Oh, how I built up this experience in my mind
Like a scene from a movie
I’d stand before the Kotel*
Feel your cool Jerusalem stone
Worn from centuries of my people’s prayers and hope and tears
My fingertips would learn your ways like reading Braille

A surge of energy and light would pass through me
Millenia of Your promise and inspiration
Flooding my body and
Awakening me to God’s purpose.

But as they say –

People make plans and God laughs.

Life had other ideas in store
Like the cramped 17-hour flight
The exhaustion of travel
Our tour’s forced march around the Old City
Causing my husband’s sciatica to act up
Sending me into worried caretaker mode
As I went to the women’s side of the mechitzah.

I headed toward the Wall
To pray for his health and healing
But like the neighborhood bar on a Saturday night
I was four-deep from the front
Trying to jockey for an opening in a tough crowd
They pray hard here
And weren’t giving me an inch.

All stink-eyes and elbows
For this obvious foreigner
Showing up without her book of Tehillim
Barking at me in Hebrew I couldn’t understand
Despite my weekly language lessons.

What are these women trying to tell me?
Get out of the way?
Go to the back of the line?
My head covering isn’t on right?
Or, there are spare prayerbooks at the back of the plaza?

All I know is I feel pressed for time.
So I reach over a tiny crone
Trying to grasp a crevice where
I can leave my written prayer
— Let me be fruitful in the unique way you have chosen for me, Adonai –
She glares at me while still moving her lips in prayer
As if I were the actual Cossack or Arab
Who inflicted the pogrom on her village
80 years ago

I quickly whisper “please be with me” and “Am Yisrael Chai”
For no formal prayers can come while I’m so preoccupied
I back away and return to the group, disappointed
All those expectations – and for what?!?
No current of energy
No shining light of purpose
Like Moses got
No grand Hollywood moment for me

Yet weeks later, in the depth of night
Tucked in my bed
After my husband has fallen asleep
And the barn owls begin their evening chatter
I see You in my mind’s eye

Just You and me
Without intrusions
I press my forehead to your cool surface
Let my palm rest against your smooth pockmarks and divots

I don’t know what you’re telling me
But I feel the connection.
As tears silently flow.

>>>

*Kotel is a Hebrew word which simply means “Wall”. It is all that remains of the ancient Jewish Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE; and Jews were (and still are) denied the right to pray on the Temple Mount. The Kotel became precious because it was the closest Jews could get to the holiest site on earth for the Jewish People. This one remaining wall is so significant, it is not necessary to detail which wall is being mentioned. It is THE Wall.

“Western Wall” is a factual description of the Wall. The Kotel is the western retaining wall of the Temple.

“Wailing Wall” is a commonly used yet derogatory term. For long stretches of history, Jews were completely barred from Jerusalem except to attend Tisha B’Av, the day of national mourning for the first and second Temples. On that day the Jews would weep at the holy site. “Wailing Wall” mocks the pain of the Jewish people, as in “there go those Jews, weeping again.”

Excerpted from The Israel Forever Foundation website.