Let My People Marry! Parashat Va’eira

Reviving this oldie but goodie from 2010 as we pass from Va’eira into Bo’ …

The Basics of Va’eira

• Diary on last week’s parshah, Shemot, by ramara
• Guide for the Perplexed: What’s a parshah?
• Here’s the full text of this week’s portion, Va’eira, and an animated summary and commentary by the wonderful crew at the G-dcast:
  

Va’eira is the second act in the violent disruption of history and memory that is the Exodus story, the struggle between the ancient Israelites and their Egyptian enslavers, formerly their gracious hosts, under a monarch “who did not know Joseph,” (1:8) the Israelites’ savior centuries prior and favored son of their patriarch, Jacob.

This portion begins the tortured bargaining between the Pharaoh and Moses for the Israelites’ liberation, with G-d calling the shots and raining down plague after plague on the Egyptians.

The story is an archetype of absolutism in crisis. Pharaoh is the tyrant who knows the game has changed, totally and irrevocably, but won’t let go. He holds out longer than any sane person would. He tries to find the smallest quantum of dignity he can give out just to get rid of the smelly frogs. Then the boils, then the lice, and so on.

This Isn’t Just Any Bible Story

The Exodus story is the only one we are encouraged — even commanded — to tell every year at the Passover table, where we’ll be just over two lunar months from now. But we don’t just read it out loud. We re-live it. We tell each other, usually in Aramaic, “Today, we are slaves. Next year, we will be free.”

This is happening to us now. This is today’s news.

This year, Va’eira comes at a delicate moment. This year, I can only read the story through the prism I live inside every day — that of a married gay American.

As I write this, Paul Katami, one of the plaintiffs in the gutsy federal lawsuit against Proposition 8 in California, is choking back tears on the stand. He is begging to be allowed to marry the love of his life. He is asking how their commitment could be lumped together with pedophilia as a ‘threat to children.’

Last year, we encountered Va’eira with the joyous noise of President Obama’s election and inauguration still ringing in our ears. My husband and I had worked our tails off for the Obama field office in our south St. Louis neighborhood, and after so many losses four years prior — Dean, Kerry, the fight against Missouri’s marriage amendment — it felt so good to be on the winning side.

Every hour and dollar we put into the Obama campaign we also put into the fight to save marriage equality in California from Proposition 8. We hosted a fundraiser in our home, phone-banked over the Internet, you name it. After we left the election night celebration just before midnight, we turned on the computer at home, and the results coming in from California hit us in the gut.

There we were again — how many times now? We’ve lost count — having the central relationship of our lives put to the whim of voters, legislators, judges — people who didn’t know us.

It was crushing.

So much had been riding on California, and when the vote was finally called, it was the death of hope.

It was the death of hope that someday soon, we could take care of each other without our own government working against us.

It was also a sentence. You’re going to spend years, the voters told us, maybe decades more in your legal no-man’s land, begging your neighbors to recognize you. Now go back into your little box and be grateful for it, faggots.

Thank G-d We Have the Exodus Story

We Jews read our exodus from Egypt as a piercing beacon for social justice. Without it, we might just lose the will to fight against seemingly impossible odds.

We have been exactly where Moses and Aaron stood in last week’s parashah, just as they first approached Pharaoh with the words, “So said YHWH, God of Israel, ‘Send out My People.” (5:1)

How Pharaoh must have shimmered with raw political power. He must have looked like a god compared to the shabby, sandal-wearing sheep herders in his presence. He had no idea who or what this so-called god of theirs was. Why should he? Why should he budge even one bit?

It isn’t until we get into Va’eira that Pharaoh starts to understand the power working through Moses and Aaron. The bit with the snakes (7:10-12) is nice enough, but right away, YHWH exponentially raises the stakes by turning every drop of water in the land to blood (7:19).

