Where do all the prayer notes go?
Pastor Dale Morgan
Where do all the prayer notes go?*
By Ari Rabinovitch
Reuters
Sunday, September 2, 2007; 8:19 PM
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - People from around the world place their prayers
in Jerusalem's Western Wall or mail them to "God, Jerusalem." It's Rabbi
Shmuel Rabinowitz who clears them up.
Millions of people a year visit the Western Wall -- one of Judaism's
holiest sites -- and leave a written prayer on pieces of paper wedged
into the cracks of the ancient stones.
The tradition has been adopted by members of many faiths around the
world. It is very common for Christian pilgrims traveling through the
Old City of Jerusalem to stop by the Western Wall and leave a note, the
rabbi says.
As Rabbi of the Western Wall, it is up to Rabinowitz to make sure
there's room for future paper wishes. Twice a year his team collects
hundreds of thousands of notes and buries them on Jerusalem's Mount of
Olives.
At most hours of the day the Western Wall is lined with people deep in
prayer. Many lean forward and touch their foreheads to the stones. With
eyes closed, they whisper their wishes and kiss the wall when they have
finished praying.
"The notes are a way to pray if you don't know how. After all, if you
want to receive, you have to ask," said Rabinowitz from his office in
the Old City of Jerusalem.
Rabinowitz and a dozen workers sweep the wall with wooden sticks in
order to reach up high to snare the notes closest to the heavens.
They never read them and have never counted the number of scripted
prayers, but in each collection there are enough to fill about 100
shopping bags, each with thousands of notes, Rabinowitz said.
The rabbi's office, which manages the site, estimates that more than 5
million people visited the Western Wall in 2006. Israel's Tourism
Ministry said that about 1.5 million of them were foreign tourists.
Other letters are sent to the wall by fax or email -- often for a small
fee. Rabinowitz said he places hundreds of letters a year received by
the post office addressed simply to God in Jerusalem.
Because the notes are never read by those who collect them it is
impossible to know the religion of the people who sent them, the rabbi said.
"You can ask for anything. You spill your heart and then you leave
strengthened," said Moshe Azolai, 29, who visited the site with
relatives from the United States.
Azolai left a prayer for his nephew, who was one of several 13-year-old
boys being honored in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony in the hot summer sun.
REMNANT
The Western Wall is a remnant of the compound of the Second Temple that
was destroyed in 70 AD. It stands today beneath a religious plaza known
to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
The entire wall stretches about 500 meters (1,650 feet), although much
of it is concealed underground. The exposed part where people gather to
pray is about 50 meters (165 feet) long and about 15 meters (50 feet) high.
Israel captured the Western Wall together with Arab East Jerusalem in
the 1967 Middle East war.
The tradition of leaving notes started nearly 300 years ago when a rabbi
sent his students with a prayer in writing because he was unable to make
the journey, Rabinowitz said.
A first time visitor from Ukraine, who gave only his first name, Dmitri,
said he could "feel" that the area was holy.
"I placed a note asking for good health. I believe it will help," he said.
Across a partition in a separate women's area, a mother, holding her
daughter, managed to cram a note into a crack already overflowing with
paper.
"It's for a member of my family who couldn't make it here," she said.
BURN OR BURY
An entire chapter in one of Rabinowitz's books deals with the issue of
discarding the Western Wall notes.
"There is an old argument about whether to burn the notes or bury them,"
Rabinowitz said.
According to Jewish law, it is forbidden to destroy holy texts. Instead,
prayer books and scriptures are "reposited" in containers and often
buried in Jewish cemeteries.
But long before notes were stuck in the Western Wall, it was custom for
religious Jews to place prayer notes at the graves of rabbis considered
holy. Traditionally, these notes are burned.
Rabinowitz said burning is a pure way to deal with the notes, but
burying them according to Jewish tradition is more honorable.
Even with the rabbi's twice-a-year cleaning -- the next one will take
place before the Jewish New Year in mid-September -- finding a snug spot
in the wall for a note can be a challenge.
Yaniv Singer, 28, who led a tour group that visited the Western Wall,
had trouble placing his prayer.
"It fell out of about three places before I managed to stick it in a
crack way up high," he said.