Tag Archives: The Western Wall / The Kotel

[Alumni Guest Post] Toward God’s Love

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R. Julie Gordon (PEP '12) recollects:

Here are some of my thoughts after my experience davenning with Women of the Wall (WOW) on May 10, 2013.

Rabbi Julie Gordon praying with Women of the Wall

Rabbi Julie Gordon praying with Women of the Wall

I was exhilarated on the day after my bat mitzvah when I learned how to lay tefillin through the wisdom and care of Bert Cooper, z”l, our Albert Lea, MN para-rabbi. I felt empowered and joyful. Safely ensconced in our community and our shared relationship with God. My Baba had given me my Zayde’s tefillin. On that day when I held them in my hands, we both cried. She said, “Zayde would be so proud that you will be using his tefillin as he laid tefillin six days a week.” I remember those words every day as I wrap them around my arms, even now 40 years later, the soft leather straps worn thin and replaced twice. The scrolls checked and rechecked by sofrei stam. I am the only person on my mother’s side of the family who lays tefillin and I do it with care.

Last week, on my 56th birthday, I was preparing to lay my Zeyde’s teffilin, and to wrap myself in his memory, as I feel commanded to do this mitzvah. But, for the first time, I felt afraid. Continue reading →

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אחד – ONENESS

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From my blog:

Am I awake or asleep? Maybe a dreamlike state in between the two.

I leave my apartment 4:45 am to continue my journey

But all I am thinking about is my bed, snuggling between my warm blankets, head on my pillow. But then I thought of the people who used to walk, to travel for days, weeks during THIS day to get to the Beit haMikdash (the Temple) and I figured I could suck up the half an hour walk to the Kotel.

I didn’t even have to really pay attention to where I was going, I followed the people, each person coming from his/her home, learning center, dressed all differently, to walk to the same place.
Continue reading →

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Holy Arithmetic

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One

An outlander arrives in J-town.
Not my first time and G!d-willing, not my last.
In a newish role: student, not teacher!
The book is open.

Minus one

Disequilibrium: distance from home and life partner,
Jitters, does anyone understand who I am?
Do I understand who I am
In this novel circumstance?

Continue reading →

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L’Havdil

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The incidents at the Kotel these past few months have dominated the atmosphere where I study. There is an overwhelming sense of support for the Women of the Wall and their efforts to be recognized as legitimate players in the Jewish-religious narrative. Many of my friends have donned their Talitot and Tefilin (some for the first time) and made headlines in the process. I can personally attest to the character and passion of these people and I believe their intentions are sincere.

And yet I struggle.

I struggle because I believe that Jewish history provides us with important lessons for the present. And when I view what is going on at the Kotel plaza it is as if I have been transported to Jerusalem just prior to the destruction of Second Beit HaMikdash (Temple). Both Josephus and the Talmud record a time of great division amongst the Jewish people and both ascribe the ultimate loss of the war with Rome and the destruction of Beit HaMikdash (Temple) to this infighting (Tradition calls it Sinat Chinam (baseless hatred) while Josephus explains it along Continue reading →

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Unexpected Encounters: The Jewish Holidays and the Other – Shavuot

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pisPardes is pleased to present the third episode of our new podcast series by Rabbi Daniel Landes, Unexpected Encounters: The Jewish Holidays and the Other. This episode is on Shavuot.

Episode title: Shavuot–Kedushat HaKotel

UE: Shavuot

Click here for the accompanying handouts.

Pardes thanks the Alexander Soros Foundation, the sponsor for the series.

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The Reason that my Tallit Belongs at the Kotel

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Reflections on Rosh Hodesh Sivan with Women of the Wall, 5773 – 2013

Throughout the year I have studied here in Jerusalem, I have learned that the Wall has its own identity crisis. It is part of a larger structure that was built and carried, lost, built again and then destroyed, and built again, and built over again and destroyed again. There are more stages in between of deeper and deeper details. The figurative symbol of complete purity, it was more often an embodiment of utter corruption. The man who inspired the design of the particular Wall before which we stand today was a gifted, paranoid maniac, maddened by grief and riches and conflicting loyalties. The Temple itself, and the Wall it became, changed owners and took on ideologies of shocking variance over the centuries. And yet here it still stands, a testament to physical stability, containing all of its tumultuous history behind the serenity of its stones.

On the first Shabbat I was in Jerusalem, I walked with a group of very new friends into the Old City for the first time. I knew nothing about it except that it was the last of the Temple, a remnant of a Judaism from long ago, one with which I had trouble relating, but that it was “supposed to”, maybe, inspire a surge of feeling within me. Perhaps a feeling of closeness to the Divine? Perhaps an intense unification with the Jewish people? Perhaps bafflement or even, perhaps nothing? I was curious, and determined not to judge whatever feeling arose. Continue reading →

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Rosh Chodesh Sivan 5773 at the Kotel

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I went to the Kotel on Rosh Chodesh Sivan expecting to pray, and I did. I was surprised that I could focus on prayer in the volatile atmosphere; the hullabaloo made me concentrate even harder than usual. “Ozi v’zimrat Yah” never had greater meaning for me than it did on Friday morning as I stood with several hundred women and men on the Kotel plaza, praying for the welfare of the world in the new month of Sivan.

