Interloping in Their Sacred Spaces

I lay my right palm on the stone wall for a quick moment before pulling it back. There are other women pushing to the wall on Friday evening to usher in Shabbat, and I don't want to be the insensitive tourist woman who keeps them from their sacred wall. The cracks are filled with folded slips of paper, prayers of centuries. Sections of the wall are worn and stained from human touch. It's obvious that the Western Wall is made sacred from human prayers and wishes.

But it is not quite my own sacred space, and that feels strange.

I wish, more than anything, that I wasn't wearing a purple shirt among the black-clad women. I wish that I spoke Hebrew and had a Psalm book in my hands. I wish that I had the sense not to turn my back to the wall, an oversight that I rectified when I noticed other women shuffling away from the wall backwards. I wish that I could interrupt the chanting to ask what they are saying and how they are feeling, and what exactly it means to them to sing and chant and rock back and forth, and to touch the wall.

Our instructors told us that it would be insensitive to refer to the wall as "the Wailing Wall," and I agree. It was, on whole, a place of celebration. Wailing is too woeful a word for what I heard at the Western Wall. The teenagers touched the wall and then moved toward the back of the crowd where they danced in circles and sang, holding hands and jumping up and down. Throngs of Israeli soldiers loudly chanted and laughed. Men and women gravitated to the wall, muttering prayers or hiding thoughtful secrets behind their silence. As tourists, we watched the people and touched the wall and wished that we could sing along. They didn't seem to mind, but it made me thoughtful. What is this thing called religion, that makes us willfully enter into rituals and celebrations that have no reward except communion with God and man?

Interloper I may be, but I am glad of it. I have my own sacred spaces, and I love them. I am glad that others have sacred spaces and rituals and beliefs. I am thankful to usher in Shabbat at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

P.S. For anyone that is enamored by sociology, I kept thinking about Emile Durkheim and his "collective conscience," and I think it is no coincidence that he was of Jewish upbringing. The Western Wall was the best example of solidarity that I have ever witnessed.