Rachael Posted:
It’s been a while since I had a chance to sit and update my blog but trust me, so much has been happening. Most of it is good though there are some troubling moments. Yesterday a woman who studies with me shared her most recent experience at the Wailing Wall, the Kotel in Jerusalem. She said that ever since the Six Day War, she has made it a point of going to Israel and visiting the Kotel. To her it is very special because she had lived in Israel in the 1950s and remembers with longing that they could never go to Jerusalem and the Kotel was not quite real to her. She never takes it for granted and always visits and makes sure to place her hand against the wall making it physically real to her.
This last time she visited Israel and again made her way to the Kotel. She mentioned being a bit hesitant because of all the politics around women and Torah reading and arrests etc. In spite of it all she made her way to the Kotel and wove through a packed women’s section. She politely said excuse me repeatedly (after all, still Canadian even in Israel), and finally was close enough to touch it, having to reach her hand over the heads of some young people who were sitting on the ground right at the Kotel. She told me she was pushed, stared at and had to endure glares “as if I was from Mars!”. For the first time she felt like a foreigner. She walked away saddened reminding herself that these are the very stones and steps her ancestors touched and walked. It was that thought that saw her through.
I want to share her story with everyone. If we are foreigners even to each other, how much more so to the strangers in our world. Politics are the arena for argument but a holy site and a wish to pray are not!
