Crying time again.

Jews place of wailing - W.H. Bartlett c. 1842

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
   ‘May they prosper who love you.
 Peace be within your walls,
   and security within your towers.’
 For the sake of my relatives and friends
   I will say, ‘Peace be within you.’
Psalm 122.6


I need to get a few things straight. I am not a believer. I also do not think for a minute that members of my tribe are "chosen people." If there is an almighty lurking out there somewhere, I think that he or she probably has more important things on his or her plate to be concerned with than mere matters of real estate and simple lot line disputes.

Still, the Palestinian Authority study released this week that maintains that the Western or Wailing Wall in Jerusalem has an invented place in jewish history sort of rankles the shit out of me. It is another instance of cultural revisionism that will go unchallenged at a time when politicized international groups like the United Nations and UNESCO only respond to a narrative of a victimized moslem world and can only see Jews and Israelis as ruthless occupiers. Not to deny that the lot of the Palestinians has been wretched of late, although an argument can certainly be made that much of their agony is self inflicted.

Written by Al-Mutawakel Taha, a Palestinian Information Ministry official, the study states that “the Al Buraq Wall is the western wall of Al Aksa, which the Zionist occupation falsely claims ownership of and calls the Wailing Wall or Kotel.”      

According to the study, the Western Wall, which the Palestinians call Al-Buraq wall and say is an integral part of the Al-Aksa Mosque, is not made of even one stone from the era of King Solomon. Taha also wrote that the Jews never used the site for worship until the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

“This wall was never part of the so-called Temple Mount, but Muslim tolerance allowed the Jews to stand in front of it and weep over its destruction,” he wrote.

Well, thank g-d for Muslim tolerance. Palestinians have long denied any claim of jewish origins of the temple. This study comes on the heels of a similar statement by UNESCO that reclassifies Rachel's Tomb as a Mosque and also now lists the Tomb of the Patriarchs as a Moslem site. This is all part of a long standing effort in the arab world and in the international community to continue to de-judaize the middle east.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) decided last week to relabel as an Islamic mosque the tomb of Rachel, one of Israel’s matriarchs, and demanded that Israel remove the site from its National Heritage list. UNESCO also said Israel had no right to add the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where most of the rest of Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs are buried, to the National Heritage list.

Permit to to indulge in a little history lesson. First of all both Islam and Christianity are what is known as completion religions. Completion religions find it easier to appropriate another belief system than to reinvent the wheel with their own divine pantheon. My tribe started worshipping g-d about 5771 years ago. Mohammed was born in 570ce and died in 632. Or about 3129 years after our first trip through the desert from the land of Ur if you are counting at home. These Islamic Johnny-come-lately's chose to build their Mosque of Omar directly on top of our Temple Mount, a practice I saw repeated at Acoma when the Spanish priests built their churches on top of the sacred pueblo kivas. That is translated as "we piss on your god" in spiritual parlance.

Culled from various sources, including Wickipedia:

The Wailing or "Western" Wall is located in the Old City of Jerusalem at the foot of the Temple Mount. 

It is a remnant of the wall that surrounded the Jewish Temple's Courtyard and is one of the most scared sites of Judaism.Over half the wall, including approximately 17 courses located below street level, dates from the end of the Second Temple period, being constructed around 19 BCE by Herod the Great. The remaining layers were added from the 7th century onwards. The Western Wall refers not only to the exposed section facing a large plaza in the Jewish Quarter, but also to the sections concealed behind structures running along the whole length of the Temple Mount.

Solomon's Temple was built atop the Temple Mount in the 10th century BCE and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The Second Temple was completed and dedicated in 516 BCE. In around 19 BCE Herod the Great began a massive expansion project on the Temple Mount. He artificially expanded the area which resulted in an enlarged platform. Today's Western Wall formed part of the retaining perimeter wall of this platform. Herod's Temple was destroyed by the Roman Empire, along with the rest of Jerusalem, in 70 CE during the First Jewish-Roman War.

Roman defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, Jews were banned from Jerusalem. There is some evidence that Roman emperors in the 2nd and 3rd centuries did permit them to visit the city to worship on the Mount of Olives and sometimes on the Temple Mount itself. When the empire became Christian under Constantine I, they were given permission to enter the city once a year, on the ninth day of the month of Av, to lament the loss of the Temple at the wall. The Bordeaux Pilgrim, written in 333 CE, suggests that it was probably to the perforated stone or the Rock of Moriah, "to which the Jews come every year and anoint it, bewail themselves with groans, rend their garments, and so depart". This was because an Imperial decree from Rome barred Jews from living in Jerusalem. Just once per year they were permitted to return and bitterly grieve about the fate of their people. Comparable accounts survive, including those by the Church Father, Gregory of Nazianzus and by Jerome in his commentary to Zephaniah written in the year 392 CE. In the 4th century, Christian sources reveal that the Jews encountered great difficulty in buying the right to pray near the Western Wall, at least on the 9th of Av. In 425 CE, the Jews of the Galilee wrote to Byzantine empress Aelia Eudocia seeking permission to pray by the ruins of the Temple. Permission was granted and they were officially permitted to resettle in Jerusalem.

