Every Rosh Chodesh (first day of a Hebrew month), a group called the "Women of the Wall" (WOW) gathers to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. You can read a brief history of this groundbreaking group here. Although they remain limited to the "women's section" of the Wall, these women have been victims of harassment and violence for daring to do things like sing psalms and read from a Torah scroll in public.
Yesterday, Anat Hoffman, a longtime leader in WOW and Executive Director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), was arrested during WOW's monthly prayer service and questioned for several hours by the police. Her arrest was captured on video:
Sad, infuriating...unsurprising. As you can see, Anat was arrested for carrying a Torah (while being a woman). The struggle of women to be allowed to pray openly at one of the holiest sites of the Jewish world is intimately connected to the struggle of Liberal and Reform Jews to achieve equal rights in the State of Israel. Events like this stress the bond between American Jews and Israel and threaten the Jewish future.
We are reminded once again why our support of IRAC and the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism is so important.
Watching the video was painful and humiliating. And yet, I felt compassion for the Israeli cops who knew with certainty that if they failed to intervene, a tide of shrieking ultra-orthodox men would surely descend like hornets, physically assaulting the Women of the Wall. I remember vividly my first visit to the Wall. It was the summer of 88. I was with my wife--at the time a very strong young woman with a short fuse in the face of ignorance. As she prayed and began placing paper prayers in the Wall, an ultra-orthodox man rushed, screaming toward her with his arms outstretched. I stepped between them, grabbed him by his shoulders and asked if he spoke English. He said yes and I told him that if I had not stopped him and he had put his hands on my wife, she would have punched him so hard his head would have cracked. His eyes filled with fear and he fled. I told Cynthia that she needed to hurry up because the man was sure to come back with reinforcements. We got out just in time as a tide of black coats came screaming toward the woman who dared defile Their Wall. A woman whose family helped establish the State and whose generosity has helped build hospitals and forests. In the latest arrest of Anat Hoffman police reacted as though she is a threat to the security of the State. And as outrageous as that sounds, it is true in the sense that Anat and those of us who think the way she does, are indeed an intellectual challenge to the status quo in which loony fanatics are allowed to make a daily mockery of the bedrock notion of Jews being free to worship in Israel. Have you ever tried to explain to concerned non-Jews why the haredim are permitted to live their bizarre lives and wield their destructive influence? I find it endlessly embarrassing. I am forced to say that the haredim exist under the protection of the IDF which includes thousands of armed, courageous Jewish women (of course, none of theirs), I am compelled to admit that the haredim bleed the State of welfare funds while they continue to denounce the existence of the State of Israel. For non-Jewish friends of Israel, it is easy to understand those Jews who wish the haredim would somehow find a way to someplace else--perhaps a nice unoccupied island of the Azores where they could invite Saudi and Iranian conservatives to join them in a Community of True Belief. When non-Jewish friends of Israel have asked for my opinion on how to deal with the haredim and the terrible divisiveness that the Jewish extremists bring to Isarael, I can only say that many conferences of much smarter Jews than this one have tried and failed to come up with anything that even resembles a way out.
ReplyDeleteThe last time I was at the Wall (two years ago) there was a Bar Mitzvah going on, and the child's mother, sisters, aunts, etc. were all standing precariously on folding chairs on the women's side trying to look over the mechitza to catch at least a glimpse of the Bar Mitzvah boy. It was ironic since I've seen photographs of how the Wall looked back in the early 1900s, and both men and women were standing together and praying there together. The mechitza is a actually a fairly new addition to the Wall - the Wall was never considered an Orthodox shul back then.
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