A Soulful Journey

Letty Cottin Pogrebin told the story of going to Israel its her Marxist-rasied Jewish husband,  when they stood at the kotel Pogrebin went to the women's side while her husband went to the more spacious men side.  Engulfed by Lubavitch they expected him to pray in Hebrew,  He said the only thing that he knew, the blessing for wine.  They all laughed. Go, learn.

While visiting Jerusalem, a well-known Jewish activist went to pray at the Kotel.   At the same time, several American families were celebrating bar mitzvahs simultaneously and crowns were milling around as usual. He noticed a fellow without a kipa turning to his companion and saying, “I just can’t find the family. Do you think there may be another wall?” There is no mistaking the holiness that exudes from the Wall of the Temple.

Once an eminent Rabbi went from the diaspora to Israel. With great effort she traveled in the most primitive conditions in his old age just pray at the western wall. After his first visit, though, all the days in Jerusalem he never returned to the Kotel. "Why did you go to so much trouble to come to Jerusalem to pray at the Kotel and not go to it every day?” he was asked. “I will tell you,” answered the rabbi. “When I went to the Kotel I saw a woman on the wall. It was the Shechinah .  When I heard her cry I knew that if I would hear such a lament and anguish once again my soul with the part. So I never returned.” May our ears be so attuned to the cries and joys of the Supernal One.

In Jerusalem, the southern gate to the Old City, the one closest to the kotel, is known as the Lion’s Gate.   It used to have another name: the Dung Gate.   It used to have other names: Sha’ar Ha-ashpot, the Gate of Filth.   The usual explanation is that when the Old City was in Turkish or Arab hands, garbage would be dumped there, to make it harder for Jews who wanted to go to the kotel.   But among the legends of Old Jerusalem there is another explanation, one I like better.   It teaches that Jewish pilgrims would come to Jerusalem from all over the world to pray at the wall.   They would come on foot across the desert.   By the time they reached the gates of the city, their feet would be covered by mud and dirt.   They didn’t want to defile the Temple Mount by entering the city in that condition, so they would wash all the mud and filth off their feet at the southern gate.   – Rabbi Harold Kushner What is the truth? ...

At the Kotel, two young men were searching the cracks between the stones of the Western Wall.   After a while, they placed a note in the selected place apparently satisfied it is the “right” place.    What is the “right” place for each of our “kvitlech” at the Wall?   What is the “right place” for each of us?   When we stand with the Jewish People, searching for our place in the building blocks of Jewish history, then we have found the “right place.” – Rabbi Barry Dov Lerner