Divine law and ethical immanence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem

A Talmudic parable

The Oven of Akhnai is an oft-cited parable told in the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Metzia 59b) about the tensions between divine and human sources of halakha (Jewish law). ¹ It begins with a debate in the great assembly of Jewish sages over the possible defilement of a certain kind of clay oven. Rabbi Eliezer maintains a view that differs from those of the other sages. He presents every possible argument in his favor, but still the other sages do not agree with his interpretation. Finally he declares, ‘If the halakha accords with me [with my opinion], let this carob-tree prove it.’ And indeed, the carob-tree uproots itself. But the other sages respond, ‘No proof can be brought from a carob-tree.’ Rabbi Eliezer then says, ‘If the halakha accords with me, let the water stream prove it.’ And indeed, the stream begins to flow backwards. Again, the sages respond, ‘No proof can be brought from a stream of water.’ Rabbi Eliezer then proclaims, ‘If the halakha accords with me, let the walls of the study house prove it.’ The walls begin to lean, but Rabbi Joshua protests, ‘When scholars defeat each other in halakhic debate, what good is it to you?’ So the walls do not fall, in honor of Rabbi Joshua, and neither do they return to their original position again, in honor of Rabbi Eliezer.

Rabbi Eliezer then exclaims, ‘If the halakha accords with me, let there be proof from the heavens!’ Immediately, a voice is heard, contending, ‘Why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer, when in all issues the halakha accords with him?’ But Rabbi Joshua stands up and exclaims in response [citing a biblical passage from Deuteronomy 30:12], ‘It is not in the heavens!’

The Talmud then asks what this biblical citation means. Rabbi Jeremiah explains, “Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not pay attention to a heavenly voice, since You [God] already wrote in the Torah at Mount Sinai [Exodus 23:2], ‘After the majority you should veer’” (referring to the system whereby decisions in halakha are decided by a majority vote). Later, Rabbi Nathan meets the prophet Elijah and [referring to the above event] asks him, ‘What did God do in that hour?’ Elijah responds, “He smiled and said, ‘My sons have defeated Me, my sons have defeated Me’.”

As Daniel Boyarin explains regarding the commentary of second century Talmudic sages, ‘the exemplum or parable was the privileged hermeneutic device’ (1995: 29), ‘an explicitly fictional narrative that is placed beside a biblical narrative as a means of filling in its gaps’ (37). From this standpoint, the Oven of Akhnai is a rabbinic myth that explains how exactly the law is both divinely commanded–and, as such, transcendent–and at the same time ‘not in the heavens.’

The biblical passage from which Rabbi Joshua quotes is as follows:

For this commandment which I command to you this day, it is not too great for you, and it is not far away. It is not in the heavens, that you will say, Who will go up to the heavens and take it for us, and we will hear it, that we may do it? … Because the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, for it to be done. (Deuteronomy 30: 11–14)

This article takes the Talmudic parable above as a starting point to consider the ethical as immanent and imminent in an ethnographic case study of contemporary Jewish prayer. I use a traditional religious text to examine Jewish practices, juxtaposing a central myth regarding knowledge and truth with observed behavior (Das, 2012). ² I look at current debates over gendered ritual at the Western Wall in Jerusalem to investigate competing assertions that reflect broader conceptions about the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of halakha, and its imminent interpretation. In this analysis, I follow Mattingly’s point (2013), informed by Aristotle’s ethics, about the place of practical judgment and the struggle to realize the ‘best good’ in the course of everyday action where rules and customs are not a sufficient guide to every singular situation. Thinking about the relationship between halakha and Jewish practice at the Western Wall plaza, I likewise shift the focus from rule and law, to intersubjective acts and forthcoming judgments. And while such acts and judgments are embedded within a complex ritual system, and are arguably about a larger effort to more deeply inhabit religious principles and follow the desires of a transcendent God, they simultaneously involve an ethics of engagement with those norms in an effort to best apply abstract rules to the complexities of modern and gendered scenarios. Following Robbins (2016), at the Western Wall, the transcendent is always already in relation to the worldly concerns of the everyday and to ethical life. Accordingly, following the approach of the special issue editors, this case illustrates how the transcendent and the immanent are intrinsically interconnected (Sidnell et al., 2019: 11). Furthermore, ethics in this scene is also imminent. With the interpretation of and debate about law, ‘Ethics is both already present (i.e. immanent) and as yet unrealized (i.e. imminent) in the sense that there are further acts, judgments, events, and circumstances to follow’ (Sidnell et al., 2019: 7).

Through ethnographic examples, I consider the role of blessings and curses at the Western Wall as speech acts in protests over halakhic interpretation and state-sanctioned laws. I demonstrate how women’s prayer performances, directed to the divine, also reflect judgments about halakha and felicitous gendered worship, and, at the same time, passionately solicit ongoing engagement in argumentation and debate with those who have seemingly incommensurable interpretations. Drawing on Veena Das and Michael Lambek’s notions of ordinary ethics, together with Jewish thinkers, I then suggest a reading of what happens at the Western Wall that locates ethics not in transcendent, rationally formalized religious rules that frame women’s visits to this sacred site; rather, ethics is immanent and imminent in their practices of interpretation, judgment, and encounter with those statutes.

