In the March Chronicle’s D’var Torah column, Rabbi Noah Chertkoff wrote of the Western Wall in Jerusalem that “No site … is more holy than that precious place,” and that Jews have “prayed for 2,000 years” there. Both notions are not factually correct.
The Western Wall is part of the retaining wall of the platform King Herod, the Roman Empire’s client king of Judea, built to hold the Second Temple he reconstructed about 2,000 years ago. It was never part of the Temple itself.
The holiest site for Jews was always the Temple and the site upon which it stood, Mount Mariah and the Foundation Stone. Mount Moriah, according to Jewish texts, is where pivotal events in Jewish history took place, including creation of Adam and the binding of Isaac; and it is where G-d chose the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence) to dwell (Isaiah 8:18).
A midrash states (Bamidbar Rabah 11:63), “This is the Western Wall of the Temple, which is never destroyed for the Shekhinah is in the west.” This expressed significant holiness of the Temple’s western wall, possibly because it was the closest part to the Holy of Holies. However, that is not what is known today as the Western Wall.
The Talmud-era rabbis forbade Jews from ascending the mount for fear they might stand at the Temple’s Holy of Holies that only the High Priest was allowed to enter. Therefore, Jews did not go up onto it.
The western retaining wall was the most accessible and closest location outside the mount and thus is the closest spot to the original location of the Temple. The earliest documented use of that wall for prayer was in the 11th century, as recorded in a scroll written by Ahimaaz ben Paltiel.
Therefore, the Western Wall of today was and is not the holiest site of Judaism, and there is no evidence that Jews prayed there for more than about 1,000 years. There is a big difference between a surrogate and the real thing. We should not confuse them.
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