Jerusalem · Elul 5786 · the nights of Selichot · September 2026
Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem
שַׁאֲלוּ שְׁלוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם
Sha’alu shlom Yerushalayim
Jerusalem · Elul 5786 · the nights of Selichot · September 2026
שַׁאֲלוּ שְׁלוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם
Sha’alu shlom Yerushalayim
Two hundred soldiers in the square at one in the morning. Listen to what they are singing.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Those who love you will prosper. Psalm 122:6
Psalm 122, from inside it
It is the week before the Jewish new year. In these nights we say Selichot, the prayers of forgiveness, and the whole country comes up to one wall to say them. Tens of thousands. Soldiers off the last bus. Hasidim in black. Christians at the back with their Bibles open.
Nobody handed those soldiers a sheet. Every child in this country knows that tune before they can read. I did not build this page around verse 6 and then find them singing it. I found them singing it, and then I understood what the page was about.
You are not tourists. You are pilgrims. Open the book. We are walking into the pages tonight.
Jerusalem, that is built as a city that is compact together
Psalm 122:3
A Song of Ascents, of David
Psalms 120 to 134 were sung on the road, climbing these hills three times a year. Read this one slowly and you feel the ground rise.
Tap any verse to see it in Hebrew
I was glad when they said to me, “Let’s go to the LORD’s house!”
Our feet are standing within your gates, Jerusalem;
Jerusalem, that is built as a city that is compact together;
where the tribes go up, even the tribes of the LORD, according to an ordinance for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the LORD.
For there are set thrones for judgment, the thrones of David’s house.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Those who love you will prosper.
Peace be within your walls, and prosperity within your palaces.
For my brothers’ and companions’ sakes, I will now say, “Peace be within you.”
For the sake of the house of the LORD our God, I will seek your good.
Psalm 122 · World English Bible
Look at the tense in verse 2. Not were standing. Not will stand. Are standing. Three thousand years on, the verb is still in the present, because the walking never stopped. It did not stop tonight.
Verse 3
Look at that photograph. A man in an orange polo shirt. Boys in olive who were on the northern border last month. Hasidim in long coats. Two children barefoot on the floor, because it is one in the morning. Nobody arranged them, and nobody checked anybody at the door.
Shechubrah lah yachdav. Bound to her, together.
The word is built on chaver, companion. Verse 3 is not praising the town planning. It is telling you what this city does to strangers.
You will be called Repairer of the Breach
Isaiah 58:12 · the capers, growing from stone with no soil and no water
Verse 6
Say it in Hebrew. Sha’alu. Shlom. Yerushalayim. Yishlayu. Four times the same soft shape, sh and l, folding over itself like water. The verse does what it says.
Sha’alu means ask. Enquire after her, the way you ask after someone you love who has been unwell. It is the only place in the Bible where God tells us to pray for a city. By name. With people asleep in her.
Why this hill
Damascus has its oasis. Alexandria its harbour. Babylon its river. Jerusalem has none of them. A ridge in the hills with one small spring, while the highway of empires runs past forty miles away.
She was never chosen for commerce. She was chosen for meeting.
Whichever way you come, the last hours are uphill. You never travel to Jerusalem. You go up. The body learns the theology before the mind does.
Your servants take pleasure in her stones, and have pity on her dust
Psalm 102:14
The stones themselves
This is not a wall of the sanctuary. It is the retaining wall Herod built to hold the mountain up. Titus came for the gold and the sanctuary in the year 70 and took them. The glory went. The foundation held. The people came back to the foundation.
That is the story of this land in one row of stones.
A soldier with his rifle strap still on and his forehead in the rock. A man in a white kittel, the robe he will be buried in, both palms flat. And in every seam, folded paper from people who could not come.
My soul longs, yes, even faints for the courts of the LORD. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
Psalm 84:2
Your note in the wall
Solomon asked God to listen toward this place (1 Kings 8:29), and that address has never closed. Write what you would write if you were standing here.
It is in the wall. Nobody reads it but the One it is written to.
The line you are standing at the end of
A father climbed this hill with his son and a bundle of wood, and came down with the boy alive.Genesis 22:14
A king bought the summit for fifty shekels and refused to give God what had cost him nothing.2 Samuel 24:24
His son built the house on it, and asked only that God would listen toward it.2 Chronicles 3:1
Exiles by a river a thousand miles east swore never to forget her.Psalm 137:5
A civil servant in Babylon opened his window toward it three times a day, when that could cost him his life.Daniel 6:10
A boy of twelve stayed behind in it. Did you not know I must be in my Father’s house.Luke 2:49
Two fishermen kept climbing these steps at the hour of prayer.Acts 3:1
And tonight a soldier, nineteen years old, put his forehead against the stones.The photograph above, an hour ago
He does not know he is standing at the end of that line.
Neither do you.
for my house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Isaiah 56:7, quoted by Jesus on this mount, Mark 11:17
All peoples. When a Christian prays at this wall, that is not borrowing. That is a deed of invitation, twenty seven centuries old, signed by the One who owns the mountain.
The teaching I give at the top
To worry is to meditate on what you do not want. To pray is to meditate on what you do want. Same faculty. Opposite direction. There is no third option. Every hour of your life you are either worrying or praying.
Your will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Matthew 6:10
The highest level is meditating on what he wants. Let your will be done. Nothing above that, and nothing quieter.
I have set watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem. They will never be silent day nor night
Isaiah 62:6
The charge
Count them. Two hundred, give or take. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Some religious. Most not. It makes no difference to where they are standing, backs to the whole world, faces to these stones.
You who call on the LORD, take no rest, and give him no rest, until he establishes, and until he makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
Isaiah 62:6 and 7
That is not a description. It is a job description, filed long before any of us turned up to accept it.
On Friday evening the year turns here. Wherever you are when the sun goes down, stop, and say the sentence God asked you to say. Peace within her walls. Peace in her houses, her schools, her buses, her hospitals. Peace in the homes of his people and in the homes of their neighbours.
Tens of thousands will be saying it at this wall that night. Do not let them say it alone.
שַׁאֲלוּ שְׁלוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem
We pray, before we walk on
Lord, our feet are standing within her gates. We ask what you told us to ask. Peace within her walls. Peace in her houses, her schools, her buses, her hospitals. Peace in the homes of your people and peace in the homes of their neighbours. You who neither slumber nor sleep, keep this city through the night. Amen.
One word I kept back
All the way up this page I let you read shalom as peace, the absence of war. It is not. Shalom is built on shalem. Whole. Nothing missing and nothing broken. A debt paid in full. And the city has carried it in her own name the whole time. Yeru. Shalem.
So when God tells you to ask after the peace of Jerusalem, he is telling you to ask that this city, and every person standing in her tonight, be made whole.
Ask it for her on Friday evening.
Then notice what you have just asked for.
It is also what he intends for you.
Pray the Land is a wall of watchmen scattered across the world, praying for this land by name, week by week. The letters come from the land itself. No cost, no meeting, only the standing.