Today I visited ha'Kotel for the very first time.
It was much more intense than I could have imagined it being.
Even though I prepared myself for strong emotions there, at the place now called the Wailing Wall, I wasn't quite ready for the wave of grief that swept over me. All around me were women-- Orthodox, modern, little girls in jeans skirts, women my age in jeans, babushkas, mothers with little babies-- praying. Though I always knew why this was such an important place to the Jewish people, I had never really felt the greatness of the tragedy which overcame them. To have a covenant with God, to be gifted as the only nation with that, and then lose it? There are no words to describe the horror, the pain, the brokenness.
No words-- but all those emotions were captured and manifested in the prayers of the women at the Wailing Wall. Whether they were rocking and praying through their books, praying quietly, praying in broken whispers, sobbing out prayers, they all were crying out the heartbreak of hundreds of generations of their people.
And I cried, too, because the remedy to their pain dwells within me, but many-- most-- of them . . . don't want Him.
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