Jew Prays, Is Arrested

We should all be outraged. On Tuesday, October 13, a Jew in the Middle East was arrested, shackled, stripped and roughed up for praying the Shema in public.  As it happens, the Middle Eastern country in question is the State of Israel, and the Jew was“>showed that he does have a sense of humor in his address to Hadassah, saying, “I will never tolerate discrimination of women.”)

Anat was leading the group in the Shema when she was arrested. The brutality with which she was treated is indefensible.  She was shackled and strip searched, made to sleep on a floor, with only her tallis for covering.

I met Anat Hoffman on a trip to Israel with my synagogue.   She sold me my most beautiful tallis, embroidered in red and purple and gold, with tributes to the Four Mothers at its corners.  She spoke to our group about her passion for Torah and prayer, about wanting the Western Wall to be a space where all Jews can worship freely and the full range of Judaism is appreciated.

My own experiences at the wall were…complicated.  I knew, of course, that we would be split up according to a male/female binary, but the experience of it was wrenching.  I thought about transgender and intersexed people I know and wondered how they’d feel in my place.  I imagined someone immobilized in the upper plaza as the hour grew late, trying to work out which of two lines to join; imagined trying to explain to the police who guard the Kotel why ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is an inadequate menu of choices.
Our group of provisional females made it into the women’s section, past the shnorers, to the wall where women sat in silent devotion, read t’hilim or shuckled, close to the stones.  I placed the brief prayer I had written into the wall and then pressed my palm and forehead to the Kotel.

I was utterly unprepared for what happened then: I burst into tears.  My conscious mind was horrified, jabbering in embarrassment, arguing frantically with whatever atavistic presence from my psyche had taken control:

“Okay, so this is a little excessive, right? Don’t you think this mystique of place is a retreat from radical monotheism?  Do you think really think God can be concentrated in a bunch of material stuff?  Suck it up, already.  You know this wasn’t even part of the real Temple, right, just a retaining wall for Herod’s Folly, the expanded edifice of a vain unpopular king?”

“Waa-ah.”

“You know if you were visibly genderqueer, you couldn’t even be here without passing, right?”

“(sniff) yeah.”

“You know you only have a nice plaza to have this catharsis in because an Arab neighborhood was torn down to make room for it, right?”

“(gulp)yes.”

“Do you even want a sacrificial Temple back?”

“…”

What’s the deal with charged space?  How can one place be holier than anyplace else when God is everywhere?  How much of the charge is about God and how much is the freight of human projections and needs? Even for this smarty-pants student, the Kotel is way over-determined.  It gets around the rational part of people.

That can make for crazy.  Since the 1967 war, there have actually been voices in Israel calling for the destruction of the Al Aqsa Mosque, a house of worship which is now situated on the Temple Mount, oblivious to the carnage such vandalism would provoke.  The Documentary