Jews are not quiet in prayer. Even when focused on the most personal of quests, as they are this season ? asking God for forgiveness for dark thoughts and unkind deeds in the past year ? they take comfort in community, chanting and swaying and dancing in circles, blowing the trumpet-like shofar, a ram?s horn.
These are the days of the Jewish month of Elul, leading up to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, when tradition says that God determines who will live and die in the coming year, and the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem?s Old City is a festival of piety that runs from midnight till dawn. Tens of thousands roll in and out during the night reciting the special penitential prayers called Slihot.
Coincidentally ? the Muslim calendar shifts every year ? it is also Ramadan, the month when the faithful believe that God gave the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad, a time of fasting, self-reflection and extra prayer, when being at Al Aksa Mosque here is even more important than usual. At night, when the fasting is over, the celebrating begins. The ancient stone alleyways of the Old City are lit up with strings of colored lights, special foods are prepared, and Palestinian Muslims come and go by the thousands.
The result has been a kind of monotheistic traffic jam in September along the paths of the tiny walled Old City, especially as dawn approaches each day. The Muslims and Jews walk past one another, often intersecting just at the Via Dolorosa of Christian sanctity, as they hurry to their separate prayer sessions: the Muslims above at the Dome of the Rock, the Jews just below at the Western Wall.
It would be wrong to call these tense encounters, because there are essentially no encounters at all. Words are not exchanged. Religious women in both groups ? head, arms and legs covered in subtly distinct fashion ? look past one another as if they took no notice. Like parallel universes with different names for every place and moment they both claim as their own, the groups pass in the night.
But there is palpable tension. Israeli soldiers walk in small packs to ward off trouble. Security cameras bristle from most walls and intersections. Commemorative stone plaques mark past acts of terrorism (?On this spot Elhanan Aharon was killed. From his blood we will live and build Jerusalem.?) while Palestinians complain that they are losing the competition for control of these ancient byways and that those in the occupied West Bank are barred from coming without special permission.
?I don?t believe the Jews and Muslims can ever have peace here,? Said Abed said on his way to dawn prayers at Al Aksa when asked his view of the unusual intersection of Slihot and Ramadan. ?The Jews are trying to control Jerusalem by deciding who can stay here.?
Some Muslims defy archaeology and history by saying that Jews have no link to the site and that it is purely Muslim sacred territory. The same problem exists on the other side as well ? some Jews believe that the holiness here is theirs alone.
Inside a closed-off area of the Western Wall plaza a few hours earlier, four young men were studying Talmud, reading to one another rabbinic commentary about a prayer for rain that is said as the new year starts. What did they think of the coincidence of Jewish and Muslim prayers only yards from each other during these days?
?The Muslims shouldn?t even be there,? offered Haim Ben Dalak, 18, of Petah Tikvah, who just started a year at a Jerusalem religious seminary before his army service. ?There should be a Jewish temple there. That?s what we believe.?
Thirty years ago, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who knew this city as few others have, wrote:
The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over industrial cities.
It?s hard to breathe.
The Hebrew name for the city, Yerushalayim, ends with ?-ayim,? a grammatical construction used for pairs of things. The device, known as a dual, exists in Hebrew and Arabic but few other languages. Which duality is being invoked has been lost to history, but it would not be hard to imagine that it is the one of heaven and earth, of holy and profane, and the difficulty of their coexisting. But of course everyone tends to focus on the holy.
Called Al Quds (the Holy One) in Arabic, Jerusalem is the city that Mohammad visited on his night journey to heaven. Just as Jews pray facing Jerusalem from anywhere in the world, Muslims did so originally as well, until the site was moved to Mecca. Jerusalem remains for Muslims the third holiest city after Mecca and Medina.
Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall for the past 12 years, goes every midnight during this period to Slihot at the wall.
?Night is a special time for spiritual reflection and this wall makes even those with hearts of stone shed a tear,? Rabbi Rabinowitz said after his half-hour Slihot prayer next to the wall, its crevices revealing the imploring notes to God stuffed there by visitors.
Above his voice can be heard scores of groups ? some large, some small, all of slightly different tradition ? praying in a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic, acknowledging sin, seeking redemption.
Most are devout, but some are secular Jews who come here for Slihot season, a growing trend.
?We love coming to Jerusalem at this time of year,? said Ada Lugati, a hairdresser from the northern city of Afula, who was dressed in distinctly nonobservant manner, in slacks with a uncovered head and bare midriff.
?It feels here as if the heavens are open to our prayer,? she said as she looked up at the clear night sky. Avi Kenig, 17, starting a year of religious study at an institute just across from the wall, put it this way: ?We have been taught that here we are at the center of the world. These are the gates to heaven.?
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