You might have seen them on the nightly news, those
Torah Readin’, Tefillin’ Wearin’, Tallis Totin’, Prayer Provocateurs … The
Women of the Wall!
“In a groundbreaking ruling, the Jerusalem District
Court upheld an earlier decision of the magistrate’s court that women who wear
prayer shawls (“tallitot” in Hebrew) at the Western Wall Plaza are not
contravening “local custom” or causing a public disturbance, and therefore
should not be arrested. "(Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2013)
I’m
not sure how long this new ruling will be upheld, but it is a nice start. Up until this ruling, Ultra-Orthodox rabbis
who have worked hard to ban Jewish women from wearing tallitot while praying
audibly and from reading Torah publicly at the Western Wall, had had the law on
their side. So, every month, at the
celebration of the New Moon, the Women of the Wall would arrive to pray, wearing
tallitot and carrying a Torah Scroll.
And police would arrive, to “break it up” and cart the “perps” off to
jail.
The
logic ran something like this: The area in front of the Kotel (Western Wall) is
a synagogue. Since only Orthodox Judaism is acknowledged in Israel, the
synagogue is, by default, Orthodox, and under Orthodox rabbinical supervision,
the customs and traditions of the Orthodox should be observed. That being the case, women must dress
modestly, may not wear a prayer shawl, are not permitted to touch or read from
the Torah. They may pray, but their
voices are not to stand out as a distraction.
And the sexes must be separated.
Me
and the Kotel go back a ways. Sure, I’d
seen those old Ottoman prints, and the 1967 iconic photograph of Israeli
Paratroopers who had just liberated Jerusalem.
You probably know the photo, three young, rugged faces, blackened from
battle, looking up at The Wall.
Back
then, it was 1969, the plaza before the Wall was a pretty empty space, except
for Friday night, which brought out the Yeshiva boys in big numbers for singing
and dancing. It was a simpler time. There were no “check points” or bag
searches or metal detectors. A low, metal fence separated the men from the
women… but we could see each other. A
woman stood, at the entrance to the “women’s side” with a basket of long skirts
with elastic waists. These were for both
modesty and propriety. After all, a female tourist wouldn’t enter a holy
Christian site without first covering her bare arms and SHORTS!
Back
then the experience was so intimate. One
could touch the stone, literally “talk to the Wall” and to leave a message
tucked in a crevice between two stones.
After my first visit, I walked over to the excavation next to the Wall,
lowered myself down a ladder and started my first day of “digging” through the
Ottoman Empire.
Things
have changed since then. Now, there always seems to be a tumult at the Kotel. The
Wall had been liberated, but for whom?
Gone are the old women pressing their lips to the stone in silent
petition. Replacing the holy aura is a
phalanx of soldiers and police forming a security barricade. Military and
medical vehicles line up awaiting the unthinkable. Peering down on the plaza
are “billboards” carved in Jerusalem stone with signs for yeshivot, and ads for
Bar Mitzvahs at the wall. The two ‘sides’ of the Kotel (His and Hers) are now
divided by a taller, solid, barrier.
This doesn’t stop the Orthodox women from watching the men on the other side. They simply line up plastic chairs and peer
over the mehitza!
God
Bless Israel. If there wasn’t infighting
and bickering I’d be worried that it ISN’T a Jewish State, after all, being
divisive is what we do best!
But the truly dark side to all of this is that
while we are bickering over the handling and “ownership” of what WE JEWS consider
the undisputed spiritual home of the Jews, the Western Wall of the Temple, the
rest of the world is being sold a different story.
According to the
Palestinian National Authority, the Jews did
not consider the Wall as a place of worship until the Balfour Declaration was
issued in 1917. The Palestinian
Authority appointed Mufti of Jerusalem believes that the Wall belongs to
Muslims alone. In a statement made in
2000 he said “No stone of the Al-Buraq (the Muslim name for The Western Wall)
has any relation to Judaism. The Jews
began praying at this wall only in the nineteenth century, when they began to
develop [national] aspirations.”
In
2001 in an interview with the German magazine, Die Welt, (January 17, 2001) he
followed up with this statement “There
is not a single stone in the Wailing Wall relating to Jewish History. The Jews
cannot legitimately claim this wall, neither religiously nor historically. The
Committee of the League of Nations recommended in 1930, to allow the Jews to
pray there, in order to keep them quiet. But by no means did it acknowledge
that the wall belongs to them.”
As American Jews we may choose to distance
ourselves and “tune out” the internal machinations of Israeli politics and religion. But as Jewish Americans, we must be alert and
“tune in” to international dialogues and policies that serve to contort the
truth.
As the timeless joke goes – the old Jew prays at
the Wall every day, three times a day, for 20 years. When asked what this experience was like, he
answered, “It’s like talking to a WALL.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rose
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