By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — Forty-eight years ago, June 7, 1967, the city of Jerusalem was reunified. It was the third day of Israel’s “lightning victory” in the Six Day War. Responding to Jordanian artillery, Israeli forces entered the Old City and fought bitter hand-to-hand battles en route to recapturing and reuniting the divided city. The army then summarily drove out the Jordanian forces from the entirety of the “West Bank” of the Jordan River and ended the Hashemite Kingdom’s own 19-year occupation of this disputed territory.
I walked in the city five weeks later. I was fourteen years old, visiting from the United States, and strode through the Holy City with my older cousin, a 22-year old veteran of the June war. Every several hundred feet, small mounds of stones, still blood-stained, marked a place where a soldier had fallen. But the hot sun shone on a city golden with hope.
The Arab merchants in the grand market of winding alleys and endless shops welcomed us along with the fresh flood of business that came with the new rush of Israeli callers—as well as from manifold other lands.
Peace and goodwill were in the air, along with the inviting smells of Turkish coffee, baking pita bread, sizzling meats, and a myriad of exotic spices. The situation had not retrogressed into the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian crisis that subsequently devastated all aspirations for a harmonious Jerusalem and the peaceful coexistence of two states. Religious tribalism had not yet spoiled the harvest of possibilities that came with Israel’s achievement that June.
My cousin and I alighted at the area of the Wall. There was no developed promenade yet, no re-laid stone walkways and modern arches, no rabbinic academies, and, most significantly, no formal barriers separating men from women. There was wonder and awe and a pervasive, nuanced mixture of reverence and grief.
The Wall—the last retaining fragment of King Solomon’s Holy Temple—loomed there with dusty, over-weeded, raw splendor. No lines and no divisions were written or inscribed across this realm of sanctity. Nobody was telling anybody how to pray, how to weep, or how to thank.
Unfortunately, especially for women, jurisdiction of the site is long-confined to the Orthodox rabbinate and their busy-body “religious police.”
I arrive with my own liturgy; I don’t care what they think. But I do care that my mother, when she was living, and now her granddaughters are not permitted to pray in the same spaces as the oligarchic men who have co-opted the blood and yearning of Jewish history in favor of their sectarian plutocracy in Jerusalem.
My deal with the Wall is my own affair and it has evolved with the crises and upheavals and reversals and triumphs and breakthroughs of my life, and that is more honest than a chart of robotic prayers. Who are they to say what is a legitimate prayer or not and what is wrong and what is right?
When I touch the Wall, I feel godliness; no one can delineate what that is for me or you. I don’t experience a simple-minded, gawking astonishment that is driven by guilty deference to the swaying rabbinical landlords who swarm about the place as thick as their black coats. I just don’t believe that God sees any difference between them in their traditional garb and me in my slacks and blazer. Neither they nor people like me, men or women, are exclusively correct or incorrect, just or unjust.
I place little notes in the wall but I don’t think God has a minstrel on the other side of it that collects and annotates the pleas, names and confessionals.
I follow the ritual because so many people have been doing this for so many centuries that the very cycle —and its uniformity and peacefulness and solemnity—instill the holiness that attends this place.
God is there, to paraphrase a more genuine rabbinical tradition, simply because we have let God in.
The millions of people — trembling, whispering, diverse, literate, uneducated and of many languages, journeys, dispositions and wounds — who have been performing this custom of the private notes for so many centuries add up to the possibility of a divine spark in the open air of a city that both defines and defies peace.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. You may comment to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com or post your comment on this website, provided that the rules below are observed.
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