Have You Been to the Kotel?

From old blog "Mother Huldra"
Original url: http://motherhuldra.blogspot.com/2010/09/have-you-been-to-kotel.html

[Reprinted as sent by email, July 9, 2010]

Have you been to the Kotel? Have you been to the Old City? It's the first thing you're asked. You may have just gotten off the bus from the airport, but have you been to the Kotel? And you haven't been to the Kotel, you haven't been to the Old City, you were going to go first thing, first day, but when that day came you were blacking out on your feet and just stuck to the schedule, you've been here a week and you are just now stabilizing enough to be taking you medication at regular times everyday because you are at the Yeshiva twelve hours, thirteen hours, every day, hour walk home and back if you don't get lost leaves just exactly enough time to wash up before sleeping and waking in theory, and you were going to go that first Friday off but you were exhausted and actually got a full night's sleep and the sun was at its full height by the time you set out and you got lost and pulling yourself and everything else together for Shabbat and besides, they set out an email that there would be a collective trip to pray at the Kotel Wednesday morning next week.

So you wait. You wait like treading water. You wait like holding your breath. And as you wait and as you tread and as you hold your breath listening to every announcement about it two announcements every day then just the day before the Rabbi says "Kotel Masorti" instead of saying "Kotel" and you start to remember a little something, not quite and nothing's quite clear, and they are assuring people there will be a walking tour and time. So you are up at 4:30am to get ready to walk to the walking tour and you walk the medieval Jewish pilgrim's walk down into Gehenna and back up through the Zion Gate with a woman who loves history as much as you explaining the sights and it's all very good except for this niggling little bit as she steers you all away from the main gate, we don't go there, and down into the archeological park, through a section opened just for your group, and what is in front of you is the wall-- isn't it? It's cordoned off. There are museum-type little signs here and there. There's a pile of huge broken blocks and a sign to tell you the Romans threw these down when they broke apart the Temple. Your guide points out the stones blackened by the fire that destroyed the Temple 2000 years ago. And you daven, and it's good-- isn't it? There are pigeons on the wall. Not the Israeli doves that hoot outside your window. City pigeons, the first you've seen in Israel. And with all due respect for the wonder and holiness of all creatures all you can think is that PIGEONS are allowed to touch the wall, and you can't. This has not been consecrated by a thousand thousand human hands and tears staining the stones. Then it's kaddish and done and the Rabbi gives a little speech about how the government dedicated this newly unearthed section for liberal Jews to pray together once a month without disrupting others by being assaulted and how this is also holy and probably part of the whole pilgrim site in medieval times and please get ready for the bus now. And you run where you saw someone else run, to the very end of the area, up and up creaking wooden stairs to a platform where you can stretch out and touch the wall and say the first and only thing you can think of-- Adoni, Adoni, El Rachum v' Chanun, and you see a few scraps of paper left by people who didn't have to run for the bus.

Later that day someone talks about wanting more time to connect at the Yeshiva, wanting and needed to hear from the people who are experiencing Jerusalem fresh for the first time, they can only imagine the experiences and reactions of the people who were at the wall for the first time that morning, and you know that that's actually all of you and one other person and you're grateful for the overscheduling that is protecting everyone else from your very most secret worst nightmare come true: that you went, and you didn't have a reaction.

