LIKE TALKING TO A WALL

So by now you may have heard about the unseemly behaviors which took place at the Kotel on Rosh Chodesh Av. The Women of the Wall, in their tens, wanted to have their Rosh Chodesh services in their tallitot and kippot, in some cases, Tefillin, and the Women FOR the Wall, Orthodox women, got there first, in their many hundreds, and packed the women's section where they prayed quietly and traditionally. Except for one woman with a whistle, who was trying to disrupt the WOW - I can only guess that she blew the whistle to drown out the voices of women singing, this saving the men the trouble. The WOW group were blocked from reaching the Kotel itself by the numbers of orthodox sem girls and women. One WOW participant, a rabbi, wrote how she was jeered when she pleaded with some girls to put a kvittel in the Wall to pray for the health of a friend recently diagnosed with breast cancer; she was very upset. 

And it is indeed, all very upsetting. During the 3 weeks, beginning of the 9 days of mourning which commemorate the destruction of the Temple, at the same very site, Jews fighting Jews. 2,000 years ago, they all would have been dead as each other, slaughtered and enslaved by Romans. Or 60 years ago, by the Nazis. You can say that about any Jew-on-Jew fight. And of course, irony of ironies, the Temples were destroyed because of Sinat Chinam, or baseless hatred. 

I am in two minds about WOW. Part of me feels that, since the Kotel is for all Jews, the WOW should just be left alone to wear their cute little tallitot etc and just do their own thing; but a large part of me feels that  they are a bunch of attention seekers. WOW- even the acronym is an attention grabber. (WOTW would be more accurate but it lacks the -excuse me- wow factor.)

Because I truly feel that this brand of Judaism is inauthentic. That's how I feel about Reform Judaism. I'm sorry if I offend fellow Jews, and I know that I do, but you can't begin to imagine how offensive are some of the 'reforms' of Reform Judaism to me and other Orthodox Jews. Declaring in 1984, for example, that patrilineage is an acceptable decider of Jewish identity rather than the thousands of years of matrilineage. Not to mention conversions, divorce, observance (or not) of basic Jewish mitzvot such as Shabbat, Kashrut, Mikveh. The result is muddying of the water of Jewish identity and, as we see in the US, astronomical rates of intermarriage and assimilation. So excuse my not believing in pluralism too much. 

So the various media picked up on the battle of the Wall and it all looked awful, a Shunda, ugly haredi women blowing whistles and picking on the WOW ladies in their fetching garb etc. Of course it was a total beat up, and if you want to know what really happened, go the The Real Jerusalem Streets, Sharon Altshul's terrific photoblog, and see.  http://rjstreets.com/2013/07/09/rosh-chodesh-av-at-the-western-wall/

The other thing about WOW is that they want it all. They won't stop. They want to have reading from the Torah at the Kotel, they want to sing and dance and pray and wear Tefillin, and they want everybody to smile and clap and chant with them, and support everything they say and do. It doesn't bother them that the vast majority of Jewish women, observant or not, have no desire at all to do this. We observant women feel that we have enough 'feminine' mitzvot to do, and we feel that these are important enough, considering that they underpin the observance of Judaism, that we need not demean them by declaring that the only way to go is like the men. Public prayer, tefillin, kippah, tallit, reading from the Torah, etc. This reminds me of 70's feminism where you could only be a true feminist by behaving like men and rejecting any traditional feminine role. 'Essentialism', the idea that men and women are fundamentally different, was mocked. And that all worked out well, hey? 

If a group decided that they would express their Judaism by, say, jumping on pogo sticks, (and stranger things than this have occurred in the history of religious observance) and then took their pogo sticks to the Kotel to jump in pure religious zeal and ecstasy, there would be two lots of upset people: those who were bumped and those who were outraged and affronted, feeling that they and their hundreds of years of Mesorah, tradition, were being mocked. And then, what if the pogo jumpers went to the Law and insisted that they have their own little spot, right there, right at the wall. And the Law agreed! So as to protect both the jumpers and the non-jumpers. How sweet! How infuriating for the rest. 

At the Kotel, nobody minds when non-Jews come and pray or stick bits of paper containing prayers into the wall, or if women wear clothing that is not what a religious person would wear, as long as the boundaries aren't pushed too far. In the plaza, groups of people sing and dance- non Jews, secular Jews, mixed groups of men and women dancing the hora, religious groups, whatever. Nobody cares. No Haredim are punching people up or insisting that everyone behaves in a Haredi way, merely in a respectful way. 

The WOW are kidding themselves if they think that they are all so kumbaya and represent all that is good in Judaism, and everyone who is not with them must be against them and a meanie.  Most people don't care or are amused or bemused. But many worshippers are offended, and I believe, with good reason. Mind you, this doesn't give them the right to a slap-down. 

During this last week before the fast day of Tisha B'Av, let's try to tolerate each other, even if we can't love each other. But let's also try not to get up each others' noses. And may the righteous Moshiach redeem us and end our exile. Amen. 

PS If you want to pray for the recovery of a sick friend, by the way, sticking a kvittel in the Kotel is a pretty infantile way of doing it, in my opinion. Say Tehillim, give Tzedakah, do a mitzvah. You don't need the kvittel or the Kotel for that, Rabbi.