Friday evening at the Western Wall - Judaism's holiest site

There are no pictures to show of the high point of the day, because taking a picture would have been extremely rude.

The Western Wall of the site where the great Temple in Jerusalem once stood is the holiest site in Judaism.  The Temple built during the reign of King Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.  The Second Temple was built during the reign of Cyrus the Great of Persia and his successor, the emperor Darius.  It was finished in 515 BCE.  It stood through the conquest by Alexander the Great and numerous other events, and was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE after an uprising by many Jewish communities that took the mighty Roman Empire many of its resources to put down.   The destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple was thorough, and all that remained of the Temple was the Western Wall of the site on which it was built.  The Temple Mount has had an interesting history since then - that will remain for others to tell.

The Western Wall - also known as the Wailing Wall, or the Kotel, or among many Jews simply as "the Wall" - has represented the Temple as its only remaining component, and in the absence of the entire Temple, it is where Jews all over the world consider the holiest place currently existent.   Over the centuries, it was available for Jewish use much of the time - especially under the Ottoman Empire and some earlier Moslem empires - but was denied to Jews after the War of Independence when it was in Jordanian territory.   It was regained by Israel in the 6-Day War in 1967, and since then it has been visited regularly by Jews from all over.

It is a most desired location for special occasions.  In 1981, I was fortunate enough to see a congregation dedicating a new Torah at the Western Wall, dancing with an ecstasy that any Baptist preacher would have envied!  It is also where many devout Jews come to greet the Sabbath on Friday evening - and that is we went.

The excitement of the evening has to be seen to be believed.  There were dozens of groups each
having their own service, led by their own leaders, using their own melodies.  We walked through the crowd and were invited by a group to join them.  The prayers are the same throughout the world, but the styles of prayer vary by location and by numerous traditions.   The group we joined were from Tbilisi, the capital of the country of Georgia - but they used the same prayers and some of the same melodies that we use in Cleveland.  It was fascinating seeing a prayer-book written in Georgian - and another that had Georgian on one side and Hebrew on the other.  We danced during L'Cha Dodi using a melody which is popular in Cleveland and elsewhere.

Several other groups were using melodies composed and made popular by Shlomo Carlebach, a rabbi and musician from New York who influenced the entire Jewish world with his melodies.  Behind us was a group of Sephardic Jews - that is Jews from the area around the Mediterranean - then the Ashkenasic Jews (from northern and eastern Europe) which are common in the United States.

The cacophony created by these numerous groups was incredible, but it added to the energy of the evening.    After the men and women in our group were re-united, we compared notes.   The men are all Jewish, and our experience was that described above.  Of the four women, only one is Jewish - but they all experienced the same energy and excitement on the Women's side of the plaza as I did on the Men's side.

Dinner after that was an anticlimax, but had some excitement of its own.   There was a group of young teens from a Solomon Schechter school in Queens, NY; we joined them for some of their prayers and singing.  I spoke to them briefly afterwards, and learned that one goes to the same summer camp that I went to in 1964 (and saw a counselor from that camp a few days ago - see Tuesday's blog entry); and another girl used to go to the same Synagogue where I was bar-mitzvahed in 1966.