At the Western Wall

Today I went to the Western Wall. As I knelt with my hands on the wall, a woman came and stood beside me and began weeping her heart out to God.

Listening to her heart-wrenching cries to Adonai, I could see on the ground beneath me countless slips of paper: crumpled, folded, some covered with a hurried Hebrew scrawl and others neatly printed. The prayers of other pilgrims offered up here to Yahweh. Drops of water in between slips marked the tears of the woman standing in my place before me.

Mostly I just felt and was moved and knelt in the Presence of God and the precious Hebrew women around me. Why do I always think I need words? There’s something so beautiful about just weeping in prayer before God. I just felt so...cleansed.

I wanted more than anything to wrap my arms around the weeping woman beside me. The language and cultural barriers suddenly seemed so insignificant. "As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD our God, till he shows us his mercy…pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge."*

She’s not the only one. The aching and searching and longing in her heart must be so real for many who come to this site where God once dwelt tangibly on earth with man, now ancient remains.

If only they knew the glorious hope that awaits and is available to them. A verse that was impressed on my heart as I knelt there was Revelation 21:2-4: “‎I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband...They will be His people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:2-4).

The promises of long ago that God made for His people here remain. They just haven’t been fully realized yet. But they have been secured for them by the Lamb, if they will receive Him and His hope.

Even now, there is more than just weeping at this place. On the other side of the wall dividing the men’s and women’s quarters, several bar mitzvah’s were taking place with much rejoicing. The women stood on plastic chairs to see, laughing and calling out to their sons, brothers, and friends. People from both sides threw candy across
to each other in a sort of game.

On the men’s side a little boy stood eagerly beside his father with a cluster of men strapping on phylacteries on their arms (see picture below), face lighting up when he caught a stray piece of candy. Some of the younger men laughed and bantered playfully back and forth. An older man mouthed prayers as he repeatedly kissed his shawl.

Nearby, a boy with wide eyes held a Torah scroll out before him with a sort of stunned excitement. A series of animated blessings were given to him by all the men clustered around him, punctuated periodically with emphatic amen’s.

What rich fullness of life and community. Rejoicing before the Torah and each other as their sons became men.

These things point heavenward too, don’t they? Not, this time, by contrast but by reflecting very dimly the fullness and life and rejoicing that is to come. I mean, if these things are only a shadow, how much more glorious will the coming kingdom be?


*Ps. 123:2; Ps. 62:8

Lifting My Eyes to the Hills

"I lift my eyes unto the hills, where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth." (Psalm 121:1)

Have you ever noticed that the psalms talk a lot about hills and mountains? Yesterday, as I stood in historic Jerusalem, where David probably was when he wrote this verse, I found out why.

While modern “Old City Jerusalem” is built on higher hills, this historic site for Jerusalem (“the city of David”) is outside those walls that stand today on a much lower hill (Eastern Hill) in the Kidron Valley. It was surrounded on all sides by hills that slope down in a bowl shape toward it.

Living in his Jerusalem, hills were an ever-present reality to David. Reading his words and gazing at the slopes all around me made the imagery so much more real and tangible to me too.

The funny thing about Psalm 121:1 though is that the hills themselves in that verse were not something that brought comfort (as we typically tend to interpret the verse) but fear. These high hills made Jerusalem an easy target, enabling her numerous and ever-present enemies to surround and shoot down into the city. The hills, then, reminded David of the enemies that surrounded him and could come swooping down to vanquish him.

The question David asks himself, then, is one of fear and uncertainty: “where will my help come from?” It was at moments like these that David claimed Yahweh as His LORD and defender. In the face of ruthless, conquering nations like the Assyrians and Babylonians, such confidence and trust was radical.

The geography of the land isn’t the only testament to David’s reliance on God. David also designed his city in a way that displayed his dependence on God as Defender. As we learned on our field study, the temple was positioned near the weakest point of the city, the North. This end of the city did not have the high hills or rugged terrain that made approaches from the other three sides more difficult. Often exploited by David’s enemies, this side of the city was particularly vulnerable.

What did David position behind the northern wall to defend it? God’s temple. The dwelling place of the LORD of Hosts, Israel’s Mighty Savior. The temple was a monument to Israel’s trust in Yahweh, boldly proclaiming to the world that “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7).

Trust wasn’t an optional avenue to internal peace for Israel. It was a lifeline in the face of brutal, conquering empires that could at any moment crash into your home and kill you. Can we even comprehend that?

While the hills around him at times reminded David of his vulnerability in the stepping stones to conquest that they afforded his enemies, they could also serve as a source of comfort: “As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the LORD surrounds His people, both now and forevermore” (Psalm 125:2). The way that these hills enfolded and sheltered David’s valley from every side reminded Him of God.

Reading these words as I stood where David did was so powerful. How comforting to think of God surrounding me in that way with His Presence.