Then YHWH covers the land in frogs, which the magicians can match well enough, but it’s at this point that Pharaoh first acknowledges he is in a different game than he might have thought at first: “Entreat YHWH to remove the frogs from me and my people, and I will let out the people so that they may sacrifice to YHWH.” (8:4)

Once the frogs are gone, of course, Pharaoh again refuses to let the people go.

Fine. We all knew his heart wasn’t in the bargain. We all knew this was going to escalate. But the lice, the beasts, the death of the livestock? We’re not even halfway through the plagues yet, and already, the people of Egypt are writhing in agony, reduced to poverty in the blink of an eye.

We’re long past the point where Pharaoh’s magicians tell him they’re outmatched, that Moses and Aaron’s god is real and too powerful to mess with. Still Pharaoh bargains. After the beasts, he agrees to let the people go out, but not far (8:24). Then he changes his mind again. And again.

From the text, we know that the plot is rigged. G-d knows that Pharaoh isn’t going to do the right thing, and even if he decided to, G-d has rigged the whole story to end in ever greater atrocities (6:3-4). But we’re not there yet. We’re still in a story about human beings with free will, and we can’t stop hoping that Pharaoh — in the face of overwhelming proof that there will be no return to the way things were — will do the right thing.

But he doesn’t. And it drives us mad.

Why can’t he just let them go? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t he care about his people? Is he so blind to what this YHWH is capable of that he would stick to his defiance? And out of what? Pride? Stubbornness? His own sense of misguided godhood?

The Outstretched Hand of Truth. Slow Motion.

Since gay couples in North America (like us) started getting married in 2003, it’s been obvious to anyone with a brain that none of the dire predictions made by equality’s enemies have come true. Nor will they. There is no bestiality, no group marriage, and by every measure, children — all children — are better off in jurisdictions with legal equality for gay couples.

Unless you’re married to your own anti-gay bias, equality is a simply a win-win.

People who are against equality for LGBT couples have run out of ‘facts’ to hide behind. Bias is all they have left — clothed, at its very best, in some religious-looking garment.

That was made as clear as day in the debates leading up the defeat of marriage equality bills in New York in December and New Jersey earlier this month. In the New York Senate, the only opponent of equality who stood up to defend his views was a Pentecostal minister. Everyone else was silent.

In America, naked expression of social bias isn’t generally cool. You’d have to be a royal putz to get up in front of live cameras and tell everyone that gay people are less worthy than their neighbors, even if they are good for upping real estate values.

And behind it all, the demographic clock keeps ticking. The marriage issue has lost its power (if it ever had any) as a Republican get-out-the-vote instrument. Every day, tens of thousands of older voters pass from this life and are replaced by teens and twenty-somethings for whom out, committed gay couples are an unremarkable part of the world as it is.

So What Is Va’eira Trying to Teach Us?

We don’t have Pharaoh today. We have millions of lesser pharaohs instead.

Perfectly nice people most of the time, and may G-d bless them always. But a twisted reading of democracy has empowered them to vote their neighbors’ rights into or out of existence.

I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that when it comes to the dignity of our families, we can’t bargain with people who don’t know us, who don’t recognize the fullness of our humanity.

I think Va’eira is trying to teach us we can’t bargain with people who are consumed with holding on to a dying image of their privileged place in the order of things.

I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that when it comes to justice for something so important, our civil actions must be big, swift, unmistakable, and game-changing. Like the Olson-Boies lawsuit underway at this very moment.

I think Va’eira is trying to teach us that if we send mixed signals or accept compromise, all we do is prolong the pain of the status quo. Fighting for marriage is gutsy, risky, and not everyone thinks it’s the best idea.

But if we ask for anything less than our rights as equals, should the pharaohs deal with us as equals?

Why Does It Have to Be Like This?

Why does there have to be so much suffering in Va’eira? Why couldn’t G-d just beam the Israelites out of Egypt? Or prevent them from falling into slavery in the first place? Why couldn’t G-d just turn Pharaoh into a mensch? Or put him and his army into a trance while the Israelites made a hasty exit?

