Truth:  I’ve wanted to use this title for years, ever since someone suggested it for the book I eventually called ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem‘.

But now is a good time to use it, since women who want to participate fully in Judaism are literally up against the Wailing Wall.

In an attempt to break the exclusive Orthodox male stranglehold on Israeli Judaism, the Women of the Wall have tried to pray there on equal terms with men for the past several years, enduring harassment, physical and verbal abuse (ultra-Orthodox bigots have called them Nazis, desecrators, whores — you name it), threats, and arrest.

Walls, of course, are a highly charged issue in Jerusalem — viz the concrete insult of Arik Sharon’s “separation wall.”   My own feelings about the Wailing Wall — its name formally changed to the Western Wall when Israel annexed the Old City after the 1967 Six Days War — are mixed in the extreme.  As a wall, per wall, it’s beautiful — giant, worn ashlar stones with wild self-seeded capers growing through the cracks.  But as a symbol of Jewish heritage, it seems to me peculiarly inapt.  It’s just part of the retaining wall of the platform on which King Herod (yes, that Herod, who was, by the way, half Arab, and whose adoption of Jewishness was opportunistic in the extreme) built the kind of lavish, over-the-top temple you expect of dictators.

But that’s not the point right now.  It’s true I’m a confirmed agnostic, though it’s also true I once played with the idea of becoming a rabbi (hey, if you’re not into paradox, you’re on the wrong blog).  So the last thing I’d want to do these days is don a prayer shawl and dance with a Torah in front of the wall, whether you call it Western or Wailing (in fact when I lived in Jerusalem, my fantasies about what to do at the wall veered more toward the, uh, sexually transgressive).  But a woman’s right to worship is as basic as her right to vote or her right to reproductive choice. And I will, as it were, go to the wall for women’s right to go to the Wall.

The ultra-Orthodox insistence on keeping women apart — on keeping them mere spectators instead of participants — led in July to the charming sight of WOTW chair Anat Hoffman being arrested at the Wall, tussling with police officers while holding a Torah scroll.  She was released only after a restraining order was issued forbidding her from coming
“into close proximity” with the Wall.

The good news:  This week, that restraining order expires, so tomorrow, Friday, the Women of the Wall will return, this time in their hundreds, for their first morning prayer service of the new Jewish year.  They’ll be reading from their own Torah scroll;  wearing specially designed WOTW prayer shawls with representations of the four biblical matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel, woven into the corners;  and ready, once more, to go jail for the right to worship.

They have my utmost admiration.  As they say in Hebrew, be’hatzlacha — “may success be yours.”  And ours.

Emily Hauser is sharp, intelligent, and red-hot angry — and she’s absolutely right.  She lived for years in Israel, and now the Israeli government wants to delegitimize her as a Jew.    So she’s doing exactly what American Jews are not supposed to do vis-a-vis Israel:  speaking truth.

An excerpt from her post “Bad Jew“:

Most American Jews are Reform, secular, atheist, Reconstructionist, Conservative — in short: anything but Orthodox. And yet everything about the Israeli handling of religious issues within Israel’s borders is predicated on the assumption that there is but one way to be a Jew, and that is Orthodox. My Conservative wedding? Unacceptable. My friend’s Conservative conversion? Unacceptable. Burial in anything but an Orthodox fashion? Literally impossible (unless you take the body to a friendly kibbutz).

This fact has served to anger me since before my (Orthodox) conversion, and the years have not lessened that anger one iota. It is simply wrong to dictate to the citizens of a democratic state how they may or may not conduct matters of faith, who they may or may not marry, who (in short) they are. You may think you’re a Jew, they seem to say, but you’re no Jew. And I have a law passed by the legislative body paid for by your taxes to back me up.

In recent days, though, my anger has turned to full-on fury as I have considered a fact that long escaped me: These same people? This Israeli government so anxious to hand me and mine over to the tender mercies of the Orthodox rabbinate — the, let’s be honest, ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, peopled by men who follow dress-codes set in (if I’m not mistaken) 16th century Poland — this bunch of secular, nationalist, opportunistic politicians for whom matters of faith matter not in the least? These people?

They are the very same people who tell American Jews, over and over and fucking over again, that they had best be all about official Israeli policy regarding the conflict. They had best be all about the occupation and the settlements and the constant war-footing and the refusal to accept any (any) responsibility for the results of the refusal to actually resolve the conflict. Indeed, American Jews must not only be mentally and emotionally behind all of this — they must also send their money east, to support it, and dog their Senators and Congress members to do likewise.

Else they are very bad Jews indeed.

To summarize: The Jewish State is happy to take American Jews’ money and stir us up to create political pressure to support endless war — but our prayers?

Ashes.

In fact Emily has been speaking truth on her blog for the past year, especially about Israel and Palestine, which is why she’s on my list of Recommended Sites.   But the depth of feeling in this post is something else.

I love her anger.  It’s purifying.  It’s freeing.  And because it comes from someone so deeply involved in Jewish faith, it cuts to the bone.     So read her full post here, and then if she lights the same fire in you, start forwarding it like crazy!