jackie_travels

I didn't have a note to leave in the Wall, but I touched it anyway. Almost immediately a stranger's elbow was in the back of my neck. A sandal rubbed against the blister on my heel. I tried to focus on the solemnity of the moment, the fact that I was standing here on this miserably hot September day touching a stone that millions of people had touched before me after they, too, had journeyed across the world to see the Wailing Wall.

Whenever I'd imagined pilgrims flocking to a religious site, I hadn't pictured this amount of chaos -- like an actual flock of birds, pecking and crying and moving in all directions. Bits of every language surrounded me -- Bible verses recited in Hebrew, prayers whispered for loved ones in French, a familiar American accent made almost incoherent by sobs. The person who'd rubbed my heel murmured a quick 'Excuse me!' but didn't stop to survey the damage. She passed under my arm to an open space on the Wall and I watched as she took a note from the pocket of her bag and reached up, on her tiptoes, to a place she could barely reach. She sank down again and stared up at the note for a few seconds before turning to push her way out, exactly as she'd come.

The woman on the other side of me -- we were all women, all of us separated from the men by a makeshift fence -- hadn't stopped sobbing since I'd pushed my way to the front. I'd never seen anyone cry like that, not even in the movies, crying from every single inch of her body. She was half bent over, getting pushed from all directions. She kept crying. I'm not sure she even knew we were there.

Behind me were several chairs and a bin of Bibles, presumably for reading and reflection. A few women were trying to accomplish exactly this, but not even the chairs were safe from the flock -- they were pushed aside, used as leverage to get over the crowd, treated mostly as barriers rather than props.

Before this, I'd imagined this visit would be a quiet, reflective one. I was not religious, but I'd had faith in the history of this monument, in the fact that it was simply this great, controversial, ancient thing that had somehow survived us despite all we've done to destroy each other.

But no, this Wall has earned its name. Of all the terms I've used to try to describe it -- passionate, loud, chaotic, emotional-- 'wailing' is the only one that seems to encompass everything, to describe in two syllables what that woman had looked like when her entire heart had been breaking her in half.