Or why, in a society built on the simple truth of equal justice under law, do we have to fight to be treated as equals?

The answer of course is that our story had to be what it is for us to be who we are.

We have to learn every year that in a world of free will, equality and dignity can come at a staggering price, one we have to be ready to pay. Or exact from our oppressors.

We have to live through powerlessness, facing betrayal and denial at the hands of our neighbors over and over again to be — when we finally come out on the other side — better, more compassionate people.

Look no further than the many thousands of American children being raised by gay and lesbian couples. They turn out perfectly fine and just like everyone else’s kids but for one thing: a more developed sense of empathy for the outcast.

Torah teaches that we were created with a divine sense of justice within us. It is universal and indestructable, but it needs be lived out and experienced with our whole bodies and all their senses. Daily, if at all possible.

But imagine this. Imagine we could convince G-d to intervene in a big way, to erase the past and bring about total and instant equality for LGBT people throughout the land.

No more crippling memories of being shut out and shut down. No more separate tax returns, no more sobbing outside closed emergency room doors. No more children torn from loving parents, no more careers ended out of bias. Acceptance. Inclusion. Bliss.

But suppose that in exchange, we had to give up the sharpened sense of compassion that only our pain could have given us. Instead of who we are in this world, we would be some breezy, happy-go-lucky tribe with with not a care in the world, free to immerse ourselves in our relatively prosperous lives.

Would we want that?

Would we want that as Jews, as people committed to a G-d of justice?

If we were those people, would we be the right ones to bring about a better world for all the rest of its outcasts?

While We Meditate the Long View…

In the midst of Va’eira, all that is happening is that G-d is raising the stakes. G-d is making the status quo unbearably painful.

Right now, we are nothing but a frightened, downtrodden mass of flawed, deeply self-doubting people about to take the first steps towards freedom. There’s nothing pretty about it, and we have no idea what’s coming next.

But maybe G-d does, and maybe that will be enough.

Cross-posted, with thanks to ramara, from StreetProphets

Save the Date, Saint Louis! Jay Michaelson’s Gay vs. God February 23 @ 7 p.m.

View this document on Scribd

The Jay Michaelson Project: February 22-23

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Two married gay guys who both converted to Judaism decide to become b’nei mitzvah together and go looking for a social justice project.

Being avid readers and devoted groupies of Nehirim, a national organization for community building among LGBTQ Jews, they decide to bring Nehirim’s founder, author and activist Jay Michaelson, to their plucky little community by the Arch to talk about his recent work.

That’s the story. Our story! So if you’re in or around Saint Louis on February 22 and/or 23, 2012, mark your calendar. Here’s the line-up, all of it happening at our spiritual home base, CRC.

Wednesday, February 22 @ 7 p.m. at CRC

Book talk and community discussion of Everything is God, Jay’s remarkable 2009 book on “the radical path of non-dual Judaism.”

God does not exist, the thinking of Hadisic and Kabbalistic masters goes, God is existence itself. This is esoteric stuff, the outmost frontiers of Jewish thought, but Jay makes it remarkably accessible and readable.

Reading this book has shaken up my prayer and practice for the better and has for a number of other people we know.

Thursday, February 23 @ 7:30 p.m. at CRC

Book talk and community discussion of God Versus Gay: The Religious Case for Equality.

This is Jay’s most recent book, and one reviewer on Amazon sums it up very nicely:

God vs. Gay is an excellent resource for those struggling to reconcile their sexual feelings — or those of a loved one — with being a person of devout religious faith. Michaelson never panders, attempts to set aside all biases and simply lets the text speak for itself. What happens when he clears the smoke of punditry and bigotry is a beautiful thing, and the discussion over equality and human diversity is elevated because of Michaelson’s willingness to have faith in the words of the Torah — and in human dignity.

Jay delves into Christian scripture and tradition as deeply and courageously as he does into Jewish sources, so this is an event we’re really encouraging our Christian friends to come to.