Gendered worship at the Western Wall

Thirty years ago, a group of religious feminists, calling themselves the Women of the Wall, began to meet at the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem for monthly prayer services, claiming their right to this most sacred of Jewish sites. Each month since then, they have continued to gather at the plaza for worship. These women reject the enforced standards of female silence, asserting their freedom to worship communally out loud, read from a Torah scroll, and use religious garb traditionally associated with male practice. ³ They take modern political concerns such as feminism and religious rights and read them into traditional Jewish sources. ⁴ Though media coverage in the past decade has often described these women as Reform Jews, in fact, many of the original founders and current leaders identify as Orthodox. For them, halakha remains centrally important (Jobani and Perez, 2017).

Believing that the Women of the Wall misapply divine law and thereby desecrate this holy space, ultra-orthodox women frequently engage in physical, aural, and spiritual opposition to their actions, including nontraditional public displays of prayer, cursing, and shouting. Violent skirmishes over the years have led to police arrests and protracted legal procedures in Israeli courts. Recently, this conflict has come into the center of public media attention in Israel and across the Jewish diaspora after a legal decision against the religious feminists’ appeals was overturned in 2013, and lengthy negotiations with the government abruptly ended in 2017. In this sense, the Western Wall becomes a certain kind of moral laboratory, in Mattingly’s terms (2013), where women’s actions transform the material and social space of the plaza and also shape their own moral selves. While the framework of the encounter is somewhat rehearsed, ⁵ each month is an experiment of sorts where ‘the possible is pitted against the predictable’ (Mattingly, 2013: 309); where different configurations of women show up and speak out, under structures of law and regulation that frequently shift as political and legal support for the different groups change.

In both religious feminist and ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, a woman’s position as a pious and modern subject is a central issue. In ultra-orthodox circles, women’s modesty and self-discipline are encouraged, shaping their desires, behavior, and dress, and the way they conduct themselves in a modern world (El-Or, 1994; Fader, 2009). In liberal and modern orthodox Jewish arenas, in turn, concerns of feminism and gender equality are brought directly to the reading of traditional texts (Avishai, 2008; El-Or, 2002; Ochs, 1990). While rabbinic literature historically locates women in a separate category, often along with slaves and minors, it is argued to varying degrees in different liberal Jewish denominations that halakha today should instead reflect current changes in gender identity. Some Jewish thinkers argue that female adults should be considered in the same socio-religious category as male adults, and they should be able to perform liturgies and use ritual objects previously forbidden to them because of their gender. ⁶ At the same time, new scholarship in the study of Jewish legal texts aims to show that incorrect assumptions or obsolete social norms underlie prohibitions against women’s performance of such practices. ⁷ Women of the Wall is an organization at the forefront of these conversations. Since the late 1980s, their members have been arguing that, while Jewish law begins in a divine realm, it must also relate to the realities of modern women’s bodies today. Likewise, the organization asserts that, while their struggle begins at this holiest of Jewish sites, in fact, their aim is to promote changes in gender and Jewish-denominational equality across Israeli society (Raday, 2005).

Among the individuals who participated in the first Women of the Wall service in 1988, most were visiting or had recently moved to Israel from English-speaking countries. While they included women from different Jewish denominations, they were mainly Ashkenazi, middle class, highly educated, religiously observant women who strongly adhered to feminist principles, negotiating their personal ritual practice by taking on certain traditionally male forms of worship and re-interpreting prohibitions against such options (Chesler and Haut, 2003; Israel-Cohen, 2012; Lahav, 2015). At the same time, by invoking liberal ideals, Women of the Wall have come to advance a sense of forward progress in their practices, where ultra-orthodox women are imagined as those who stay behind–seen to be marginalized in their communities and in this holy space because of norms of female modesty and more limited opportunities for higher education. In turn, ultra-orthodox women, mainly Mizrachi and Hassidic, have come to claim the site in response to feminist assertions of gender and religious discrimination.

The Women of the Wall’s contention is largely with ultra-orthodox protestors and with the ultra-orthodox Jewish establishment to whom the Israeli state has given authority over this site. Since the capture and occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, the government has appointed rabbinic authorities to dictate civil regulation of the plaza following the norms of customary Jewish practice. ⁸ Thus ritual concerns also come under the purview of state law. These ultra-orthodox figures, with others who uphold the same positions, enforce gender segregation and norms of female behavior and attire at the Western Wall (Lahav, 2013), believing that these precepts maintain a continuity of historical Jewish tradition authored by divinely inspired rabbinic debates in the ancient past. Recently, for example, ultra-orthodox politicians and leaders forcefully rejected government negotiations to build a separate egalitarian plaza at the site because they deemed such a move would entail formal recognition of practices that represent a misinterpretation and desecration of divine statutes. The Islamic waqf has also condemned such building plans, arguing that the area is a holy Islamic site and belongs to Muslims.

