borders, there is obligation. Before sovereignty, there is submission.
The modern world treats land as politics—lines, armies, treaties. The Torah treats land as moral space. Canaan is not merely inherited geography. It is covenantal geography. And covenantal geography requires covenantal people.
Brit milah is the title deed, not written on parchment, but on the body itself.
The land of Canaan is not inherited simply because it was promised. It is inherited because Abraham accepted what the promise demanded.
Then comes the Akedah and the Jebusites, which takes place in Jerusalem.
If brit milah secures the land broadly, the Akedah secures its heart.
Abraham’s greatest trial takes place on Mount Moriah, where he binds Isaac and prepares to surrender the son through whom every promise was meant to continue. Jewish tradition identifies that mountain with the future Temple Mount, the site held by the Jebusites until King David captures it and makes it the spiritual center of Israel, 3,000 years ago.
That means Abraham’s greatest and final test takes place at the future center of Jewish history. That is not incidental.
Long before David purchases it, long before King Solomon builds the Temple, long before priests serve and pilgrims ascend, Abraham stands there and confronts the deepest truth of covenant: even the future belongs to God.
Canaan is the inheritance of the body. Its covenant is sealed in flesh.
Jerusalem is the inheritance of the soul. Its covenant is sealed in surrender.
One is broad territory. The other is concentrated holiness.
The land of the Canaanites – the land of Israel – is the essence of the covenant between God and the Jews; the land of the Jebusites – Jerusalem – is the center of that faith. These are lessons that God imparted to Abraham in the year 2023 of the Jewish calendar that anchors Judaism to this day.
First One Through 