Both events are free and open to the public! Hope to see you there.

B’ahavah v’shalom,
Michael/Shim’on

Never: The Israel Trip

Previously:
I’m Not Sure Where to Start * Shabbat in the Desert * The Road to Jerusalem * This Post Is Brought to You by the Word ‘And’ * The Old City of Jerusalem
Blogroll: Erika ~ Scott ~ Arthur

I’ve never felt so Jewish as I did with my head uncovered, having a beer on the beach in Tel Aviv.

I’ve never felt so alive as I did driving

in Tel Aviv traffic.

I’ve never so instantly prayerful, so reverential as I did on the Temple Mount, surrounded by Muslim sites of worship.

I’ve never felt so focused, so calm inside as I did after a week away from Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress.

I’ve never felt so connected to a place so strange, so troubled, so wonderful, so surprising.

Opening Jerusalem: The Israel Trip Part 6

Previously:
I’m Not Sure Where to Start * Shabbat in the Desert * The Road to Jerusalem * This Post Is Brought to You by the Word ‘And’ * The Old City of Jerusalem
Blogroll: Erika ~ Scott ~ Arthur

This wasn’t just any trip to Israel, you see. We spent much of our time in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv meeting with local activists and community leaders who are working hard to bend Israeli society towards greater justice and inclusion for LGBTQ people, Jews and Arabs alike.

Our first night in Jerusalem, we had dinner with members of Havruta and Bat Kol, still very new organizations for Orthodox men and women, respectively.

Oh, To Be Orthodox and Gay.

Or trans. Or a woman passionate about prayer and study. Or anyone else whose body and soul don’t fit in the neat containers of halachah. This word – literally ‘going’ or ‘walking’ in Hebrew — refers the code of law that governs an observant Jew’s every action, from getting dressed to peeing and pooping, eating, and especially sexual intimacy.

The Orthodox posture on homosexuality in particular emanates from Leviticus 18:22, for which I’ll give you a mostly literal translation suggested by Rabbi Steve Greenberg in his trailblazing 2005 book, Wrestling with God and Men.

And a male you shall not bed as in the lyings of a woman. It is abhorrent.

Over the centuries, the rabbinic tradition has built a tall fortress around this verse, encompassing all forms of same-sex intimacy. Some parts of the halachic world, particularly the far-right ultra-Orthodox, have been quite vicious about it.

By itself, this part of halachah might be reason enough for a gay Jew to close the book entirely. Stay in the closet, say. Or move to Tel Aviv and leave Judaism behind.

For decades, that’s mostly what happened. It wasn’t until the 1990′s, really, that the first cracks started appearing. Most people think a big starting point was the opening of military service to out LGBT people, which happened without much fuss at all in 1993 and added another ingredient into the great social blender that is the Israeli Defense Forces.

Religious Jews, including many living in the closet, started serving alongside out LGBT people and learned to trust their experience of them.

Things Started Happening Fast After That.

Jerusalem Open House, by Greg Barman

In 1997, the Jerusalem Open House, a walk-in community and support center, started out in the dingy, courageous little office building it still inhabits. Since 2002, the community has staged — or tried to, at least — yearly pride celebrations, the condemnation of which gives conservative leaders of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian sectors a rare opportunity to make a show of unanimity.

At the 2005 march, the one the city’s ultra-Orthodox mayor tried to ban altogether, an extreme right-wing Jew stabbed three people.

And still LGBTQ Jerusalem gathered, and organized, and marched. But then a funny thing started happening.

“Mama, why is Papa wearing sackcloth and screaming at people?”

That, apparently, was the question out of children’s mouths in ultra-right-wing religious families amidst all the demonstrations and riots. Leaders of Jerusalem Open House held secret meetings with ultra-right-wing rabbis, and an uneasy consensus was hammered out — tone it down a bit, and we won’t protest. Keep the parade route away from our neighborhoods, and we won’t urge the faithful to attack you, at least not in public. Whatever it takes to stop our children from asking questions about things we’d rather not talk about.

