The struggle over the Kotel has never really been about stones.

It has always been about us — about who belongs, whose Judaism counts, and whether the Jewish people can hold more than one way of standing before God without turning difference into division.

I know this personally. I sat in the rooms where the Kotel compromise was negotiated nearly a decade ago. Those meetings were often exhausting, sometimes hopeful, always consequential. I remember one moment vividly: sitting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, drawing on his background studying architecture at MIT, began sketching a visualization of what the expanded prayer space might look like.

In that moment, it felt real. It felt personal. It felt like a genuine attempt to imagine a Kotel spacious enough for the entire Jewish people.

That image has stayed with me, because it captured what was possible.

And it makes what came later harder to forget.

Politics, as we know, is local. Coalition realities are real. I understand that. But when the agreement was ultimately frozen, many in the Diaspora felt they had been thrown under the bus. The sting was not only political, it was relational.

That wound still lingers.

Now, with the Israeli Supreme Court again pressing the government toward implementation of egalitarian prayer arrangements, the debate has returned. Some see judicial overreach. Others see long-delayed justice.

I see something deeper.

I see a mirror held up to the Jewish people, asking whether we have confused reverence with rigidity.

When Reverence Becomes Idolatry

The late Israeli writer Amos Oz once warned that praying to the Wall risks becoming a form of idolatry — worshipping the stones rather than the God beyond them.

That insight has stayed with me for years.

I do not pray to the Wall. I pray through it.

The stones are not the destination; they are the doorway. They gather memory and longing, but they are not meant to contain God, or the Jewish people.

And yet, over time, the Kotel has become a battleground over ownership, as if holiness can be possessed, as if one interpretation of Judaism can claim exclusive rights to a place that belongs to all Jews.

When that happens, we risk turning the Wall itself into an idol.

The Courage of Compromise

The Kotel agreement was courageous precisely because it acknowledged a basic truth: Jews pray differently.

Some pray separated by gender.Some pray together as families.Some pray with music, some with silence.

The compromise did not ask anyone to abandon their practice. It asked something harder, that we make room for one another.

It is worth remembering that these negotiations did not emerge in a vacuum. The arrest of Anat Hoffman — an image that appeared in The New York Times and reverberated across the Jewish world — helped trigger the urgency that brought leaders to the table. Pain became catalyst. Conflict created an opening for imagination.

Today, history feels as though it may be repeating itself. Recently, my friend Tammy Gottlieb, who was herself part of those negotiations, was arrested at the Kotel. For many, it was another moment of heartbreak. Yet I cannot help but wonder whether this, too, might become a turning point. Sometimes movement only begins when the status quo becomes impossible to ignore.

When the agreement was frozen, many Diaspora Jews experienced it not merely as a policy reversal but as a message about belonging: your Judaism may exist, but not at the center.

And honesty requires us to say that aloud.

A Heart of Many Rooms

Rabbi David Hartman described Judaism as a heart of many rooms — a covenantal tradition spacious enough to hold multiple voices without demanding uniformity.

That image feels especially urgent now.

The question before us is not whether Judaism has one authentic expression. Jewish history itself answers that question: it never has.

The real question is whether we have the courage to build a Jewish future strong enough to contain difference without fear.

Natan Sharansky understood this. The goal was never merely another prayer platform. The goal was to expand the symbolic heart of the Jewish people — to say that the Kotel reflects the fullness of Jewish destiny, not the triumph of one stream over another.

Courts Can Move Stones. Only We Can Move Hearts

The Israeli Supreme Court may compel action. Construction may move forward. Bureaucratic delay may finally end.

But courts cannot rebuild trust.

That work belongs to us.

If the Kotel becomes a symbol of exclusion, we will have failed the very history it represents. But if it becomes a place where Jews encounter one another — sometimes uncomfortably, often imperfectly, yet honestly — then it can still serve as a covenantal center for a fractured people.

Our tradition teaches that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam — baseless hatred. The remnant that survived should not become a monument to renewed division.

When I stand at the Kotel, I do not see a boundary. I see generations pressing their hopes forward — Jews who argued fiercely yet remained bound together by destiny.

I pray through the Wall, not to it.

The stones are not there to separate us, but to remind us that beyond them lies something larger than any single ideology or denomination, something we inherit together and must protect together.

The Kotel does not belong to one stream of Judaism.

It belongs to the Jewish people.

And perhaps the real question before us is this:

Can we learn, finally, to make room for one another — not at the margins, but at the heart?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)