At The Kotel

Jerusalem
Davened kabbalat shabbat and shachrit at the Kotel. We also went to the Kotel Thursday night, spur-of-the-moment. Max joined us for our first dinner in Israel and then we went back to the hotel room. (Underwhelming accomodations, to say the least.) Saul and Max explored Israeli TV – in particular, discovering billiards as a televised sport on EuroSport while I reviewed hotel options. And then Max: “Why don’t we go down to the Kotel.” Saul was immediately game, and I felt far more energized than I expected after our 17 hour airline journey. What better way to initiate Saul’s first experience in Israel?

We entered the Kotel from the Jewish quarter, first passing the giant menorah fashioned by the Torah Institute (more on this later). There are few views as thrilling as the first view of the Kotel from the top of the steps leading to the security check point. I get a similar thrill from the Manhattan skyline whenever I visit it. Yet I realized yesterday the breath-losing moments between Manhattan and the Kotel to be completely and obviously different.

Yet the first time I visited the Kotel, 20 years ago, I found it completely underwhelming. I felt obligated to feel something, and instead felt nothing. But the Kotel is not a hotel room one can change and thereby discard (as we will do with this one). I kept coming back and built a relationship with it.

Surprisingly, visiting the Kotel with Saul was immediately and immensely meaningful. I had resolved to let Saul have his own experience with it; I thus made no fatherly prologues or raised the issue for discussion. We simply went to it. I did have in mind to share with him my own disappointment at my first visit. But the comment was never needed. Saul approached the huge space with a kind of silence, taking it all in. We went down into the men’s area and lingered a bit, Max sharing some details about recent archaeological discoveries. And then Saul, on his own and without any comment, walked up to the Kotel and touched it. “That was so cool,” he said when he returned. He described an intense feeling, a kind of electricity, coming through his fingers and palms and up his forearm. I started crying, silently, to myself. Visiting the Kotel had never been this powerful for me before.
Then, davening today, again feeling a tremendous sense of connection as we davened, I had a chance to reflect on why I found visiting with Saul and Max so intense. I realized that on all my prevous visits to the Kotel I had been alone. When Vicki and I came on our honeymoon she obviously could not come with me; we had parallel expriences, not connected ones. During the year I lived in Israel I had no friends or framily to visit with; again, personal and isolated.

Today I visited with my family. I met Max the day I met Vicki, and Vicki and I were soon babysitting him. I bathed him, played with him, watched ET with him the first time he saw it (he cried when ET seemed to die). And Saul, well, of course, he’s my son. Saul and Max became their own conduits uniting me with the Kotel. More than conduits: continuity. This was no longer a lonely and finite experience. Now it was shared, and visiting the Kotel would continue beyond me, through Max and through Saul. I was no longer an individual visiting the Kotel. Now I was a piece in the larger puzzle of Jewish history. Saul and Max completed me.
But this realization was only a prelude to the true climax of the day. I saw Max, mensch among mensch’s, whispering with the gabbai during the Torah service. And then Max came over to where Saul and I stood and announced that Saul would be getting an aliyah. Saul asked to borrow my talit. I could not have given it to him more proudly, just as I could not have stood more joyfully watching Saul chant the blessings. I wished I were a painter, because I wanted to record this scene after shabbat so as to never forget it.

Instead I tried to burnish it in my memory. I stared intensely at the scene. Saul, standing tall next to the short ba’al koreah. And to Saul’s left, a chasid wrapped with a talit over his head, leaning down over a tenach as gabbai shenei. To the left, in the distance on top of the buildings of the Jewish quarter, the Israeli flag waved. It’s stripes could not have been more blue. Suddenly a light projected up from the torah scroll. I would have to use chiaroscuro if I were to paint this. And I noticed the clouds had just parted, dropping a ray of sunlight.
Saul handed me back my talit and I shook his hand, saying yashir koach. As I did I wondered why I had no impulse to hug him. Max shook his hand and I heard Saul say to Max, a trace of embarassment in his voice, ‘My dad was crying.’ He turned to me. ‘Weren’t you?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, and knew instantly why I didn’t move to hug him. Saul may have just had an aliyah at the holiest Jewish site in the world. But he was still my teenage son, who doesn’t do hugs. But I have my memory. And now Saul has his. Which is forever – thank you for that, Max. If Saul got forever, I didn’t need a hug.

Museum Moments

The Torah Institute dedicates itself to creating the holy objects that would be needed if a third Temple is ever built. It placed a stunning example of its work at the top of the stairs that lead from the Jewish Quarter down to the Kotel plaza: a giant menorah, somehow made from a single piece of gold. The menorah is encased it what appears to be bullet-proof plexiglass. Next to the display is a small plaque, in Hebrew and English, that explain little more than what I just did.
As has happened elsewhere on this trip (see the Atlanta airport, and the Great Synagogue), the menorah presentaed a Museum moment. And it taught me two things.

One, when I looked closely at the menorah, I noticed a few spider-web strings afixed to some of the branches. And when Max, Saul, and I started talking about the object, we came up with a few basic questions that the sparse text did not begin to address. The combination of these two limitations undercut the value of the display. The cobwebs are a simple maintenance issue. Easily fixed, and a spur to me to concentrate more on maintenance of the L.A. Museum. The plaque issue demonstrated to me how important it is to choose carefully what facts need to be presented with an object. Clearly, it would have been as limiting if the plaque over-explained all the details of the menorah. But the presenters would heighten the viewers’ experiences if they attempted to anticipate 2 or 3 basic questions. This information would help viewers digest or contextuallize what they were seeing.