Something else, more difficult to define, is going on at the margins, out of the headlines. GLBTQ Jews are, even in some very ultra-right-wing circles, no longer demons in disguise, infected with spiritual cooties that foul anyone they touch. Meetings and conversations are happening — off the record and away from public view — that would have never taken place even a few years ago. One of the JOH staff spoke to us of meeting a Haredi rabbi who showed her the black candles he had been burning at midnight to curse her, just to prove, I suppose, that there were no hard feelings.

So Life Goes On

Jerusalem Open House, by Greg Barman

The JOH staff who met with us had many stories. Stories of the lounge filled with ultra-Orthodox Jews sitting next to Palestinians, the library of books in Hebrew and Arabic for people who can’t access the Internet. There’s the transgender Haredi woman who comes in about once a month, puts on the women’s clothing she keeps in the office. She has tea, chats with people in broken Hebrew — like many Haredim, her native language is Yiddish — then puts her black hat and black coat back on and returns to the Haredi world as a man. Then there are the Palestinian kids who come in from East Jerusalem and villages outside the city, wondering if anyone knows how to stop the feelings they have for other boys.

And the hundreds of people who come every year for free, rapid, and anonymous HIV testing, which the Ministry of Health is working hard to shut down. They want to track each and every test by name and identity card.

Why Don’t You Just Move to Tel Aviv?

That was a question the staff reported hearing often, both from people living in the freedom of “the Bubble,” as it’s called, and from religious Jerusalemites uncomfortable with this openly LGBTQ presence in their midst.

“It’s hard to live in Jerusalem,” one of them told us, echoing observations from people in our own group. There’s scrutiny. There’s tension. Bared shoulders and tattoos generate stares. On average, Israelis are not shy about staring, and Jerusalemites even less so. Women who wear kippot or tzitzit, the head covering and fringes of a religious Jew, get stared at and jeered at.

The people we met with spoke of Jerusalem as the focal point of a slow-motion population transfer — very religious Jews moving in, secular Jews moving out. But nowhere did I sense a break in the resolve of the people who are committed to staying.

“Everything that’s a challenge in Israel is a challenge in Jerusalem,” one of the JOH staff told us. “If we don’t face it here, we’ll face it somewhere else.”

Besides, so much is happening in a country used to sudden, convulsive changes. Especially in the center-to-left parts of the Orthodox world, long-sealed doors are beginning to be pushed open by LGBTQ Jews who refuse to shut up. In the the past few years, open and affirming prayer communities have sprouted up, started by organizers who timidly put the word out, expecting a few dozen stragglers and seeing hundreds instead.

And that’s the sense I left Jerusalem with. If positive change can happen here, it can happen pretty much anywhere.

Please give generously to Jerusalem Open House by clicking here!

Yad VaShem: The Israel Trip Part 5

Previously:
Part 1: I’m Not Sure Where to Start
Part 2: Shabbat in the Desert
Part 3: The Road to Jerusalem
This Post Is Brought to You by the Word ‘And’
Part 4: The Old City of Jerusalem

Blogroll: Erika ~ Scott ~ Arthur

Let Me Take You Back…

Long before I became a Jew by Choice, you see, I was a German by Choice. I took German in high school, fell instantly in love with the language, the culture, and immersed myself in both for the next decade of my life. I lived in Germany for two years, and most people I met there couldn’t tell I wasn’t a native speaker.

I was there during the eighties and nineties, during an opening of the German national heart — a decades-long, ongoing process, fraught but steady, of opening up to the atrocities of the past. The government built museums, academic institutes, and memorials on the sites of the many concentration camps on German soil.

I visited one of them, Bergen-Belsen, just after high school with my German host family. I remember that even though the site is surrounded by a forest, somehow the birds knew not to sing there. Low, blood-red bushes grew in the footprints of the long-vanished barracks. The people, my host family included, were silent, saddened, wandered the blighted ground like polite ghosts.

