There’s a great old joke that everyone knows but nobody ever really gets tired of. “Two Jews are stranded on a desert island. What do they build? Three synagogues. One for each of them, and one that neither will ever set foot in!”
Thankfully in our community we are not stranded on a desert island, and we have many wonderful options of synagogue life that range across all of our Jewish denominations.
However, there is one place where Jews have looked towards as they prayed for 2000 years, symbolic of our roots, our home and our hope — The Western Wall, in Hebrew HaKotel HaMa’aravi, in Jerusalem.
Throughout our many years in the Diaspora, Jews have made pilgrimages to that site under difficult circumstances and while it was under foreign rule, and when they arrived so many were moved to tears that it became known as the Wailing Wall. No site, in any religious movement of Judaism, is more holy than that precious place.
When I was a rabbinic student living in Jerusalem, I loved to go the Kotel, day and night, place my hand on the smoothed rocks, and send my prayers alight. Now that I am a father, I want to raise my daughter to have a similar relationship with the Wall.
However, with good intentions of attempting to standardize a ritual practice at the Kotel, the Israeli government turned the site over to the Western Wall Heritage Foundation in 1988 led by a haredi Orthodox rabbi.
Today, the Wall is run as though it were an Orthodox synagogue with a mechitzah (divider) between the men’s section and the women’s section, which is much smaller than the men’s section.
In order to be respectful of the Orthodox Jews who worship there, women are forbidden to wear a tallit (prayer shawl) because it is considered by the Orthodox to be men’s clothing.
Women’s voices cannot rise above a whisper due to the Talmudic prohibition of kol isha (literally “voice of a woman,” meaning that men are not permitted to hear women singing), and the Torah is not permitted to be publicly read by women.
After the excavation under Robinson’s Arch, which is technically also part of the western foundation wall of the Great Temple built by King Herod, the Israeli government, with good intentions, permitted all those who wished to worship in non-Orthodox ways to pray in the excavation.
However this is not the Wailing Wall that has been exposed to generations of our people throughout our history. It is a wonderful attempt at a solution, but it is not an adequate one.
And so we are confronted with women being arrested or detained for possessing a Torah with the intent to read it, or causing disturbances by wearing tallitot, as happened on Feb. 11.
There are many authentic expressions of our Judaism. No one of us can lay absolute claim to being the soul possessor of “Truth.” Judaism provides each of us with many concurrent ideas or systems for living that work differently for different people.
It stands to reason that at our most holy site, we can work this out. After all, we are still one people.
Why not, for example, have set times for services that can allow for different ritual practices to occur? If one form of ritual offends someone’s sensibilities and it takes place at 7 a.m., why not come at a different time?
Why not have rabbis of different denominations work on a committee to make the Wall a place that is inviting for all of us?
If this is to be a place that is holy to the next generation, and Jewish continuity is in the interest of all of us, than we must follow the wise advice of Rabbi Simeon ben Eleazar in the Talmud Tractate Ta’anit 20b: “Be pliable like a reed, not rigid like a cedar.”
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