Tisha B'Av at the Kotel

A week ago, I prayed at the Kotel for Rosh Chodesh Av, the new Hebrew month of Av. Av is a strange month in that it begins with mourning. The first nine days of Av are dedicated to mourning rituals, all leading up to Tisha B’Av. Tonight begins Tisha B’Av, the day when we bemoan all the bad things that have happened to Jews over the course of our long history. We pray for Jerusalem to one day be a Jewish city again.

What? Jerusalem has been a Jewish city for almost 50 years now. Why are we still praying for its return?

Perhaps we’re not praying for a literal return to the realities of the kingdom of Judea and the time of the Temples. Instead, we are looking for something we have lodged in our collective imaginations. We’re longing for a world where we can practice our Judaism, live in community, and feel safe. And after all, isn’t peace what all humans want?

It’s ironic then that my prayer at the Kotel, the holiest Jewish site, felt anything but peaceful. I celebrated Rosh Chodesh Av with @womenofthewall The service I attended was absolutely beautiful, the lack of peace was not based in prayer, but rather in the response of other Jews who came to protest it. 

As the probably 30 of us prayed in a tightly knit circle, wrapping tefillin and lifting our voices in prayer, a mob of probably a thousand more traditional Jews tried to drown us out. Young girls shrieked each time we began to sing, and an older woman yelled in Hebrew, calling us whores and terrible names and claiming that we were taking money from Nazis to desecrate the holy site. 

This was incomprehensible. Why would people, and other Jews no less, care that we were praying? Especially at this holy site where people travel from far and wide to… pray? How could my practice of Judaism be misunderstood so deeply by other Jews?

Jewish tradition upholds the principle that constructive disagreement for the sake of heaven is needed to repair what can feel like irreconcilable differences within our Jewish communities. Guided by the belief that Jewish texts and their diverse interpretations can empower us to engage more constructively in disagreements, @pardesinstitute runs #MahloketMattersFellowship which I participated in this past spring. There, I learned about “Moral Foundations Theory”, which proposes that there are several innate/universally available psychological systems that are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, creating different moralities.

By this theory, I share the same moral values with the Jews who berated me at the Kotel. I simply weigh them differently. I value care over authority- how people feel when they pray is more important to me than whether they say the words exactly as they are written in the Siddur. I can understand, at least logically, that someone who believes in a G!d who punishes based on correct recitation of those words would be deeply upset when exposed to a different community's version of prayer. As somebody who values liberty highly it’s also hard for me to understand their desire to stop me from praying, but if I imagine that their goal is to improve my life somehow and suddenly I can understand their actions through a lens of loyalty to me as a fellow Jew. 

On Tisha B’Av we mourn our painful past as a community and we yearn for a better future. To achieve that future, we must open up and try to understand each others’ points of view.