What I Saw In The Holy Land, 18This is the Wailing Wall, of course. We couldn't take pictures because we arrived on the Sabbath, so you'll have to simply imagine the rows of chairs put out for people to pray, and the rows upon rows of women (of course I couldn't enter the men's side) sitting or standing, leaning against the wall to utter their prayers.
I was surprised to learn this is not actually a wall of the Temple itself, but a retaining wall built by Herod the Great when he expanded the temple area. Nevertheless, pious Jews believe it remains standing because the presence of God is here, and they come here to speak directly to God --or to leave their petitions in pieces of paper stuck into crevices of the wall. It was a great joy to me to be able to pray here. I recited Psalm 122, the prayer for Jerusalem, and then prayed for my family --especially the Jewish side-- and left all their names with a short petition on a paper in the wall. When I told my brother this later (although we were raised in our mom's evangelical faith, our blood's about 1/8 Jewish --which doesn't cut it for the Rabbis, but was Jewish enough for the ovens, as we like to note), he said with pride he felt "extra Jewish" knowing his name is in the wall. Me too.
Theoretically, the current intifada, is a reaction against Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in 2000. It can be demonstrated from comments made by various imams at the time that in fact the intifada was planned in advance, but it's a bizarre claim even on its face. There are visiting hours when tourists are permitted to visit the Temple Mount, and Sharon went during regular hours and never tried to enter a mosque or anything like that. The people who should have been offended were pious Jews, who are told not to go to the Temple Mount because no one knows for sure where the holiest places were, and due to the impossibility of performing the ritual ablutions before entering. And the entire reason the al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock exist is because a pious caliph named Omar was horrified to find the ruins of the Temple of Solomon --whom Muslims revere as a prophet-- being used as a refuse heap when Muslims took Jerusalem. In other words, the site is holy to Muslims --and Mohammed visited there-- precisely because it was the place of the temple. That was the orthodox Muslim view until the 1990s, when suddenly the imams started denying the Temple was ever there and claiming offense at Jewish use of the site.
I bring this up here because the Palestinian Christians impressed upon us the need for the Western press to face reality about the source of current troubles in their land: namely, the radical imams, who spread a virulent version of Islam for their own corrupt political purposes. It's not, according to people I spoke with, a matter of Arab v. Jew or even religion against religion, but one strain of Islam against everyone else.