Still, you will go to the Old City Friday. You wake at 4:40am, the time you are used to now. Even moving slow and tender with your body you are on the street by 6:30am. You retrace the route of walking. You don't get lost. The Armenian Church bells are tolling 7:00am as you pass through the Zion Gate alone. You walk carefully not to slip on shining stones gleaming like the pig's snout at Pike Place Market polished slick-smooth by the passage of humanity en force. You wait for the security guard's attention, and walk through the metal detector alone, and pause to read every sign on modesty and security and the long one about how panhandling is absolutely and expressly forbidden, and then you run into your first panhandler. Tzedakha? Tzedakha. You root out your change purse for a couple of shekels, and then there's a line of old women who have seen you give and are no longer sitting along their ledge, they are edging toward you with a gentle forth-rightness, Tzedakha? Tzedakha? and you have the embarrassment of picking through your little change purse because you don't want to give too little, gott-forbid you should give someone a 10 agronot piece, not even a penny, but you also know that there is a ten-shekel piece in there that will be most of your lunch and needs to stay in the pouch. Then your hands are free, you come around the corner, and there's the Wall. There's the Wall. There's the Wall. It's so small. You thought it would stretch on forever like the Vietnam Memorial. You want to fold it up and carry it home. You feel as though you could spread out your arms and hold it and everyone at it, everything, the partitions, the plastic chairs, the siddur stand, the women old and young and modest and bare and swaying and backing up and pressed against the stones like a lover. You can't get too close. There are no crowds yet, you just can't get too close. You edge forward. You see the tiny scraps of paper emerge from the edges of the stones like condensation.  The stone are weeping prayers. And then you have to daven for healing, you have to, you davened before you left home so that you could lay tefillin today but you have to daven here, at the Wall. You have to pray for healing, yourself, your love, your family, your friends, your friends' family. A mishaberakh. You back up, swallow and take on the embarrassment of pulling the one clunky Hebrew and English siddur off the stand so that you will be able to find your place. Come forward. The book falls open at the Shema. Last night your host was listening to a recorded lecture about the necessity of saying the Shema aloud. You say the Shema aloud, and the three paragraphs aloud, every slow squinted word, and there is a woman beside you and she pushes gently on the page of your clunky super-sized siddur a little square of paper in English, "A Prayer for Healing", and she whispers, Tzedakha? And you grope for your coin pouch and find that ten-shekal piece and press it, silver and gold and grateful, into her hand. You take three tiny steps back and three huge steps forward and you are praying the Amidah aloud, taking whatever time it takes to sound out every Hebrew syllable aloud clearly for the first time in your life, and you know this is why you have worked so hard with you Hebrew, worked so hard with your davening, so that you could daven at the Wall like a bride who realizes that all the dances she has danced in her life have just led up to this moment of being able to dance with her father at her wedding. All those hours of slow learning because you want to be able to lead, and the hours of shame at waiting to be able to lead, because you are basically a quiet personality in a distressingly loud person and you are always scaring yourself with your own noise and the way your voice goes up out and over and the mass of your words and if comes to you that what are you afraid of? You will never be a Rashi, you will never be an Akikva, you will never be an operatic cantor, there is no danger in the world of you ever being too big or doing too much, so sing, and lead, and learn, and teach, and do everything that you can do, because who do you think you are to be holding back? There will always be people better kinder wiser more prolific more artistic and above all more effective than you so do everything that you can for whatever tiny sparks you may reach and know that you will never be big or loud, or anything but humble, and you daven from that. And you hit the blessing that is not a blessing, the proscription against slanderers, that they may be brought to shame, shame, like studying in Jeremiah yesterday the crying out of the hopeless doom that cannot be averted because there is no shame, shame which in Jewish tradition is the death of one's self in one own eyes, and suddenly you know that this addition to the Amidah is and has always been about those who would tell us that the way we worship is wrong, the way we offer ourselves is wrong, may they be brought to sudden shame and die in their own eyes and be transfigured. Daven for healing. Daven for righteousness. Daven for Jerusalem. And past the end of the Amidah, you daven not just the speaker's prayer, keep my tongue from evil, but the whole first sentance right up let my soul be dust to all and you smile because it is a comfort to be dust. The siddur closes and you read the little English Prayer for Healing aloud, and the Hebrew within the English whispers in your ears as your speak the words "Master of the Universe" Ribbono shel Olam and you read the little paragraph out loud, eighteen times out loud, "spare us and all our family" and you are not thinking so much as feeling, knowing, that when this is done you will walk up and touch the wall. It is done. You walk up. You wait your turn; you wait and wait. A little part of your brain detaches to wonder at yourself that you had not have the sense to move closer and then chant your eighteen times while waiting. Why did you move forward to this particular section without thought? Why didn't you take a look around like finding the best line at the supermarket? The sound of prayer, loud prayer and amen, comes over from the men's section. In the women's section weeping whispers and crickets sing. Women shift and suddenly you see that right in front of where you are waiting there is a fissure in the wall. You will be able to put your whole hand into the wall. You wait. There is a girl in a baseball cap with glitter gold nails edging along the surface of the wall looking for a place to wedge her paper. She stretches up, down, hunting, hunting, finally putting it to rest-- and then taking out the second piece of paper. When she finds homes for all her prayers she puts her bangled wrist up over her head and gives herself up to the Wall like a child collapsing into mother's arms. You wait. Except the waiting isn't waiting any longer. It's witnessing. Women comes, women go. There are a couple of young women at your shoulder, one has her paper wadded up, she wants to leave it, touch the wall, and go-- kind of like what you thought you would be doing when you arrived. She is bobbing, weaving, angling for a space, eyes grabbing at likely possibilities near the head of the girl in the baseball cap, and she starts to try to slip in past you, and you raise your hand with the little English Prayer for Healing in it and you say it, you actually say it yourself for the first time: Sav-la-noot! Soft voice and full force, and she backs right up.

And a time comes when it is your time, when the girl in the baseball cap walk past you as if in a dream as you whisper for her, Ken hi ratzon, and step forward into the place where you touch the wall, you kiss the wall, you whisper to the wall the name of your love, and your family, and the family of your friends, and your friends, and this litany of worry becomes a litany of all the good people ine your life that you care about so much, the best of the best of blessings of your life, and you are kissing the Wall and all the names you can name for healing have turned into todah todah todah as you kiss the Wall over and over like kissing someone you never thought you'd see again, the way you would kiss the kindest face of your childhood if you had only one more moment with them again, and you sob, and you sob, and you put your hand into the heart of the Wall. And you pass your little piece of paper into the heart of the Wall, so that you will have something to bring back to the people who love you. And you back away. Back away. Back away. It is like backing away from the deathbed of your loved one. Back away. It is like dying and backing gently away from your loved ones. Back away. It is like coming through death and being with everyone you have lost in the light and then life pulling both sides apart. Back away. Back away. Back away until the feeling of the stones change under your feet, and Hashem lets you go, back away to the stone bench where Hashem is waiting to catch you. Sit there with Hashem in Hashem leaving Hashem and understand kabbalah and reach into your little coin pouch and pour it all out into your hand to give to the first person who asks you for tzedakha. It's not so much, after all, barely a dollar converted. Walk for twenty minutes over Jerusalem stones with the coin sweating in your palm and no one asking for tzedakha until you find the trash on the stairs and put the coins away because you need both your hands because you have learned that you are the only person in all of Jerusalem who actually picks up other people's trash and it is time to be you again. Time to do you again. Time to be lost and found.

And now you have been to the Kotel.