Israel: It’s complicated, yet magical

You can hear the Western Wall before you see it—the hum and murmur of humanity congregating at one of the most sacred places on earth.

To reach the Western Wall (also known as the “Wailing Wall”) in Jerusalem’s Old City, my travel group and I had to walk down the long, narrow alleys of the Arab shuk (market), where colorful shawls, touristy trinkets, and pomegranate juice stalls line each side of the cobblestone path. We passed countless boisterous Arab shopkeepers crying out, “Come in, come in and see!” before making a sharp turn to the right, down stony steps, and through a security checkpoint manned by pimply faced, 19-year-old Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.

The moment I made that right turn, the hum I had heard from the distance loudened. The plaza trembled with the sounds of wails, whispers, sighs, and songs—a full range of human noises merging into a collective, cacophonic buzz. I was reminded of the verse I had just read that morning in the book of Ezra, a vivid scene describing the noises of the exiled Jews who had returned from Babylon to rebuild the Second Temple: “No one could distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping, because the people made so much noise. And the sound was heard far away.”

I VISITED ISRAEL FOR THE FIRST TIME last month for two weeks. I spent the first week with a group of 45 professional “storytellers” through the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, a Jewish philanthropic organization, the second alone in Jerusalem. My first visit to the Western Wall was with the storytellers group on a Friday evening, right after we lit candles at sundown to welcome the Shabbat. As always during the Shabbat, the Western Wall plaza was packed shoulder-to-shoulder and bosom-to-bosom with people.

As I waded through the masses, I started to distinguish the sounds. In the middle of the upper plaza, a group of male and female IDF soldiers in olive-green uniforms formed a large circle. They sang joyful songs, some clapping, some hugging each other’s waists and dancing with leg kicks and much laughter. Parents in their best attire hugged their children—fidgeting girls in dresses and stockings, shy boys wearing kippahs (skullcaps) twirling their dark payots (side curls).

The mood turned melancholy as I pushed my way toward the women’s section of wall. Row after row of women, young and old, head-scarved and wigged, stood or sat on white plastic chairs facing the millennia-old limestone structure. Many tucked their heads behind prayer books, rocking back and forth as they murmured psalms and lamentations to their God.

After much shoving and tummy-sucking—Israelis refuse to move unless you show some aggression—my hands finally found the cool surface of the 187-foot wall. I pressed my forehead against it, adding my own mark onto the waxy layers of tears, snot, saliva, and sweat coating the exposed lower-half of the wall—residue from decades of weeping, wailing, and kisses. Whatever pain and anguish, joys and supplications, the wall has heard it all. And here it still stands, collecting the most passionate expressions of the human heart and soul.

Whatever pain and anguish, joys and supplications, the wall has heard it all.

When I went back to join our group of storytellers at the upper plaza, I was surprised to see somber expressions on their faces. Many of them have Jewish roots, but the majority was secular or agnostic. One creative strategist, who once told me he cringes at the word “prayer,” had tears in his eyes as he gazed at the sea of chanting and singing men shrouded in tallit (prayer shawls). His boyfriend stood beside him, gently rubbing his back as he observed the worshipful crowds with an equally solemn expression. This sight further moved me with the realization that it wasn’t just me—even those who say they don’t believe in a higher presence instinctively recognize a sensation powerful beyond explanation.

During my second week alone in Jerusalem, I visited the Western Wall every day, as though drawn to an ethereal siren. But it wasn’t because I sensed holiness in that space. No, far from it—rather than feeling the Spirit of God, I sensed mankind’s desperate, soul-aching desire for the presence and dwelling of God’s eternal shalom. It was that hunger, that yearning, that plea that drew me day after day to pray before the wall. At times, all I could mutter was, “Lord, have mercy on me, have mercy on us. Oh Jesus, come soon.”

Each day, I nudged between different women, shut my eyes, and listened. I didn’t understand Hebrew, but I understood the heartbreak of the diminutive old woman with a black head scarf beside me who sobbed so sorrowfully that she choked on her own cries. I understood the laments of the lady in a floral cardigan who beat her breasts repeatedly, the thud-thud-thud resounding up beyond the tips of the wall. I understood the earnestness of the slim teenager behind me who moved her lips silently in prayer, eyes full of longing fixed on the shrub sprouting out from the cracks of the wall. I understood that we all, despite our varying ages, backgrounds, and circumstances, are all pining for someone greater than ourselves, something better than what this current world has to offer.

PEACE IS ON THE LIPS of every person in Israel. “Shalom,” calls out the Jewish baker at Jerusalem’s popular Mahane Yehuda market, as I pick out the glossiest challah for Shabbat. “Salaam,” greets the Arab produce seller, as I lift a box of luscious, wine-hued figs. Even the tipsy night revelers drinking in the bars of liberal, secular Tel Aviv bless you with peace, albeit with a slur.

