The Women at the Wailing Wall

Picking up on Regina Bannan’s (my cherished companion on the trip to Israel and Jordan
a week and a half ago) Table post for March 14, I would like to add my brief reflection
and observation about our experience by the Western or Wailing Wall of the Temple in
Jerusalem. (I did miss the rabbis gathering to pray on the plane at dawn. Weariness had
conquered excitement by then!)

How strange it was to process through the ancient Jerusalem gate toward such a holy site
as the Western Temple Wall with groups of young boys, often under canopies and
accompanied by musicians, singing, dancing, and clapping, with their delighted families
ringing around them, making their way up the stony pathways to the remains of that most
Holy Wall for their bar mitzvahs. Strange because at that wall were hordes of people
anything but joyful, praying, mourning, crying, keening as the boys gathered with their
rabbis and the males of their family around tables in the background to complete the
ancient rite.

As Regina mentioned, all of us women had to go to the women’s side of the wall, and all
those mothers and sisters and aunts and girlfriends had to climb on a perch along the
divider and stand side by side as close to their boys and men as possible just in order to
see and call out their encouragements and proffer their pride in their children in lonely
communal separation.

This felt especially poignant because, just before I joined them on the overlook, I had
stood at the wall itself, put my forehead against its cold harsh stone and listened to a
young girl, her forehead next to mine, issue the softest, longest series of moans I had ever
heard, a profound lamentation that eventually I could not help but join. All of us women
were there, wailing, crying, tucking our prayers into tiny niches in the wall, just as the
men were doing on the other side. We had no joyful rituals going on behind us though;
we had only each other.

Why? Throughout all the centuries and ages? Why?

Why?