Stones that Speak

(As you will notice from the two month gap in postings, I am not much of a blogger. Problem is an excess, not a lack, of things happening in life.)

Tonight I experienced the conflation of time. I sat with Max on the stone curb of what archaeologists identify as a shop on the road that ran along the western wall of the Temple Mount when the Temple itself stood up above. Directly in front of us, protruding from the wall high above, were the stumps that remain of the staircase (now called Wilson's Arch) where once pilgrims climbed up to the Mount. And slightly to our left on the level where we sat was a heap of huge boulders that had fallen to the pavement below 2,000 years ago during the Roman destruction of the Second Temple.

Tonight was the beginning of a day of mourning and fasting, the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, Tisha B'Av. On this day, Jews gather, sit on the ground, and read out loud the book of Lamentations that describes the horrors of the destruction in 586BCE of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the exile that followed. It is commonly attributed to Jeremiah who had foretold the destruction and lived to write this heartrending poem. Over the millennia Tisha B'Av has come to be a day of mourning for numerous Jewish tragedies that were said to occur on the same day, most notably the Roman destruction in 70CE of the Temple, rebuilt and enlarged by Herod.

We sat with some hundred or so student and adult tourists and residents of Jerusalem in an area assigned to the Masorti movement, Israel's name for Conservative Jews. This location had been granted to them so that they could sit men and women together with women reading as well as men. At this marvelous spot, they are out of sight of those Orthodox who for many years protested against them, sometimes violently.

Conservative Jews In Jerusalem no doubt would choose greater visibility, but to us this location on this night and the walk past the walls of the Old City into the excavation area, was an extraordinary gift.