As I did at all the museums and sites over the next twenty years, I wandered with them.

Not This Time

We entered the museum and I felt numb. I just didn’t want to be there, bumping elbows with other visitors in the dark, cramped spaces at the start of the main hall — which, at the beginning, is all about Germany in the years leading up to the deportations and killings.

I wanted to go out and party on Ben Yehuda street or something. Eat. Drink. Feel alive. Anywhere but there.

Exhibit after exhibit. Numb.

But then I started to linger on individual stories. My steps slowed, weighed down by grief and morbid fascination. “How do they expect me to move through this place?” I wrote later in my journal. “How do they expect me to put one foot in front of the other? How can I not stand in front of one picture, one story, and stay there?”

The videotaped survivor interviews grabbed me. I listened to elderly European Jews relating their stories in Hebrew, which I’d never experienced before. I could understand much of what they were saying and was utterly drawn in by their linguistic defiance. As old as they are in the videos, as blessed with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they talk of the last time they saw their mothers and fathers and cry like little kids.

The View from Yad VaShem, by Greg Barman

We went in all laughs, like we’d been since breakfast, and came out silent at the top of the slow climb out of hell, looking out over the beautiful hills of West Jerusalem. Trees. Houses. A highway. That finally brought the tears on.

“There’s anger here,” I wrote later. “Anger at being forgotten, left to die. Anger and being locked out, shut out, even after all the killing was over. And defiance. All those stubborn little suburbs on disputed land, prosperous little red roofs sheltering the descendants of people who were simply thrown away.”

I Wept the Rest of the Way

It hit me in the hall that contains the actual memorial, ashes and other remains retrieved from the death camps of Europe, from exhumed mass graves — buried under a massive slab of black rock with the names of the camps carved on them in Hebrew and Roman letters.

For the first time, I cried for myself, for the part of me, the Jew, buried there with them.

We gathered briefly outside to talk about what else there was at Yad VaShem, where we were going from there, and that’s when I heard about the children. Ran, our tour guide, told us we were going into a space where we would hear the names of children read aloud, along with their ages and countries of origin.

“Please, G-d,” I thought to myself. “Not the children.”

It’s dark inside the children’s memorial. The only light comes from little lamps suspended in a maze of mirrors — hundreds, maybe thousands of little reflections hanging in empty space along with black and white photographs.

Maybe the images rotated, maybe they stayed the same. I just don’t know.

I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. I heard the names being read aloud, but I couldn’t understand them. I staggered through the dark, sobbing.

Every name was a gashing wound whose pain I recognized instantly, perfectly.

It was the pain of the little boy in me who lost his mother.

Somehow I moved my feet and made it out. I tried to not let everyone see how hard I was sobbing, but I imagine I blew my nose often enough to give it away. Brian had taken note of one of the children’s names.

Yudith Honig, twelve, Belarus. 

Outside We Prayed Together

We read a translation of Psalm 90 from Sha’ar Zahav, the mostly GLBTQ community in San Francisco:

G-d, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were born, or the earth and world brought forth, through all time and space, You are G-d.

You turn us from You and we are destroyed; or You can call: Return, My human family.

For a thousand years in Your sight are as yesterday when it is passed, or as a watch in the night.

You sweep us away with a flood of years; we are like a dream at daybreak.

We are like the grass which grows; tall and flourishing in the morning, cut and withered when evening comes.

For the years of our lives are few; we spend our youth seeking adulthood, and our age seeking youth, but we are soon cut off, and we fly away.

Teach us to number our days, that our hearts may grow wise.

Let Your servants understand Your work, and share in Your glory.

And may the beauty of the Eternal be upon us, and upon our deeds; may G-d grant that our deeds deserve to endure.