I found all this peace greeting ironic, like many things in Israel, considering that the nation has been facing an existential crisis since the day a group of Zionists proclaimed the Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. A day later, its Arab neighbors declared war on the newborn state. Israel came out victorious, while the Palestinians still refer to that day as “al-Nakba,” or “the catastrophe.” Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes in Israel, and many more Jews were chased out of their homes in the Middle East. Both sides committed atrocities.

The tension hasn’t ceased. Halfway through my travels in Israel, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip bombed its neighboring town Sderot on a Sunday afternoon (no one was hurt), and Israeli military forces swiftly retaliated with air power and tank fire. Wherever I went, IDF soldiers with rifles patrolled the neighborhoods with alert eyes. At the Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli security officials grilled and body-searched me for 50 minutes because I had visited Islamic countries last year. Nobody in Israel forgets that enemies surround the nation.

Israel—especially its capital Jerusalem—is the world’s navel of conflicts and contradictions. It’s a hyperbole of chutzpah and triumphs, a paradox of faith and atheism, idealism and despair, utopia and dystopia—and the Israelis recognize that more than anyone else. Tour guide Michael Bauer, a natural-born Israeli and secular Jew who lives in a kibbutz, introduced his country this way: “It’s complicated.”

Israel—especially its capital Jerusalem—is the world’s navel of conflicts and contradictions.

Just the terminology surrounding this state is an ideological, political, and religious minefield. For example, every student in Israel learns this historic 1948 line: “We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel.” Well, what does a “Jewish state” mean when most of the Jews in Israel are secular? Who’s a Jew? Where are the borders of Palestine, and what about the 700,000 Palestinians who lived in that land? What right does Israel have to call the land theirs, what power does it have to declare itself a state? It’s complicated.

No one can deny that the suffering of the Jews has been great and long. The Jews are arguably the one people group in the entire history of mankind who has received the most hate, envy, and blame from others. That’s why the existence of the state of Israel, no matter the controversies surrounding it, is a miracle, a blessing. After losing a third of their people in the first half of the 20th century, the Jews returned to Canaan and established a modern Jewish, democratic, and thriving sovereignty. They built houses and farms, raised Nobel Prize winners and entrepreneurs, created new history and narratives. They retain their identity and memories and dignity. It’s incredible. It’s stunning. It’s magical.

I CAME TO ISRAEL PRAYING for clarity and understanding of the situation in the Middle East. Instead, I returned to Los Angeles with more questions than ever.

I came to Israel expecting some kind of awesome spiritual, transcending-time experience while walking on the same land that Jesus, David, and Isaiah did. Instead, I felt the terrible loss of God’s absence in a supposedly holy city where people literally wear their religion.

I came to Israel pining for the foretaste of shalom, the name of my cat and the first word you hear from strangers. I did see some organized peacemaking efforts, but mainly I heard Jesus yearning and mourning for the city’s lost souls: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

I felt the terrible loss of God’s absence in a supposedly holy city where people literally wear their religion.

Before the trip to Israel, I had asked God for Scripture that will help frame my prayer for the nation and its people. I believe He gave me Jeremiah 31, an uplifting, glorious chapter that prophesies a new covenant and a restored Zion. It draws a beautiful picture of a paradise to which the “scattered Israel” will gather repenting and praying, a once-and-forevermore city that will “never again be uprooted or demolished.”

But Jeremiah 31 also thoroughly confuses me with its mix of fulfilled and half-fulfilled prophecies. I wanted answers to many questions: Is Zion a terrestrial or celestial city? What’s the biblical significance of the current State of Israel? Who are “all the families of Israel” and the “watchmen” on the hills of Ephraim and “the remnant of Israel” mentioned in these passages?

For whatever reason, I did not get the clarity I anticipated. The diverse eschatological interpretations of these verses still befuddle me. Like Daniel, I hear and see and read, but I do not understand. I can guess, but I cannot be certain. And as to Daniel, I heard God telling me to go my way and rest in the partial picture I have till the end of the days when He finally reveals these mysteries.

Even so, God expanded the aching inside me for the complete, finalized fulfillment of Jeremiah 31. I felt my heart shred while listening to the babble of humanity at the Western Wall, but I also felt it slowly patch back together as I read through the Scriptures. His Word pumped my heart full of love and longing for the New Jerusalem foretold in Revelation 21, in which God promises to “wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

On my last day in Israel, I visited the Western Wall for the final time. It was a Friday evening, just after the Shabbat horn blared across the streets, signaling the dawning of the Jewish Sabbath. As I marched through the Old City toward the wall, I convened with others who shared the same destination, and together we stepped into one purposeful pace. Because every shop had closed down and the streets were empty, all I heard reverberating throughout the city were footsteps on cobblestones and the fading echoes of the Shabbat horn.

Once again at the Western Wall I listened to people’s sobs and songs, and I wondered what it is that draws them to the wall, what stories and desires knit their prayers. And then I envisioned the day when the Wailing Wall will listen to no more wails and weeping. Oh Lord, may that day come soon.