I came to welcome the month and to celebrate the new court ruling that allows women to pray in tallitot and tefillin at the wall. What a wonderful reason to rejoice: I could sing, dance, wear a tallit, and not fear arrest! Even though the government is discussing the Sharansky plan, I am convinced that the Women of the Wall need to continue to pray as they have for the last 25 years until a viable long-term plan is realized. Those who oppose my presence as a praying woman in a tallit do so because Continue reading →

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Toxic Davening

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From my blog:

When you are praying the words “Shema Yisrael”, “Listen Israel”, but instead you hear the sound of people yelling at you.

When there are more photographers and journalists than people praying.

After months of hesitation and apprehension I visit the kotel for Rosh Chodesh. I go to finally see what it is like to be a part of Women of the Wall, an organization that some of my friends have been very active in all year. I have come up with every excuse in the book to not go: “I’m too tired, I really need to sleep”, or “I don’t want to get arrested for being there when I don’t even know how I feel about it”. But after realizing I have successfully not gone for 9 months, and I only have 1 or 2 more opportunities before I leave Israel this time, I pushed my self to wake up and go.

I was waiting on line with this huge group of Argentinian Jews who, from overhearing their conversation, had just come from Poland. And they looked like it, exhausted, drained, and happy to be in Eretz Yisrael. With the look in their eyes, like they know the last week of their lives changed them forever, even if some haven’t realized it yet. Continue reading →

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Singing and Kol Shofar at Women of the Wall

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Singing and dancing at the Kotel

Singing and dancing at the Kotel

This Rosh Hodesh was my second time attending Rosh Hodesh davenning at WoW. Last month, I was glad to check it out and feel like I was part of something important but between the cameras and security, I struggled to feel like I was davenning.

This Rosh Hodesh, two amazing things happened. 1) I got to sing shacharit and hallel liturgy with gusto, led by Pardes alumna Lauren Henderson and Joanna Selznick Dulkin. I realized that for me, singing was important medicine in healing my relationship with the Kotel. From my very first visit, when I was 16, I have longed to sing praises to God at the Kotel. Singing is how I express myself in prayer most openly. Raising my voice in harmony with the Women of the Wall, especially singing Min HaMetzar, I felt so present with the narrowness of our situation and my prayers felt so real.

All of this is not to say that our davenning went without incident. While no one was arrested, thank God, there were Haredi women screaming at us that our prayers were an insult to God and calling us names. Some of them planted themselves in front of our group and chanted tehillim at the top of their voices, in an effort to drown us out. And when they were not chanting their prayers, they were shushing ours.

And on the men’s side… I was astounded to hear someone blowing a shofar to drown out our Shma. The thought occurred to me that it must be a sin to try to block someone’s prayers from reaching God. (I don’t believe one can succeed at such a thing.) I was upset and appalled at the ingenuity of the method. But then I got to thinking about the shofar and had my second amazing moment.

2) Kol shofar – the voice of the shofar. I remembered a teaching that on the yamim noraim, the shofar is God’s voice crying into our world. And suddenly, I recalled these shofar blasts on Rosh Hodesh not as an interruption in our prayer, but as God’s voice, either praying along with us or crying out with us.

I am still marveling at the healing of both of these experiences.

I realized Monday night that I only have a few more months here when I will have the luxury of showing up at the Kotel, wearing my kippa and tallit, singing my praise in blessing and protest. I made a commitment to myself that night that even though it makes for a really early morning for me (and I am not a morning person) I need to get up and show up to support this cause. And then, I showed up and got to sing and struggle. And now, I find myself looking forward to next month’s gathering with joy that even overshadows the sense of commitment and duty. Who knows what blessings will find me in Iyyar?

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Granted

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I often find myself reflecting upon something that my father shared with me about his early impressions of Israel after he made Aliyah from Moscow in ’74. He told me about his being a security guard on Mt. Scopus before the Hebrew U. campus had been fully constructed, and gazing from his post across the hilltops of Jerusalem (the view today is obstructed). He said he felt then as though he could see his ancestors walking along those very hills… and felt deeply that he was living in the Land of his People Israel.

Even now I’m touched by this, but it is not my own, despite my deep connection to this Land – the Land of my birth – the Land that changed the course of my family’s history forever – the Land that I frequented during my childhood on visits to grandparents and cousins. My own connection feels less dramatic to me – no moment of epiphany.

While my parents’ lives were changed forever with Aliyah from the Former Soviet Union (FSU), my life literally began with Israel. Continue reading →

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