BUCKET LIST | WESTERN WALL
Journey to Jerusalem People from around the world gather to pray at the Western Wall. BY RINA NEHDAR
Prayer Plaza: (Left to right) Western Wall panorama, and placing a note in the Wall PHOTOS: © JASMINA | DREAMSTIME.COM, © SHOTSMAKER | DREAMSTIME.COM
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he day we visited, we each brought our biggest worry, written on a scrap of paper, meticulously folded into the smallest possible contortion, ready to slip into a crack of the Western Wall. Feeling giddy, we descended a limestone staircase into the rectangular Prayer Plaza.
On this afternoon before Shabbat, which began at sundown, a stream of people churned through the men’s and women’s areas. As directed by Jewish Orthodox tradition, genders are separated by a wooden mechitza partition to obscure the view of the opposite sex. On their side, the men faced the Wall, praying. Some held books, others held Torah scrolls. A spinning circle of dancing men — most with payot (sidelocks) and wearing a skullcap, fedora or fur-lined hat (shtreimel) — filled the plaza with song and celebration, commemorating a 13-year-old boy’s bar mitzvah. While his mother and other female relations stood on chairs peeking over the mechitza, their beloved boy was called to the Torah as a man.
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On the women’s side, I stood with old and new friends with whom I had traveled on a pilgrimage tour of Israel called Momentum. We slowly advanced toward the rocks stacked in rectangles and squares, sized according to the era they were added to the wall. Some women, once their turn at the Wall arrived, practically collapsed with emotional relief at being heard by the One who could finally bring them peace. Some cried. Some scanned the limestone for enough space to fit a piece of their hearts into a crack along the Wall, which already held pieces of millions of other hearts. Known in Hebrew as Ha-Kotel Ha-Maʿaravi, the Western Wall is such a rock star that just saying “Kotel” is enough for everyone to know what you’re talking about. It came from humbler beginnings, though, as one of the support walls King Herod added during an expansion of the Second Temple around 15 B.C. But let’s back up. King Solomon built the First Temple on Temple Mount around 960 B.C. The Jewish people thrived for almost 400 years until the