And this recollection from a gay survivor, which recalls that not everyone who survived made it out of the camps…

Through six years– but no, the camps were beyond time;
Through forever, when I was sure
The Nazis ruled heaven and earth–
For if not, where was the power of heaven?
Where the decent people of earth?–
I survived.
When they cam to free us it hardly mattered to me.
The ones to whom things still mattered had died long ago.
But we walked out the gate
And they gave us food–
That mattered–
And then they processed us again.
And we were to receive money and help in relocating;
But then I saw the few left of the men with the lavender triangles:
They had been separated out;
They would go back to the camps,
For they were not political inmates;
They were, as all civilized people knew,
Criminals,
And the Nazi government rightfully put them in the camps.
Then I knew where the nations had been,
And how much they cared for the pain of the different.

I wish I had some insight to share with you, some way I found to make sense of it all. But I don’t, naturally. No one does. From the same author comes this line:

May G-d’s name be praised
Though what we praise is beyond our comprehending.

Next Up: Meeting the GLBTQ Movers and Shakers of Jerusalem.

The Old City in Jerusalem: The Israel Trip Part 4

Previously:
Part 1: I’m Not Sure Where to Start
Part 2: Shabbat in the Desert
Part 3: The Road to Jerusalem
This Post Is Brought to You by the Word ‘And’

Blogroll: Erika ~ Scott ~ Arthur

Why Not Start with the Old City?

Old City. By Erika Davis

The oldest part of Jerusalem isn’t a city so much as a warren, a truly medieval place built on layers of ruins going back almost five thousand years. Often the way to get from one place to another is over roofs and staircases built into walls.

We spent most of our time in the Jewish quarter and did the things most people do there.  It didn’t leave my mind for a second that for Jewish tourists to be strolling around the Old City, shopping for kippot and chowing down on felafel, is the realization of at least seventeen centuries of anguished prayer.

The Jewish longing for Jerusalem is everywhere in our liturgy, our holidays, nearly three milllennia of literature. Even the most disconnected Jew whose entire religious life consists of one Passover seder in a whole year raises a glass and says, as our people said for almost two thousand years, “Next Year in Jerusalem.”

In the Old City, I remembered, of all things, a story from Joan Nathan’s The Foods of Israel Today, told by an elderly Jew who had grown up in Iraqi Kurdistan.

We lived in clay … huts with straw roofs. Twice a day we made bread over a coal stove. All our pots were made from clay, and we sat on the floor. Everybody spoke Aramaic, like they did Yiddish in Eastern Europe.

We were big Zionists. For twenty-five hundred years, we sat on our suitcases because we wanted to go to Jerusalem. We didn’t know the name Israel — only Jerusalem. When the state was created, we left everything and came, first by bus to Baghdad, then a train, and then a plane to Lod. When we arrived in 1951, we were herded into buses like sheep into the mountains of Castel, close to Jerusalem. They gave us iron beds with straw mattresses and a gray army blanket. I keep the blanket as a memory of those difficult times. It was very cold, the beginning of April. We danced all night to get warm. We had no food but we were happy because Kurds know how to survive.

I tried to let the beauty of the place, the sheer improbability of our presence there, untie the knot that had been in my stomach since we arrived in Jerusalem. If you believe in anything like miracles, the Jewish return to Jerusalem has to be one of them. If you’re attuned to it, the knowledge permeates the air and clings to the cobblestones like dew.

And Then There’s the Wall

Glimpse of the Kotel, by Erika Davis

You hear it called the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, ha-Kotel in Hebrew.

It is a physical remnant of a much earlier form of Judaism that centered on the slaughter, butchering, and burning of sacrificial animals in a Temple. For almost two thousand years, sending animals and pilgrims to the Temple was among the highest expressions of Jewish faith.

The Wall wasn’t part of the first temple or even the second one, but a much later structure built around the time Jesus of Nazareth lived. It is the closest accessible place to where the heart of the Temple once stood, the kadosh k’doshim, the Holy of Holies, a room at the heart of a complex of altars and courtyards, thought to contain the most intense manifestation of G-d’s presence in the universe. All of it — the Temple, the sacrificial cult, the priestly caste — was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE in the course of brutally suppressing a Jewish revolt.

