Thursday, my school took us on a tiyul (trip) to the tunnels under the Western Wall–that is, to steal from my friend Geoff’s blog of said same event, they are “the part of the western retaining wall of the Jerusalem Temple complex which has been obscured from view for many centuries by the arches and buildings built above it.” Geoff’s writeup is good and has a lot of great history, so I won’t repeat what he said–rather, I’ll quote egregiously from it:

The Temple Mount complex was built by Herod in the 1st Century B.C.E., and the main street and marketplace of Jerusalem ran along its western wall. Long after the destruction of the Temple, Mamluk builders (after Saladin’s conquest in 1187) sought to raise up the level of the city to the level of the Temple Mount plaza, and filled the area below with arches in order to support the new city above. Thanks to the Israeli excavations of the past thirty-five years, it is now possible to walk below those arches along what was once a wide, main street open to the sky at the foot of the Western Wall, and to see the original stones put in place by Herod’s builders.

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Per usual, I’m going to be more interested in navelgazing focusing on my own weird impressions of stuff anyway.

There isn’t a ton to say, actually. I was excited about going, partly because the idea of running around underneath the Kotel (Western Wall) always seemed so mysteeeeerious and coooool, partly because I am professionally a dork when it comes to old stuff, and partly–well, I’ll get to the third part in a sec.

I think living in Jerusalem has made me spoiled when it comes to this sort of thing. Sure, we were tromping around more than 2000 year-old stuff, with peeps of stones that date back to the First Temple, even (so figure at least 2700 years old, maybe older) and I didn’t feel as though my world was being rocked. It was cool to get a bit more history on all this Temple business than I had before, but the whole thing felt very intellectual.

The guide was great–very smart and thorough. She walked us through some of the tunnelege and then sat us in front of a little model of the Temple space so that we could get a sense of where we were and how it all fit together. This is a view of everything as though you were looking at the Western Wall, You can see how there’s a top part of the wall and a bottom part, with the stairs on the left taking you from the lower area? The lower part is where all the merchants and main economic drag used to be, and the upper part is now the ground/street level.
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Mostly, it was walking around stone tunnels. Old stones = cool, but I didn’t have a strong reaction to being there or anything. Dude, neat. Okay. Now what?

I was, however, thoroughly amused by the way they created protection around the tunnels for those who were taller than 5′4″ (not that I needed it, but some of my classmates sure did):

The other draw for me (number three, as it were) is the fact that inside the tunnels, there’s a wall on the other side of which is the Holy of Holies, the stone that is considered in Judaism, among other things, the foundation-stone of the world.

I had been up into Dome of the Rock [which is where the Holy of Holies “actually” is] once, when I was in Israel last time (summer 2000, right before the second Intifada broke out) and it had been a pretty intense experience. As I’ve noted in this blog before, some spaces carry a particular kind of charge, and the space that has been the singular focal point of religious and spiritual activity and devotion by many many many millions of people over thousands of years can’t not have that charge. We’ll never know what that space was like before 2500 + years ago, but its power now is absolutely undeniable. Walking into Dome of the Rock, I felt like I was walking into a swimming pool–the juju there was so thick I practically couldn’t breathe. I’ve never experienced anything else like it, before or since. And I don’t expect to, frankly.

Given the extremely sad state of the world today, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to try to go up there now (nor, actually, do I have much desire–God being everywhere, and all), I was curious to see what things were like over on this other spot.

In reality? Yeah. There was a lot of juju. An awful lot, I could tell right away as we neared the spot and the wall itself was practically vibrating. Know what else? Not all of that juju felt like good juju, or clean juju. Just as I could feel its strength, I could also feel a lot of funkiness–whether that was because many desperate and sad people had prayed there, because of the pain and suffering that the place has encountered more generally over the years, or because of something else, I dunno. But it didn’t feel like it was all filtered into being something with which I’d like to connect. I hung out with it for a minute, and then I was decidedly ready to move the heck on.

Holy sites are funny. Philosopher Yeshayahou Leibowitz called the Kotel the “discotel” and accused people of using the Wall for idolatry, of trying to find God in a concrete thing. On the one hand, I absolutely understand his critique and sometimes feel the same way. On the other hand–well, what is a holy site, anyway? Is it a site that has particular holiness intrinsically? Is it holy because we have chosen to ascribe to it a certain meaning? Is ascribing meaning a bad thing? As a religious Jew, I’d say no–there are things I do every day, every week, that are based on the assumption that they have meaning, but, to follow the Rambam for a moment, they have meaning because it’s been decided that they do. And that meaning is extremely important.

Ultimately, I don’t have a mission statement about the Kotel, the Holy of Holies or the tunnels under the Wall right now. How I feel about these spaces keeps changing and shifting and will continue to do so, over the course of my life. This is a good thing. I’m grateful that I have access to some of the places that are considered most sacred in my tradition, and that I have the opportunity to engage and struggle with and interrogate my relationship with them. Both of these things are, historically speaking, tremendous luxuries, and I’m aware of it.

For now, I don’t feel a strong pull to go daven at the Kotel–usually when I go to the Old City these days, it’s to visit a friend who lives in the Arab Quarter, and most of the rest of the time I remain comfortably ensconced in the nouveau parts of 21st-century West Jerusalem. *shrug* Of course, how these things work is that the moment that I’m on the plane back to America, I’ll be sobbing my sentimental little eyes out about leaving the old stuff. Isn’t that always how it works?