Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

15. Two Trips to the Wailing Wall - March 2002 and October 2008

March 2002 and October 2008 It’s 2002. I still have a family; I’m still a man and am sure I always will be. We’re in Israel together, wandering through a Jerusalem emptied of tourists by a vicious cycle of suicide bombings and Israeli army reprisals. No one is in the souk, the Arab market, but the shopkeepers and us, a genteelly impoverished American family the shopkeepers can tell isn’t likely to buy. They eye us sadly, halfheartedly calling out invitations to examine scarves and pots. Our son is eight, lively and curious and running ahead to touch everything he sees. Our middle daughter—our only daughter then—is two. She refuses to walk, and, since we don’t have a stroller, when we’re out she’s always in my arms or on my shoulders, talking, laughing, crying. Carrying her for miles is exhausting and painful, or would be if dissociation from my body weren’t my natural state of being. I take up space, move, eat, teach, but never actually feel that I’m there. The warm, squirming weight of my daughter in my arms merges with the blank weight of dissociation, turning my nonexistence into a form of love. Here and there my wife stops to examine something—earrings, a skirt, a potential gift for friends back home. I want to look at those earrings and scarves, too, but that would undermine the wall I’ve built to shield the persona of husband and father from the inchoate craving to become a woman roiling behind it. 203 15 Two Trips to the Wailing Wall The souk seemed deserted, but, the moment we step across the line—it’s quite visible—into the reconstructed cardo of the Jewish quarter, we realize how much life was represented by the dispirited Palestinian merchants. The excavated Roman shopping district is eerily empty, as still as the moment before an explosion. My wife and I hesitate; perhaps this is the moment before an explosion. But our children take the quiet as an invitation to make noise. Our son scampers off, darting between marble pillars, and our daughter startles me by demanding to be put down so that she can run after her big brother. My arms are aching, but I hate to let her go; without her warmth against me, I’m left with my own emptiness. Their game of tag echoes, laughter clattering among the ancient stones. We gather the kids and climb from the cardo into the bright light and sharp angles of the Jewish quarter. For no reason at all, we feel safer. We’re above ground, the sun is shining, and a few people are drifting through the clean-swept streets. We buy the kids ice cream and let them play while we rest in metal chairs on an open square studded with short pillars the Romans provided for the stabling of horses. It’s a hot day, though it’s only March, and our daughter’s ice cream lathers her face and hands. We clean her up, I hoist her into my arms, and we climb through empty, shuttered shops and unvisited museums to a stairway ascending to a view that is one of the most famous in the world: the house- and grave-heaped hills, the great golden and silver mosques shimmering above paradise-blue mosaics, the broad open square, the Wall. It’s beautiful—no, it’s beauty itself, human spirit transformed into stone and earth, color and form, for the sheer glory of God— a glory people can’t stop killing and dying for. Poor God. It must be hell to be glorified by creatures like us. The kids ignore our oohs and aahs and play on the steps. I wish I could feel what my wife is feeling. The view seems to be entering her, filling her, intensifying her sense of the miracle of being alive. That’s what I’m supposed to feel, but the beauty that fills my eyes and mind cannot reach my walled-off heart. Emotionally, spiritually, the view seems flat and far away, just another image projected on the blank white screen of my life, so distant that I fear I won’t even remember it. Part Three: The Door of Life 204 Indeed, it’s already gone. We’ve moved on, herding the children past the guards, through the metal detectors...