Pilgrimage Through Time

By Susan Esther Barnes

A couple of times a year my job takes me on a road trip through time, causing me to drive past the towns I lived in years ago. Sometimes it’s hard to drive by those places without remembering what my life was like when they were my home base.

Last night I passed by the town where I lived with my ex-husband from the mid-80’s through the mid-90’s. Whenever I think about that place, I think of mitzrayim, Egypt, the narrow place from which the Jews escaped in the Exodus. Those days were unbelievably constricting. I felt like there were walls pressing in all around me, to the point that my spirit was almost crushed.

I used to think of myself as a person who would be married to one person all my life. It was incredibly difficult to give up on that vision. In the end, I mourned the loss of the marriage, but not the distancing of myself from the man.

It’s not that the vision was meaningless, or that I didn’t love my ex-husband, but the relationship we had never constituted a healthy marriage. In fact, I realized on our honeymoon that I had made a horrible mistake. In a way I was trying to cling to something that never existed. It reminds me of a line from a song by The Wailin’ Jennys called “Heaven When We’re Home” which says, “I’ve been hanging on to nothing when nothing could be worse than hanging on.”

Also last night, I drove by the town where I lived during and after my separation and divorce. When I think of that place it always brings a feeling of lightness. The heavy burden of my marriage was gone.

The walls, however, were still there. They were just pushed out a little farther away. It was like moving from a straightjacket to a room of unknown size with dense fog obscuring the walls. I didn’t know what my limits were. They felt close, but I didn’t know how close.

Like the Israelites who left mitzrayim, I was b’midbar, in the wilderness, and I didn’t know how to handle my freedom. I remember one evening, early on, pulling to the side of the road on the way home from work. I had to stop because I couldn’t decide what to have for dinner, so I didn’t know whether I should drive home, or to the grocery store, or to a restaurant. I had to decide before I could move.

Deciding was so difficult because, for ten years, deciding on what to have for dinner was about reviewing what we had eaten recently and then trying to guess what my husband wanted to eat. The penalty for guessing wrong was getting yelled at, and being told what was wrong with me.

On my own, when I tried to think of dinner, my mind kept going to what he would want, and I had to keep reminding myself that didn’t matter any more. It was just about what I wanted. That thought pattern was alien to me.

I understand long-term prisoners have the same problem when they get out of jail. When someone else decides everything for you – what you wear, when you wake up in the morning, when you go to sleep, what you eat – it is hard to decide those things for yourself. These decisions seem simple and easy to most people, but it’s hard to train yourself to employ new and different patterns of thinking.

Like the ancient Israelites, I was physically free, but still wandering in the wilderness, trying to make sense of my new circumstances and trying to learn a new way of being.

Finally, last night I drove to the area where I now live. This place feels expansive. It’s not that there are no walls; it’s just that they are both further away and more clear to me. These walls are so far distant that I don’t run into them often, but unlike the hardly-seen walls after my divorce, their presence isn’t a mystery.

In the middle I live in a safe place, with a husband who loves and supports me, and who gives me a solid home base from which I can take the risks necessary to explore the placement, the strength, and the height of the walls.

I’m not convinced it’s possible to live in this world with no walls. We all have limitations. They are physical, or financial, or spiritual, or emotional. The difference is, these walls aren’t stifling. They don’t interfere with my daily life. I know where they are. And I know that if one gets in my way, I can give it a good shove, and it will likely move aside.

I don’t know where the next place will be, or how it will feel. I don’t know what the walls will be like there. But I know it will be where I’m supposed to be. It brings me back to the same Wailin’ Jennys song, with its refrain, “It’s a long and rugged road, and we don’t know where it’s headed, but we know it’s going to get us where we’re going.”

Mah Zeh Achim?

By Susan Esther Barnes

The most holy place for Jews is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the place where our Temple once stood. It is said God's presence in the world emanates from this place. It is where Abraham brought Isaac; it is where God spoke and created the world.

For the almost 2,000 years of our exile, we yearned to return to this place. Throughout those long years, when the land was in the control of others, the closest we could get to it was a small piece of the retaining wall that forms a rectangle holding up the hill on which the Temple used to stand.

This accessible piece of the wall is West and South of the Temple's former location, which was about half way between the North and South ends of the wall surrounding the hill. The Holy of Holies, the most sacred place within the Temple, where the presence of God resides, was on the West side.

Although Jews are now in control of Jerusalem, we are still not allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, still not allowed to pray near the old Temple site or the Holy of Holies. I am not advocating a change in this policy.

Untold thousands of Jews continue to come to the Western Wall to pray, where the men and women are divided by a barrier and women are not allowed to sing aloud or wear a tallit (prayer shawl). It is crowded with people. There is always someone there praying, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

But recent excavation has opened a path along the base of the Western Wall, heading North. It leads to a place that is clearly marked as being aligned with where the Temple used to be. This is the closest any Jew can now come to the old Temple site, to the Holy of Holies, to the source of God's presence in the world.

So who is allowed to walk this path to this special place? Just the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem or other dignitaries? Only the most devout? No, it is open to everyone.

So it must be crowded, right? Bursting at the seams? Humming with life and prayer? No. Even though anyone can come here; men and women, children and families; wearing a tallit or not; singing aloud or not; this Holy place stands as empty as a forgotten tomb.

*****

Mah Zeh Achim?
What is This, My Brothers, My Sisters?