Here’s the thing. Ask any liberal Jew and they’ll probably agree with me: losing the Temple was maybe the best thing that ever happened to us.

What could have been the end of Jewish civilization was instead a new beginning, a flowering of devotional practice centered around prayer, family, community, and acts of compassion that have sustained the Jewish people through two thousand years of bloodshed and repression. The destruction of the Temple was only the the first act in centuries of death and banishment, but out of it, we built a tradition that is — at its heart of hearts — hopeful, optimistic, loving.

I don’t know if we would have gotten where we are if if the Temple had been functioning all these years.

Still, the Temple is everywhere in Jewish life. When Jews pray together, we pray facing Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, we pray facing the site of the Temple. Ever see Jewish people rush to wash their hands before eating bread? That’s done in memory of the Temple service. Like challah? That word for rich, braided Sabbath bread designated the portion taken from rising dough that was added to the Temple sacrifice.

Prayers at the Kotel, by Erika Davis

What strikes you immediately is how small it all is. The Kotel, the Muslim sites on top of the Temple Mount, they look so big in pictures. Maybe that’s our spiritual eyes playing tricks on us. In actuality, it’s all small enough to fit inside a large indoor mall.

If you’re going to pray at the Kotel, one of our leaders told us, maybe think about all the spiritual focus being directed over your head to that very site. Understanding that part didn’t take much in the way of visualization. In our luggage, we had carried a little ziploc bag with slips of paper containing heartfelt prayers of people in our community back home. We followed the tradition and put them into cracks and crevices in the Wall.

Here’s What Happened

When they pray at the Wall, traditional Jews go through an entire service, which depending on day and time can be very long or very short. We got there with not a whole lot of time to spare before our next event; some of us went to pray, others hung back. The gender politics of the wall are difficult for a lot of us, as Idit Klein has written about very eloquently.

I hung back. I had packed my tallit and a siddur and fully intended to go through the entire afternoon service.

But when it came time to approach the wall, I couldn’t. I felt so conflicted, so self-conscious. “I’m not ready for this,” I told Arthur.

Bar Mitzvah at the Kotel, by Erika Davis

It didn’t help that it’s actually quite chaotic at the Wall, as it is in most traditional prayer settings. Everyone kind of goes at their own pace, people come and go, children play. An Ethiopian family (I think) was even celebrating a bar mitzvah there — singing, cheering, carrying around their young man on a chair. From their side of the mechitzah, the wall that divides women from men, the women of the family were standing on chairs, leaning over, cheering and ululating.

How was I supposed to pray in the midst of all this noise? Here’s what my journal has to say:

I half expected to have another of my more typical G-d encounters — the wordless presence that came over me in the desert. Something powerful. What happened instead is difficult to describe. It was hard to concentrate. I was feeling very self-conscious. The sun was shining on my right leg but not my left, heating up one half of my pants, etc. etc. I hadn’t brought my siddur, thinking there just wouldn’t be enough time to put it to use, so I just started going through prayers I have in my head. Half-way through Adon Olam, I blanked on the words. Same thing with the sh’ma.

But then something else floated in. A sweetness, a quiet feeling in the midst of the noise, a lightness I’ve never experienced before in prayer. I stopped trying. Everything else drifted off into the background, and there I was, my hand on the Kotel, feeling very relaxed. After a while, I moved away, walking backwards. I bowed, then took off my tallit, and then I was ready to leave.

Like a lot of things that happened on the journey, I’m still working to make sense of this. But I think one thing the encounter at the Kotel taught me is this. Prayer can and should happen everywhere, not just in quiet, decorous sanctuaries or in the early morning before everyone else is up, not just in the safe places.

Jerusalem Sunset, by Greg Barman

Pray in chaos, Jerusalem teaches me, and the quiet will come. Pray in noise. Pray in tension and conflict. Pray at the clashing of worlds.

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