Last week, my wife and I were in Jerusalem, me for my first
time, and though somewhere between non-believer and scoffer, I sense and celebrate the
power of places, history, and the meaning of human striving. In those
categories and in the category that continues to elude me (for surely the loser
in this lack of connection is not God), Jerusalem’s Western Wall is among the
world’s most sacred places.
I remember images of the wall on television as a child
growing up in a small Vermont town. For us, ethnicity was Irish or everything
else and creed was either Catholic or not, and I remember thinking it odd, this dress,
this sobbing, this utter sense of transportation they were experiencing (perfectly unperturbed as I recall with the cardinals' sea of little red hats). Mine was the kind of narrow outlook travel is unparalleled at
befuddling.
Though not part of my religious education and family
traditions, I intended to participate fully in my first visit to this venerated
place, so I parted from my wife (the male and female areas of the Western Wall
are separated) and entered the courtyard. Debra told me I needed to cover my
head to approach the wall, and I assumed I would be spotted and provided a
yarmulke. Invoking the absent-minded-professor component of my personality, I
walked directly past a repository of gratis yarmulkes and
waited.
Debra observed all of this and corralled a stranger to bring
one of the yarmulkes down to where I was standing. Once fitted, I drew a deep
breath and began my approach. There was an open space at the extreme right side
of the wall, and I angled my direction toward it. Orthodox Jews in black Borsalinos and knee-length greatcoats, and Chassidics in shtreimels lined the wall, all whispering
prayers and schuckling back and forth, flames seeking to loose the grip of the
wick.
With each step closer, the gravitas of where I was, the
meaning and history of the place began to envelop me. The lash of the pharaoh,
the wheels of Rome’s chariots, the swords of The Crusades, the pogroms of 19th
century Russia, Eichmann, Hitler, all of it, ALL OF IT, was right here, in the
living rock. I noticed for the first time as I got closer thousands of pieces of
paper, notes of prayer and devotion to a God that had only this past century
begun once again to fulfill his promise and coalesce the global diaspora. This two-thousand year old
explosion of imagination, talent, comedy, tragedy and humanity across the world
and at the same time away from itself has made Moses’ forty-year wanderings a blink by
comparison. And there they were, the dreams and griefs of that past year or
that whole lifetime, summarized in scribbled sentences and stuffed into the
wall. I lay my hands on the smooth limestone, and feeling a sudden deep, low
vibration, I fell into a meditation over a tragic loss my family had undergone in
the past year, over the scarring my father’s early death had caused since my boyhood, and of a personal woe I learned of just a few days before.
This juddering pulse arced into my hands and through
my body, and found its ground through the bottoms of my feet and onto the stone
plaza, dolomite and limestone slabs mined from ancient Israel’s begrudging
bosom, foundation to this last remaining vestige against Rome’s conquest. I
retreated as a pilgrim to the wall ought to, humbled, reverent and changed. So
was God trying to make a deal after all? I still don’t think so. But it is a
place that can be represented by no image, described by no words, and for me
adds to a long list of reasons for wonder.