Unlike my last post, these and other similar sites that we visited this Sunday did make the verses seem a lot more real. I think it’s partly because I’ve started to shift my mindset from one that looks for “golden holy auras” to one that is beginning to appreciate the gritty realness of this place—after all, my life is one mostly composed of those same gritty, earth-bound details. And God throughout history has met people in those places. That’s what’s so shockingly amazing about God coming to earth.

I think another reason these places and passages seem more real to me then last week’s field study is that the Psalms have always been so refreshingly, life-givingly real to me. They’re so raw and honest and authentic. I’ve turned to them so many times for solace, finding often in them a starting point to understand myself and express my heart to God.

Later on in the day, we sat on the temple steps where Jesus likely taught his followers (the traditional site for rabbis to teach their disciples). Here too Paul received instruction from the highly esteemed rabbi, Gamaliel. And both were within sight of the place where David wrote his psalms. God’s work throughout the ages is rooted so deeply in this place.

We ended our day in St. Anne’s Cathedral near the Pool of Bethesda where Jesus healed the lame man. We all sang Great is Thy Faithfulness, listening to the majestic swells as the cathedral’s acoustics reverberated the words off the walls. Thinking of God’s faithfulness in this place from the time of David to Jesus to Paul to us today. It was so breathtaking. What a beautiful legacy.

A Living Tel...and Not-So-Holy Auras

I don’t even know where to start. Old City Jerusalem is just so beautiful and complex and overwhelming. I think that’s the best word to describe it all: overwhelming.

One of the things that really struck me was the incredible diversity of this city. Stacey, near the beginning of the trip, described Jerusalem as both an archeological tel (an excavation site with several layers from different eras and people groups on top of each other) and, in a sense, a “living tel.” So many different “layers” of people groups and religions are piled on top of each other in this city.

One of the most poignant images in my mind as I reflect back on this diversity is standing on the rooftops at the heart of the city looking at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher placed directly in between two Islamic minarets. Nearby, a hippie-looking man with dreadlocks and red, wide-rimmed glasses drummed repetitively as we watched Jewish boys running down the street below us with their caps and bouncing curls, listening to Stacey describe the Kidron Valley in the distance made mysterious by the bright streaks and shadows of the setting sun.

I don’t know why, but the hippie man really sticks out in my memory. What brought him here? What shaped him into the person he is? What is he seeking? When I made that remark to the girl next to me, she replied, “Maybe he’s seeking his inner peace.” Wow. I think so. Just like the Orthodox Jews below me and the Muslims heading their melodious, mournful calls to prayer.

So many people come here seeking: Muslims, Jews, and Christians of every kind. Old City Jerusalem is incredibly compact (much more than I expected) to attempt to accommodate all those who want to claim a piece of acreage here. The topography added to the complex layout of the city. The narrow, winding cobblestone streets lined with shops were almost always at a slope, leading you up and down with the contours of the land: hilly ground and a valley in the middle of the city. Especially in the Jewish Quarter (the other three were the Muslim, Christian, and Armenian Quarters), the buildings and streets also seemed to pile up haphazardly on top of each other. As Stacey shared, this was true in David’s time too: “Jerusalem is built like a city that is closely compacted together” (Ps. 122:3).

In David’s day, too, the people yearned for peace: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem…For the sake of my brothers and friends, I will say, ‘Peace be within you.’” (Ps. 122:8).

How ironic…tragic, really…that this city to which so many travel in their searches for peace is itself so desperately in need of it.

The tensions between the many religious and ethnic groups that reside here is very tangible. It’s so different from the hyper-tolerant, casual approach to religion that we find in America. Each group is so adamant, willing to die for sacred sites (wars were fought over possession of the Holy Sepulcher). It’s hard for me to even comprehend it all as a Western Christian. I hope that I will gain insight and understanding into these different religions (and even the more Eastern, Orthodox churches) with their worldviews that are so different from my own. I want to know how to engage with these people in a loving, gracious, and effective way. If I had to do that right now, I would be mostly at a loss.

Beyond the city itself, my own emotional (spiritual? mental?) reactions to it were different than I expected. I think, coming to Old City Jerusalem, I almost expected some sort of golden aura of holiness that would move me with awe and wonder and that encountering these physical places would instantly make the Bible seem more real and believable.

It didn’t. Certain things were moving, and the city was very fascinating and beautiful, but I didn’t really feel that sense of awe and wonder that I was expecting. Instead of a golden aura, I found stray cats, garbage, and rows of smokey stalls cluttering these holy sites. And to be perfectly honest, it almost made it harder while I was standing at different sites, now so roughly real, to believe that God, the infinite, eternal, transcendent, Maker of the Universe, stood right here in a physical body like any of the men standing around me. I’m afraid that if I had run into him on one of these streets, I would have been just as skeptical as the people back then. It’s just so much easier sometimes to think of Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection as real and believable when they’re in a far away land which is still, in your mind, bathed in golden holy dust.

I believe, Abba, but would you help me with my unbelief?