The issue of heterodox services at the Kosel HaMaaravi is back in the news again. The heterodox movements it seems are unhappy with their designated prayer spot at Robinson’s Arch. Personally I’d always felt that as the  site of an archaeological dig the location was rather appropriate given these movements’ greater fealty to the god of Semitic Studies Departments than to the G-d of the Beis HaMikdash. But it’s not good enough because as Anat Hoffman the feminist activist who heads Women of the Wall (WOW) and is a former city councilwoman ofJerusalem put it she wants to “see and be seen.”

Many Orthodox Jews are disturbed at what they see as the willingness of activists whose motives they suspect to foment division disturbance and disenfranchisement at what has for so long been a place of unity prayer and inspiration for the widest possible spectrum of Jews a holy spot where so many Jews have begun their journeys back to the heritage of their forebears.

Strange because when I hear what these activists are pressing for I’m cheered and filled with hope. Of course the fact that they want to hold mixed gender services have women’s singing and other activities that hurt the Jewish soul is deeply upsetting to me. But I want to focus on the positive so let’s consider all the good news that I believe their campaign signals.

For a very long time now the Reform movement has accepted wholesale all the academic heresies about Jewish history including those that question the very existence of David and Shlomo’s kingdoms and the existence of a Temple. Their seminaries teach this bunk to their clergyfolk who in turn indoctrinate their congregants with it. Afra l’pumayhu. Even when they have acknowledged the Temple and its service as realities of Jewish history they have bowdlerized the siddur of all embarrassing references to the ancient Jews’ “bloody sacrificial cult ” as the leader of Los Angeles’s largest Reform congregation put it in arguing for the contemporary irrelevance of Tisha B’Av. Afra l’pumay. No wonder that many years back the head of Tel Aviv’s Beit Daniel Reform house of worship issued a responsum averring that there’s no particular holiness inherent in the Kosel site and thus no particular reason to visit it.

But the heterodox movements’ tenacious fight for their place at the Kosel can only mean to my mind that they’ve done a complete turnabout on all this and have come to treasure the Kosel as the last vestige of a sacred Beis HaMikdash and to mourn its irreplaceable loss and that’s wonderful news. Else if they viewed this site merely as some sort of museum of either a mythical or mortifyingly archaic past what Anat Hoffman calls a “national monument for all ” a Jewish theme park devoid of any authentic religio-historical significance they wouldn’t think for a moment of placing their claims on  par with those of Jews who do indeed regard this as the place to which millions of their ancestors once streamed to offer sacrifices and connect to their Creator and who still stream there in their hundreds of thousands at all hours of the day and night in the belief that this last vestige of the Temple remains the gateway through which their prayers ascend to Heaven. Would they? 

Moreover the fight of the Reform and the WOWettes for women’s rights at the Kosel can only mean as I see it one thing: that they have decided to reject heterodoxy’s universalist worldview which as both Daniel Gordis of Jerusalem’s conservative-leaning Shalem Center and Jack Wertheimer  of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary have written compellingly leads their clergy to lament in the same breath and to the same extent the loss of Palestinian life in Gaza and the loss of Jewish life in Sderot and leads Jews to give to secular charities vastly larger sums than they donate to Jewish causes. It is the exaltation of the stranger over one’s brother that leads the heterodox movements to be moved by the plight of illegal Guatemalan workers but not that of an Orthodox father of ten whom a miscarriage of justice will keep imprisoned for life.

But apparently this too is changing. After all it can only be a very particularistic love of Jews and Judaism that moves these feminists to be so exercised as to whether their Jewish sisters get to wear talleisim yet so insouciant about whether their Muslim cousins get to live period. Else they wouldn’t devote huge amounts of time energy and resources to the fight to pray at this section of the Western Wall rather than that other one while remaining completely indifferent to the horrific violence and subjugation of women in Muslim countries and other societies around the globe. Would they?

Finally I take the battle for heterodox rights at the Kosel as a heartening portent that non-Orthodox Jews will begin visiting studying and even settling in Eretz Yisrael in droves. Until now that has not to put it delicately been the case.

According to the 2012 Annual Jewish Opinion Survey of the American Jewish Committee 80.5% of Orthodox respondents have visitedIsrael as compared with 54% of Conservative and 36% of Reform-affiliated respondents. Fifty-two percent of Orthodox Jews who have visitedIsraelhave made the journey three or more times while only 16% of Conservative and 7% of Reform Jews have come with similar frequency. The numbers for Reform-affiliated Jews studying or settling there are even far more dismal.

But clearly a huge wave of Reform-affiliated Israel-bound travelers must be in the offing. Else a movement the great majority of whose members cannot sadly be bothered to visit the country even once wouldn’t have the temerity to agitate for disrupting the prayers of the millions of Orthodox Jews who live and visit there? Would it?

WALL TO WALL PROBLEMS Speaking of using religious coercion to overturn the status quo in a Shabbos drashah to the recent Agudath Israel convention Rav Baruch Mordechai Ezrachi shlita representing Rav Aharon Leib Steinman shlita as well made an impassioned appeal for help regarding the gezeirah of mass military inductions of bnei Torah. After an initial uproar some months ago I hear and see little discussion anymore of this ominous threat to the beating heart of Klal Yisrael.

The metzitzah b’peh issue we’re facing in New York is a serious one but one has to wonder why it stirs passions in a way that the threat of a yeshivah draft which has much broader and more immediate ramifications doesn’t seem to do. At a Friday morning convention session on the metzitzah lawsuit my presentation was about the challenge to metzitzah as part of a larger threat to religious freedom now unfolding in theUnited States. I referred to a recent Pew Forum study showing that both governmental restriction of religion and social hostility to religion in the United States are no longer in the “low ” but now in the “moderate ” even “high moderate” range having moved up more than a point on a ten-point index based on events in 2009-10. With the advent of the ObamaCare mandate against religious employers and other developments since then these levels are undoubtedly even higher now.

But having heard from my son in Eretz Yisrael how gravely Rav Meir Soloveitchik shlita has spoken about this issue I decided to note that the Pew study places Israel very much in the “high” category of restrictions on religion and I then made the obvious connection to the efforts to force bnei Torah en masse out of the beis medrash. It wasn’t directly related to my talk but we have to begin speaking up.

I’m not usually one for making these sorts of connections which I try to leave to those wiser in Torah and clearer of vision but the following occurred to me: The gemara in Bava Basra 7b relates that Reish Lakish exempted talmidei chachamim from contributing towards the building of the city walls and Rav Yochanan supports this ruling by expounding a pasuk in Shir HaShirim (8:10) as referring to Torah as a protective wall and to Torah scholars as watchtowers. Could it be that when we are apathetic about the protective benefits of that wall we might be sent a motivational message by means of an attack aimed at yet another Wall?