Bringing the Prayers of my Tucson Community to the Kotel

Much was made in recent months of the visits of Pope Benedict XVI and (then) Presidential Candidate Barach Obama to the Western Wall. And I must admit that, as the time of my own Holy Land sojourne approached, the Western or Wailing Wall has been one of those places that has held a certain romantic mythology for me. I have often seen images of pilgrims inserting small slips of paper into the cracks beneath the massive stones that make up the only remaining portion of the Wall of the 2nd Temple that was destroyed by the Romans in punishment for Jewish revolts in the late 1st Century of hte Common Era.

The reality is that the portion of the Temple Mount Wall that is visible and exposed on th eWestern Wall Plaza is part of the expansions of hte Temple Precinct expanded by Herod the Great during the 1st Century BCE. There are other Herodian stones visible on the South and South Eastern sectionsof the Temple Mount Wall. So why has the Western Wall attained to this particular pride of place in the 20th Century? And it has only sense the establishent of the modern State of Israel that the Holiness of this section of the Wall has been declared. But there is strong evidence going back as far as the 4th Century that Jews were allowed by Byzantine Christian Emperors to return on the 9th of Av every year to pray in lament for the destruction of the Temple and that those prayers were carried out at the exposed stones of the Western Wall. In the 16th Century, the Muslim ruler Suleman the Magnificent guaranteed the right of Jews to pray in this place and built accommodations for these prayers there. But why here?

This portion of the Wall is very near the center (south to north) which is closest to the actual situation of the 2nd Temple (which is roughly where the Dome of the Rock sits now). Jews believed that the "Glory of God" (Shikinah)resided in particular way in the Holy-of-Holies in the Temple. That glory has never departed from the Temple, even with its destruction, so they want to get as close as they can to the actual place, believing that the Glory of God still dwells there. This appeals to the Catholic sensabilities as well. The whole of the Temple Mount would be Holy, but this is the exposed section of rock from the 2nd Temple Period that is closest to the actual site of the Holy-of-Holies- so it is holiest. The Jewish Community has turned it into a great open-air synagogue. Christian and Jewish Pilgrims come here by teh thousands each day to offer prayers and to leave votives.

In the weeks leading up to my departure from Tucson, I invited my parishioners at St. Thomas More Newman Center in Tucson to write prayers that I would deliver for them to the Wall. That was successful beyond my wildest imagining and I arrived here with more than 300 slips of papers with prayers for the wall! I am not a superstitious man at all (in fact I rail against what I consider superstitious customes within Catholicism), but I love many fo the sacramental customs of our faith. They are the means by which we use ordinary stuff (water, oil, ashes, bread, wine, etc.) to encounter the Holy. This is what the Wailing Wall is to me. It is a gigantic sacramental! Not wanting to be arrested for littering, I have been taking the prayers of my friends to the walls a little at time. So each time I go to the Kotel (as the Jewish community called the Western Wall), is also a time for connection with my friends in Tucson. I usually read some of the Psalms there and offer my prayers for our little community in Tucson. On Thursday I spent most of the afternoon in the Jewish Quarter and a little time at the Kotel. On Friday I was there again (I will write about that fun experience in another post). I plan to go again on Sunday. It has become one of my favorite places in Jerusalem. It is always busy with people and there is a certain social character to the plaza that surrounds the Kotel, but the Wall itself is a place of prayer - always and only. To those of you reading this blog who wrote prayers that I brought to Israel, know that I am diligently getting them there and I thank you for the opportunity to stay connected to you in this little way.