You have been separated from your beloved for many years. Your heart aches for her, you long to embrace him again, and though you know your love is reciprocated, despite your best efforts you are kept at a distance.

She dropped a scented kerchief to you, and you cling to it as you pray by her outer courtyard, calling to her.

He sent you a love letter, and you write down your deepest fears, your secret dreams, on little scraps of paper that you leave by his outer gate, hoping he will discover them there.

But what is this? The outer gate has been opened to you, for the first time in all your years of longing you may enter. And although you still may not approach her front door, and though you may not enter his home, yet you have been given a chance to come closer to the dwelling place of your beloved.

What is this?

She begs you to draw nearer, yet you stand aloof. She calls out to you, yet you do not hear. "What is this?" she cries, "Why have you abandoned me?"

"Why do you linger yet in the street outside?" he wails, "Have you clung so long to your kerchief and your letter, have you spent so much time adoring the place to which you have been coming all these years, that you have forgotten why you ever started to come there at all?"

"My beloved," she whispers, "Has it been so long you have forgotten it was me you once loved, and not the cold, hard stones?" She aches for you to abandon your worship of the wall and to draw nearer, to return to her.

My brothers, my sisters, wake up. Open your eyes.

Mah zeh achim?

What are you doing?

Women and the Wall

By Susan Esther Barnes

There has been a lot of rhetoric flying around since Nofrat Frenkel was arrested at the Western Wall, or Kotel, in Jerusalem. Many reports suggest she was arrested for wearing a tallit, or prayer shawl, at the Wall, even though halachah, Jewish law, does not forbid a woman from wearing one. An article by Rabbi Avi Shafran, originally written for Am Echad Resources and published in the January 21 edition of J Weekly, says her offence was actually to “publicly read from the Torah opposite the stones of the Kotel.” He goes on to cite a passage in the Mishnah Torah which prohibits women from reading publicly from the Torah.

In splitting hairs about what, exactly, was Ms. Frenkel’s offense, Rabbi Shafran seems to ignore the point that all she wanted to do was to be allowed to pray at the wall in the same manner that men are allowed to pray there.

Marvin Schick, in the January 1 edition of The Jewish Week, says the women who want to be able to pray at the Kotel are sincere, but “This sincerity is embedded in egotism, in the attitude that what I/we want trumps long-standing religious practices, the sensibilities of others notwithstanding.”

Schick goes on to say, “I wonder whether it is all that difficult to understand that what has been labeled for far too long as out of touch or fundamentalist has proven to be essential to our survival as a people.” Further, he says, “Now that we have returned to Jerusalem and can pray at the Kotel, let us be respectful of the religious faith and teachings that indeed were the catalysts for our return to Jerusalem.”

I find it hard to imagine that others fail to see the lack of logic in the twisted reasoning of these men. They speak as if Judaism has always been static, that the laws were written down at the very beginning, and have never been re-examined or changed since. This is simply not true.

The most obvious example springs from the site of the debate itself, the Kotel, thought to be a remnant of the Temple where the Jewish people used to conduct our ritual sacrifices. When the Temple was destroyed for the second time, there was no place in which to conduct these sacrifices. Therefore, all of the laws regarding ritual sacrifice had to be set aside. The result was a tremendous change in how Jews practice our religion. Any who insisted Judaism could not exist if these changes were made were swept aside, and Judaism survived because of our ability to adapt and change to what was, at the time, the modern world.

It was only because Judaism recognized the realities of the world around it, and adapted, that it was it able to survive in the diaspora and thus have any chance of maintaining a people who would one day be able to return to Jerusalem. Thus, in contradiction to what Mr. Schick says, a refusal to re-examine the laws and to make changes where necessary was not a catalyst for our return, but could very well have been a course that would have prevented our continuation as a people.

Similarly, his statement that “We have returned to Jerusalem and can pray at the Kotel” is nonsensical when seen in the light that, although we have returned to Jerusalem, roughly only half of us can pray at the Kotel, because women may not do so.

Mr. Schick thinks it is wrong for the women to upset the sensibilities of the ultra-Orthodox, who are a minority, but he does not seem to consider the egotism of the ultra-Orthodox who upset the sensibilities of the Conservative, Reform, and other denominations of Jews who constitute the majority in Israel and elsewhere in the world.

It is time for the Orthodox to take a sincere look at the strength of the Jewish people and to recognize that our survival has depended in large part on our ability to adapt to the changing world around us. It is time for us to recognize that laws and rituals have changed over time to meet our changing understanding of the world and the realities in which we find ourselves. We have in the past, and must continue, to make changes where they make sense while retaining the core of our Jewish beliefs and practices. This is how we will survive as a people.

It is time to recognize we are all b’tzelim Elohim, made in the image of God. Let all Jews who want to come and pray at the Kotel do so, in full voice. Does this mean the Orthodox should lose their ability to pray as they see fit? No. Rabbi Eric Yoffie proposes a solution in which the Kotel is divided into thirds. One third would be set aside for Orthodox men to pray, one third would be set aside for Orthodox women to pray, and the remaining third would be open to secular Jews and those of other denominations. Thus, every Jew would be able to pray at our holiest site in the way we see fit.

It is time to stop worshipping what we imagine to be immutable laws, written by mere mortals long after we received the Torah at Sinai. It is time to return to our root values, in which we respect all human beings and recognize the fallibility of our sages. It is time to recognize the need to correct our course and to realize we have been following the wrong path. It is time to allow all of our people to return to Jerusalem to pray.