As One At The Wall
Rabbi Avi Shafran
Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America
Israel's High Court has turned down a Jewish feminist group's request for an order allowing its members to hold nontraditional services at the Kotel Ma'aravi, or Western Wall - the remnant of the courtyard wall of the Second Holy Temple. Instead, the court ordered the government to prepare a special site adjacent to the Kotel for such services. The decision was immediately scored by "Women of the Wall" as a blow to its "right" to pray as it sees fit where it sees fit. Shortly after the decision was handed down, Batya Cohen-Kallus, a WOW member, told Ha'aretz that "we've been treated like second-class citizens who don't deserve the right to pray at the Kotel." Women, however, have always prayed alongside men at "the Kotel" ever since its liberation from Jordan in 1967. In deference to Jewish religious law's requirement for segregating the sexes at a place of Jewish worship, men and women pray on opposite sides of movable partitions. Women of the Wall has to date not sought to change that accommodation of normative halacha but what it does want is for its members to be able to don at the Kotel tallitot and tefillin, prayer-shawls and phylacteries traditionally worn by men, and to sing aloud and chant from the Torah. When provocative prayer-gatherings like WOW's or "egalitarian" mixed-gender services at the Kotel have been organized by feminist activists in recent years, what resulted was considerable hurt and anger (and even - inexcusably - some violence, on atypical occasions) among the hundreds of traditional Jews, men and women alike, who were present. The court, for now, opted not to permit such unnecessary and incendiary disruption of the time-honored and tradition-based manner of prayer in the main Kotel plaza, a place most regularly frequented by Jewish men and women to whom classical tradition is very important. Those Kotel regulars know, and are gratified by the fact, that the Kotel is a spiritual magnet for Jews of all denominations and beliefs. They do not monitor what prayer-books visitors use at the site or if proper head-coverings are worn. They want only to pray and let pray. But women's song at the Kotel would not allow the men among them to pray there; they consider hearing a woman's singing to be forbidden to men. They are thus chagrined not only by the attempt to impose an idiosyncratic form of religious worship on a place moored in tradition - but at the prospect of being effectively banished from their place of prayer. Many Jews who are sympathetic to radical redefinition of traditional norms nevertheless consider the campaign to establish non-traditional prayer services at the Kotel to be misguided. There can be no denying that such services offend those who are present at the Kotel from early morning well into the wee hours of the night. And what sensitive person of good will, whatever his personal practice or belief, would ever think of entering a mosque with shoes on, or to hold an evangelical revival service in St. Patrick's Cathedral? As (non-Orthodox) writer Hillel Halkin put it: "Are there no other places to practice Jewish feminism in the world, in Israel or even in Jerusalem, that they must do it at the one site where it most infuriates large numbers of other Jews?" And consider, further, the inevitable next step were Jewish tradition, as WOW would like, put aside as the public norm at the Kotel. Would not "Messianic Jews," for example, assert a right to hold aloft crosses for their services at the Wall? Or political activists of various stripes, to call rallies and demonstrations there? How and where does one draw a logically consistent, legally defensible line? But in the end, the most compelling reason to keep prayer at the Kotel as it is may have nothing to do with offending others, or with opening a legal Pandora's box. It has to do with something infinitely more important. For more than three decades, the Kotel has been a place - perhaps the only one in the world - where Jews of all affiliations and persuasions have regularly prayed side by side. What has allowed that for that minor miracle has been the maintenance of a standard at the holy site by which all Jews - even those who might choose other standards, or none at all, elsewhere - can abide. Anyone whose gut reaction to the recent court decision is sympathy for Women of the Wall in its quest for its self-declared "rights" might do well to pause and think, long and hard, about that. The Kotel today is the only place on the planet where all Jews - despite differences in personal practice, politics and outlook - are daily joined together as one by the sheer holiness of a place, where their collective heartfelt prayers all rise up to heaven intermingled - like the "sweet smelling" sacrifices once offered at the Holy Temple that stood mere yards away. Should any Jew really want to undermine that? Posted April 15, 2003
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