Kosel Under Attack

The issue of heterodox services at the Kosel HaMaaravi is back in the news again. The heterodox movements it seems are unhappy with their designated prayer spot at Robinson’s Arch. Personally I’d always felt that as the  site of an archaeological dig the location was rather appropriate given these movements’ greater fealty to the god of Semitic Studies Departments than to the G-d of the Beis HaMikdash. But it’s not good enough because as Anat Hoffman the feminist activist who heads Women of the Wall (WOW) and is a former city councilwoman ofJerusalem put it she wants to “see and be seen.”

Many Orthodox Jews are disturbed at what they see as the willingness of activists whose motives they suspect to foment division disturbance and disenfranchisement at what has for so long been a place of unity prayer and inspiration for the widest possible spectrum of Jews a holy spot where so many Jews have begun their journeys back to the heritage of their forebears.

Strange because when I hear what these activists are pressing for I’m cheered and filled with hope. Of course the fact that they want to hold mixed gender services have women’s singing and other activities that hurt the Jewish soul is deeply upsetting to me. But I want to focus on the positive so let’s consider all the good news that I believe their campaign signals.

For a very long time now the Reform movement has accepted wholesale all the academic heresies about Jewish history including those that question the very existence of David and Shlomo’s kingdoms and the existence of a Temple. Their seminaries teach this bunk to their clergyfolk who in turn indoctrinate their congregants with it. Afra l’pumayhu. Even when they have acknowledged the Temple and its service as realities of Jewish history they have bowdlerized the siddur of all embarrassing references to the ancient Jews’ “bloody sacrificial cult ” as the leader of Los Angeles’s largest Reform congregation put it in arguing for the contemporary irrelevance of Tisha B’Av. Afra l’pumay. No wonder that many years back the head of Tel Aviv’s Beit Daniel Reform house of worship issued a responsum averring that there’s no particular holiness inherent in the Kosel site and thus no particular reason to visit it.