Muslims identify the Western Wall as the place where the Islamic prophet Muhammad tethered his winged steed, Buraq. The tradition is first referred to in a manuscript by Ibn Furkah (d. 1328) stating that Buraq was tethered outside Bab al-Nab, an old name for a gate along the southwestern wall of the Haram al-Sharif at the very spot presently known as Al-Buraq.

The first reports of arabization of the area near the wall date to about 1320ce with the creation of the Mograhbi Quarter. 

The Likutim instructs that "when one sees the Gates of Mercy which are situated in the Western Wall, which is the wall King David built, he should recite:

    Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the nations: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the Lord" — Book of Lamentations 2:9


There is a mountain of information that refers to the wall and its connection to judaism written between the fifth century and today. Jews have returned to this holiest of sites for centuries to weep over the destruction of their temple. Archaeologists have found a multitude of discoveries that illustrate the wall's connection to the temple and to the jewish people.

I first visited the wall in the mid 1970's and immediately felt its importance to my tribe, deep in my heart, seeing the men writing their notes and prayers on small pieces of paper and slipping them in between the joints in the rocks as they dovened and prayed.

The British set up a committee of inquiry and consequently an international committee (consisting of a Swede, a Swiss, and a Dutchman) was appointed by the League of Nations to resolve "the problem of the Wall". It conducted in Jerusalem, in the summer of 1930, "the trial of the Wall". The commission concluded that the Muslims had absolute ownership of the Wall. However, the Jews had the uncontested right to worship and to place seats in the street, though not to blow the shofar there. The Arabs objected, and the Jews agreed, except for the last point, considering it a humiliation. Each year nationalist youths would blow the shofar near the wall at the termination of Yom Kippur, which would always lead to the intervention of the British police. 

 During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the Old City together with the Wall was captured by Jordan. Article VIII of the 1949 Armistice Agreement provided for Israeli Jewish access to the Western Wall. However for the following nineteen years, despite numerous requests by Israeli officials and Jewish groups to the United Nations and other international bodies to attempt to enforce the armistice agreement, Jordan refused to abide by this clause as part of a policy of Islamization. Neither jews or Israelis were permitted to visit the wall.

My father and other Israelis tell me that during the period between the War of Independence and the 1967 War, the Jordanians allowed their livestock to defecate near the wall and left the area in shambles. When it was finally captured, soldiers cleared away a toilet that had been affixed to the wall itself. Where was the international community then?

Jewish tradition teaches that the Western Wall was built by King David and that the wall we see today is built upon his foundations, which date from the time of the First Temple. Jewish midrashic texts compiled in Late Antiquity refer to a western wall of the Temple which “would never be destroyed.”Some scholars were of the opinion that this referred to a wall of the Temple itself which has long since vanished. Others believed that the wall still stood and was actually a surviving wall of the Temple courtyard. However, today there is no doubt that the wall is the western retaining wall of the Temple Mount and the Midrash refers to the Temple in its broader sense, that is, the Temple Mount. Jewish sources teach that when Roman Emperor Vespasian ordered the destruction of the Temple, he ordered Pangar, Duke of Arabia, to destroy the Western Wall. Pangar however could not destroy the wall because of God's promise that the Wall will never be destroyed. When asked by Titus why he did not destroy it, Pangar replied that it would stand as a reminder of what Titus had conquered. He was duly executed. There is a tradition that states that when water starts trickling through the stones of the Wall, it is a signal of the advent of the Messiah.

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kaindenover discusses the mystical aspect of the Hebrew word kotel when discussing the significance of praying against a wall. He cites the Zohar which writes that the word kotel, meaning wall, is made up of two parts: "Ko", which has the numerical value of God’s name, and "Tel", meaning mount, which refers to the Temple and its Western Wall.

Jewish sources, including the Zohar, write that the Divine Presence rests upon the Western Wall. The Midrash quotes a 4th century scholar: “Rav Acha said that the Divine Presence has never moved away from the Western Wall”. 18th century scholar Jonathan Eybeschutz writes that “after the destruction of the Temple, God removed His Presence from His sanctuary and placed it upon the Western Wall where it remains in its holiness and honour”. It is told that great Jewish sages, including Isaac Luria and the Radvaz, experienced a revelation of the Divine Presence at the wall.

Irrespective of how you feel about Israel, or jewish people, or religion in general, it is impossible to deny the Jewish people's link to the land of Israel. There is a wealth of archaeological records that bears witness to our origins and presence. It would be a travesty if Islamic revisionists are allowed to warp historical truth in their attempts to somehow ethnically and culturally cleanse the mideast of its jewish roots.

A rare Hebrew seal from the First Temple period, discovered in archaeological excavations in the Western Wall .