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. Today is Tisha B’Av, the day when we communally bemoan all the bad and ugly things that have happened to our Jewish community over the course of our long history. Many Jews fast on Tisha B’Av, and read from the book of Eicha, or Lamentations. We mourn the myriad of terrible events that have happened in these few days - from the destruction of both Jewish Temples, to the expulsions of Jews from Spain, England, and France, all the way up through to the Holocaust and modern antisemitism. We do all this and we pray for Jerusalem to one day be a Jewish city again.

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

I would like to posit that perhaps we’re not praying for a literal return to the realities of the kingdom of Judea and the time of the Temples. Most Jews I know are not hoping to restore the practice of animal sacrifice. Instead, but we are looking for is 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 an orgainization called Women of the Wall. Women of the Wall strives to “achieve the right to wear prayer shawls, pray and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall (Kotel) in Jerusalem, Israel. The Western Wall is Judaism’s most sacred holy site and the principal symbol of Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty, and Women of the Wall works to make it a holy site where women can pray freely.” The service I attended was absolutely beautiful, it was a Bat Mitzvah full of joy. 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 Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews tried to drown us out. From the men’s side of the Kotel they screamed, and on the women’s side they yelled and protested. 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. 

As an American, Reconstructionist Jew who grew up with a woman Rabbi, this was incomprehensible. Why would people, and other Jews no less, care that we were praying? Especially at this holy site where people travel to from far and wide to… pray? How could my practice of Judaism be misunderstood so deeply by people in my own community?

Jewish tradition upholds the principle that constructive disagreement for the sake of heaven (Mahloket L’Shem Shamayim), is not only imperative but the holy work needed to repair what can feel like irreconcilable differences that permeate within our Jewish communities. Guided by the belief that Jewish texts and their diverse interpretations can empower us to engage more constructively in disagreements today, Pardes runs a fellowship called Mahloket Matters which I participated in this past spring. In that fellowship, I learned about something called “Moral Foundations Theory”, which proposes that there are several innate and universally available psychological systems that are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. 

According to this theory, I share the exact 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’re going to have to open up and try to understand each others’ points of view.