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REASONABLE DOUBT: FROM HOLY SITE TO SACRILEGE
by Noga Tarnopolsky
Jerusalem Post, Jan. 29, 2004
Go to the Western Wall. It is a strange wonder: not much more than a truncated
stretch of an old retaining wall, crumbly at spots and studded with prickly caper
bushes that emerge from its crevasses as if from the dark. As seen from above,
it appears to be a magnetic force drawing dark-clad people to it in numbers, reluctantly
letting them go. Individuals mill about as if there was nothing else to do, lean
on the low wall that encloses the courtyard at its base and simply stare at the
rocks.
The Wall and its peculiar, stolid luminosity never cease to astonish. It was not
even a Temple wall, but the impact of its very survival for thousands of years
endows it with an anthropomorphized quality — of witnessing
we usually associate only with intimate spaces, the bedroom walls that contained
us as we grew, Grandma's kitchen.
It is as if this wall were the intimate space shared, in the end, by all Jews.
If only for its historical claims, the western retaining wall of the fallen Temple
in Jerusalem draws even the most secular. It is an old lion sitting there, impassive,
watching. Our sphinx.
For a stubborn, fractious, divided people, no other symbol has been as unifying.
Again, if you stand slightly away from the Western Wall and at a certain elevation,
it is not unusual to see haredi men encased in black and secular women
gazing at its uneven surface with an equal wonder, as if wishing to retain something
of its aura. Given its significance, and given its import to Jews outside the
country, you might expect that news relating to any changes at the wall would
rate a headline or two.
But Israel, in addition to its ancient ramparts, has Ariel Sharon's legal woes
to fret over, not to mention the appointment of Meni Mazuz, the prisoner swap
with Hizbullah, and any number of other pulse-quickening events and occasions
such as flooding and strikes, so the mutilation of the Wall —
for that is about as apt a phrase as I can come up with to describe what is taking
place there — has been relegated to lesser pages,
if any at all.
If you need something to cry over, go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. These
grey days, it has the aspect of a maimed, caged lion. The plaza that was cleared
of rubble in 1967, exposing the Wall to light, air, and to our eyes, is once again
a construction site. This time, the plaza is being cut up in order to —
once again — expand the enclosed area directly in
front of the wall in which men and women are separated. This leaves but a narrow
corridor in which the thousands wishing to visit the Wall, perhaps —
God forbid! — accompanied by spouses, can stand.
I say "once again" because it almost goes without saying that this is only the
most egregious offense undertaken by religious authorities at the Wall. The initial
division of a segment of the plaza is, in my mind, unquestionable. People deserve
to be able to pray at this holy site as they see fit; for many Jews, that involves
isolation from the other sex. But since that move, the Western Wall has become
an untouched fiefdom of our own little wakf.
Free-thinking Israel has abandoned the Wall as it has abandoned any number of
other issues that touch upon it — upon its history,
upon its identity — as if playing by the rules of
a questionable, illusory game by which it is willing to abandon almost every identifying
marker so long as Tel Aviv is left alone.
And so the Wall has long become an arena for the harassment of young women who
are not dressed as the hooligans who claim to represent the local authority there
dispose. Just ask any young female soldier what it's like. Ask women who on summer
days in 35-degree weather dare to wear short-sleeved blouses. Yes, even religious
women.
The decision to take more and more of the access to the Western Wall has, of course,
nothing whatsoever to do with real religiosity or faith. One of the tragedies
is that just as the secular have abandoned the Wall, the truly faithful are also
turning their backs, leaving this symbol of our unity and our survival to a fringe
of pseudo-religious hacks and interested parties who are turning it, slowly but
surely, into a sacrilege.
Go see the Western Wall: You will see blasphemy in the making.
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The author is a Jerusalem-based writer. |
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