Separations

It wasn’t my first trip to the Western Wall, but it was my first time there in a huge crowd. I didn’t make it all the way to the actual stones; hundreds of women crowded together, praying silently. They brought their children with them, far past bedtime, to sit in chairs or simply on the ground in the plaza. They read from the book of Lamentations, swaying to the rhythm of their own reflections.

On the fast day of Tisha B’Av, Jews commemorate (and some very much mourn) the destruction of the Temple and other calamaties. In Israel, many travel to Jerusalem, to the Kotel, considered a remnant of the ancient Temple (though in reality a retaining wall, part of the entrance to the Temple area but not originally part of the Temple itself).

A group of HUC students walked down into the valley and up again to Mount Zion to observe and to participate. On our way, as we sang psalms about Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile, a faculty member pointed out a few interesting aspects of Israeli custom at the Kotel on Tisha B’Av. He called the holiday a combination of mourning and reuniting; people who haven’t seen each other in months run into one another at the Kotel and rejoice at the reunion, only to continue on to recite the heart-wrenching words of Lamentations. We would hear different melodies for chanting these verses, he told us, Jewish melodies from all over the world.

But, of course, I heard no melodies.

Large dividers cut the plaza in two. On one side, men. On the other, women and children.

It’s called a mechitza, and its function is to separate.

The word “mechitza” does not come from the Hebrew word for “division” but from the word “half.” But that night, as on all other nights and all other days since just a few decades ago when extremist notions took hold, the plaza was not split in half, not evenly. The smaller women’s side had been expanded for the holiday, but it was still overflowing with women, girls, strollers, infants, toddlers napping and crying and asking questions. On the men’s side, there was room to walk without tripping, an opportunity to make it to the Kotel without being separated from your friends, to approach this relic of Jewish history in a group.

And there was another important inequality: the melodies.

Certain Jewish traditions claim that women distract men from prayer, that our voices draw men down from thoughts of the spiritual to a baser level. So women do not pray aloud at the Kotel. No haunting melodies for Lamentations, no wailing nigunim (wordless tunes). On the men’s side, individuals chanting aloud and groups singing together—people praying in the Jewish way of praying: collectively.

I pushed my way back through the crowds to the section of the plaza farthest from the Wall itself and searched for my friends. They had forlorn faces, furrowed brows. Our male classmates were still down by the Kotel, perhaps observing, perhaps participating. We slowly made our way toward the mechitza to hear some of the melodies, faintly, and to simply look. Tears came, and words of anger.

I don’t know if I can explain that feeling of separation. For me, the injustice of this separation stems not (or not only) from the division of men from women but from the purported reasons. To argue that women distract men from prayer is to link women always, only, and irrevocably with the erotic and the sexual. Women tempt men, and so they cannot be seen or heard, lest they lead men away from the task of prayer. This way of thinking refuses to acknowledge women as full and complex human beings, reduces us to the instinctual. I cannot pray aloud at the wall because my voice would not be heard as one of prayer but as one of seduction.

I stood next to the mechitza and I thought about walls—to keep people in and to keep people out. And I thought back to just a few weeks before, Erev Shabbat, which we celebrated just around the corner from the Kotel, on the southern side of the Temple Mount. There, a group of men and women joined to pray old and modern words. As we concluded, we read aloud about Israel and its place in the world as “the dawning of hope for all who seek peace.”

Hope and peace, I read, and as I looked out from the spot that once represented an entrance to the Temple, a place to come near to what is holy, I saw a wall.

Curving like a snake from the horizon where the desert begins, cutting along the line of the valley and beneath the shadow of green hills, the Wall of Separation divides East from West, Muslim from Jewish. Does it mark, too, a line across which certain voices must not be heard?

I admit I have much to learn about Jersualem, about Israel, about separations and connections and divisions and communities. But I know, for now, how it felt to declare “the dawning of hope” with that imposing wall in plain sight. I know, too, how it felt to face the dark and silent night isolated from the community of the Jewish people, barred from voicing the words of tradition. Little hope, little peace.

But the small kehillah of my female classmates, huddled together at the back of the plaza, alternately teary-eyed and firey-eyed, reminds me that walls can be furnished with gates and windows and doors; they can be climbed with ladders and ropes; they can be relocated to encompass more territory; they can be torn down.