Women of the Wall

This morning I got up really early to head down to the Kotel for Women of the Wall’s monthly Rosh Chodesh minyan. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have made it: it was rainy and windy enough that my umbrella kept turning inside out; the friend who was supposed to go with me slept in; I wasn’t exactly awake at 5:50am when I had to leave the apartment; and I don’t really go out of my way for feminism in the first place. (Blame it on reading books and articles from the 1970s.) However, last month’s arrest of Nofrat Frankel made me determined to attend, if only to support a fellow queer Jew who wanted nothing more than to daven at the holiest Jewish place in the world. Besides, I haven’t been to shacharit for a while, and I miss singing Hallel.

As I mentioned, the weather was miserable, but there was still a nice group of us huddled together under umbrellas. Someone behind me commented that if they wanted to break up the Women of the Wall by arresting one of their members, they failed and did the opposite; I’m inclined to agree, since someone else said that this was the worst weather she could remember meeting in.

For the first few prayers, everything was fine. But by the time we got to Psalm 150, men were gathering next to the mechitza and behind the women’s section shouting something at us—maybe “ki va,” maybe “toeva,” maybe “give up.” Of these “toeva” makes the most sense, except that… it doesn’t. What were we doing wrong? We were on the women’s side of the wall. We were in the back, so we weren’t interfering with religious women who wanted to go up to the wall. We didn’t do any parts of the service which require a minyan, even though there were definitely at least a minyan of us there who count women. I saw very few women wearing tallitot, at least outside of their jackets (I didn’t even bring mine, since I was warned that being an American meant I could get deported if I made trouble) and while this is something Orthodoxy forbids, it isn’t listed as a toeva (abomination) in the Bible. Also, while one woman came up to us and started screaming, everyone else was a boy or a full-grown man standing on the periphery. They didn’t have to look at us. They didn’t even have to listen to us; we weren’t being very loud, and they certainly could have overpowered us with their own prayers rather than shouting at us. Of course, their shouting forced us to raise our volume; we spent the rest of the service struggling to hear where we were in the service, and when one of us picked it up we had to sing loudly to signal others of our place.

After we finished the Amidah, we headed—slowly, so as not to slip on the wet Jerusalem stones and drop the Torah—to Robinson’s Arch, the area designated for women and mixed groups to read from the Torah. The men followed us, still screaming, held back by the police. To drown out the screaming, we sang—Al HaNisim, Banu Choshech, Ahavah Raba, Esa Enai—songs of strength and hope. Because it was raining we were told we could read the Torah in a covered space near the Arch, but then that permission got revoked. “It’s an archeological site,” we were told, “tourists are going to be coming through.” (Even though the site didn’t open until 9am, and it wasn’t even 8:30 at this point.) We ended up going to the actual Arch, huddled once again under our umbrellas, where Nofrat Frankel chanted the Torah portion out of a chumash rather than risk the Torah getting wet. We, of course, did not get this privilege; I left the service soaked through multiple layers, and too cold and wet to walk to the bus stop. I paid 40NIS to take a taxi home, but at that point I didn’t care.

I’ve read people wonder why the Women of the Wall can’t be satisfied with praying at Robinson’s Arch in the first place, since it is, after all, still part of the Wall. But from what I saw this morning, I have to wonder how anyone can pray there. There’s just one long path leading up to the wall, no space to really gather. It is, after all, an archeological site and not a prayer site (but somehow still acceptable for us to use, and whereas the space indoors is not?) Imagine praying in a synagogue the width of your bathroom; that’s about the width of the space at the Arch. And they wonder why we can’t be content to pray there!

You may notice that I’ve been using the word “we” a lot in this entry. This is natural for an entry about an event I attended, but I feel like it’s more than that. As I get more and more fed up with the Orthodoxy of this city (more about that to come), I’ve come to identify with this group of women a little bit. All they want is to pray, once a month, at a holy site where some people pray every day. They’re not there to be disruptive; they just want to be themselves and practice their religion in a way that’s meaningful to them. And if this minyan is a way to carve out a little space each month to do that, and in the process perhaps show those bigots that there are other people in this world who are entitled to pray at the Kotel too, all the more power to them. They’re not meeting next month—nor will I be here—but come February, I’m definitely going again.

If anyone is interested, the New York Times ran an article about this same minyan. I'm under the rainbow umbrella, and no it isn't mine.

Added 11 March 2010 - Youtube now has two videos from the December meeting of Women of the Wall. The first gives the overall experience (minus the bulk of the service where we were being screamed at); the second shows the Haredi reaction to our davening.