Mike Huckabee beat me to it. The newly arrived US ambassador to Israel made a beeline from the airport to the Western Wall (Kotel Ma’arvi or Kotel for short in Hebrew). He prayed there and dropped off a note penned and given to him by President Donald Trump. It is an old tradition to write a note to God and put it between the cracks in the ancient stones. Many do like the ambassador: from the airport, they make their way directly to the Kotel, which is the part of the retaining wall around the Temple Mount. The site is the number one tourist attraction in the country, however much Israel tries to add F1 racing or Giro d’Italia stages or multiple marathons. People come to Israel, go to Jerusalem, enter the Old City and find themselves face-to-face with stones that saw the smoke from the Temple sacrifices go up into the sky. Oftentimes, people cry when they start to pray spontaneously in front of the ancient stones that witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 at the hands of Titus and his Tenth Legion.

Architect Moshe Safdie wrote in one of his books on Jerusalem that there was a competition after the 1967 war to design the prayer area in front of the Wall. Several proposals were submitted, including one from a Japanese architect who suggested a large black cube representing the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust. Safdie’s proposal had earth movers remove all of the junk that the Jordanians had put there and just leave the space open for prayers. And that is what the Israeli government did. There are times when there are a few dozen people praying in the open courtyard and there are holidays or........

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