Orwell at the Kotel

Asher V. Finn

Many American Jews likely applauded the decision by Israel's High Court ordering the government to allow a women's group to hold vocal prayer services at Jerusalem's Western Wall, or Kotel Ma'aravi, as a victory for civil rights. In truth, though, it was something else entirely.

At present, of course, women are entirely welcome at the Kotel, just like men. There is, though, a tradition – at the Wall since its capture by Israel in 1967, and in Judaism since approximately 1000 years before the Common Era – that considers public and vocal women's prayer inappropriate in the presence of men (and mixed men-and-women services altogether improper). That tradition, though it has been rejected by many contemporary Jews, is codified in Jewish religious law. It was born not of any prejudice against women but of a deep concern with modesty, a concept admittedly fallen from grace among many of late.

That very Jewish religious tradition, though, was lived and cherished by all Jews' forebears. Its insistence that women's voices not be raised in song in the presence of men and that women and men are to worship in separate areas may seem quaint to many, but it is part and parcel of Jewish life for hundreds of thousands of Jews in the contemporary world. And it is certainly so for the vast majority of Jews who are the "regulars" for services at the Western Wall.

Indeed, there is a law on the books in Israel barring ceremonies at the Kotel that are "not according to local custom." Israel's highest court did not nullify that law, which was clearly enacted to preserve the status quo regarding services at the holy site, but seems instead to have interpreted it to mean that any practice in which Jews engage can lay claim to the designation "local custom." A tradition of twenty years, in other words, is no less meaningful than one of twenty centuries. George Orwell may have imagined a society where "war is peace" and "hate is love" but even he might have found "new is traditional" something of a stretch.

Nevertheless, proponents of contemporary "new traditions" no doubt rejoice in the court's embrace of their oxymoronic stance. What they might ponder, though, as might joyous ramparts-chargers in other contexts, is just what might lie ahead. Surely, if the Israeli court's decision is not rendered moot by new, clearer, legislation, there will be no grounds for stopping at public "Women of the Wall" services or Reform services or even "Humanistic Judaism" services (that latter group unabashedly touting atheism as a branch of Judaism) at the Kotel. Nothing will prevent a Hebrew Christian group from asserting its own new Jewish "tradition", complete with symbols and chanting, at the Wall that once was a place of deeply Jewish tradition and peace.

Perhaps that image doesn't bother some of us. But there can be no denying that it deeply troubles those who gather at the Kotel regularly, often in the thousands, and deeply saddens all Jews who maintain deep-seated and sincere respect for Jewish tradition – the original one.

And so, if Israel's religious parties, supported by the Jewish State's overwhelmingly tradition-minded if not fully observant populace, manage in the end to preserve the status quo at the Kotel through new legislation, thoughtful Jews, whatever their affiliation or degree of observance, should not be quick to condemn the development as a blow to civil rights. For it will really have been a blow to Newspeak.

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Asher V. Finn is a writer living in Manhattan