In addition to religious and gender assertions, all parties involved are implicitly making claims to territory in an already conflicted space. While the struggle at the Western Wall is conventionally painted as an argument over women’s rights and religious freedom, practices of debate over Jewish prayer and gender simultaneously frame the plaza as historically and politically central to Jewish claims to sovereignty. Aside from the waqf’s declaration, Palestinian actors and views are largely absent from these conversations. For Muslims, the southern edge of the wall is where the Prophet Muhammad tied his horse-like creature before going up to heaven, yet those involved in the debate rarely mention this significance. Likewise, they seldom reference the history of the plaza: residents of the Muslim neighborhood, which previously stood adjacent to the site, were expelled and their homes razed in the Israeli capture of 1967. ⁹ Instead, debates over ritual felicity generally overlook and efface these narratives and divert attention to concerns over Jewish history and sanctity.

Prayers, blessings, and curses

In June 2015 I visited the Western Wall while the Women of the Wall’s new moon service was taking place. ¹⁰ It was about 7:30 a.m. and already the cool morning air was tense. The monthly battle over the soundscape had begun. The Women of the Wall were gathered at the back of the women’s section, huddled in a group of about fifty or sixty. Behind them, behind the partition sectioning off the women’s area from the main plaza, a group of about twenty or more young ultra-orthodox men yelled insults. On the other side of the partition to the left, in the men’s section, male groups shouted their prayers emphatically in order to drown out the voices of the Women of the Wall. In return, the women sang the morning liturgy even louder.

Over the past four years I have intermittently conducted 10 months of fieldwork on the struggle at the Western Wall, during which I was present at many Women of the Wall services. In a departure from previous months, in June 2015 a small portable podium was set up in the middle of the women’s section, about two meters in front of the Women of the Wall’s gathering. It was manned by a rotation of ultra-orthodox women protesting the feminist service behind them. Every twenty or so minutes, a different woman occupied the podium, swaying back and forth in the pious movement of focused prayer. Her back was to the women’s service as her body faced the wall. In another setting, one might think she was leading a communal service, since prayer leaders generally use such podiums. However, following a reading of Jewish law that prohibits men from hearing women’s voices in song, the ultra-orthodox women were attempting to aurally overwhelm the prayers of the women behind them by screaming and blowing whistles. Remarkably, one woman who rotated at the podium wore a vest with potent curses taped to her back–curses that made use of biblical language of malediction generally applied to those who perform abominable sins. ¹¹

At Women of the Wall’s services the next spring, I noticed multiple ultra-orthodox women wearing paper capes and vests with Hebrew curses hand-written in black marker on their backs. ‘You are cursed,’ for example, used a biblical word reserved for Israel’s enemies. Another expression included a passage from Lamentations ‘Those who bring destruction and havoc upon you, they are from you.’ A third malediction cited a rabbinic phrase: ‘He who immerses and holds an impure thing in his hand,’ which references the statute regarding a person who tries to do a correct act, but makes it infelicitous or sinful by doing something else–referring to the Women of the Wall’s efforts to pray while at the same time singing out loud and wrapping themselves with traditionally male ritual objects. Writing these formulations on paper and displaying them on the back of their bodies allowed the ultra-orthodox women to worship facing the sacred wall, while at the same time communicating their messages loud and clear without voicing them or turning toward the feminists. They could literally turn their backs to the feminists. Some shouted curses as well. Drawing her hand across her neck in a gesture of decapitation, one woman repeated in heavily accented English a bone-chilling damnation of Women of the Wall, describing their imminent death in the end of days: ‘When Moses [or perhaps the Messiah?] comes, they [the Women of the Wall] will be the first to be slaughtered.’

In the following months, this huddle of shouting, whistle-blowing, curse-displaying women had moved a few meters back in the plaza to stand almost adjacent to the group of Women of the Wall. At moments, the paper vests seemed to be the only way to tell the women apart. Curses aside, their physical proximity matched the ironic fact that both groups of women mainly uttered the same blessings and supplications. ¹²

For these different groups of religious women, precepts taken from the Talmudic story of the Oven of Akhnai, biblical sources, and parallel rabbinic discussions provide them with varying approaches to the interpretation of divine statutes. For ultra-orthodox Jews, ‘It is not in the heavens’ means that, in discussions of Jewish law, each final ruling should follow the opinion of the majority of male religious authorities involved in the dispute. Chaya, ¹³ an ultra-orthodox teacher and leader in her community, explained to me that the fundamental principle of the majority, illustrated in the Talmudic parable, is precisely why the Women of the Wall should respect normative rules of Jewish law at the Western Wall plaza. At this sacred site, she maintained, ultra-orthodox Jews are the majority, and therefore their ideals trump those of other visitors. (In fact, the majority argument is used on both sides of this struggle. It is likewise argued by liberal Jewish actors that, in Israeli society, ultra-orthodox Jews are a minority, and so their values should not be determinative at a central site such as the Western Wall.) ¹⁴

In contrast to the ultra-orthodox position, Women of the Wall argue that if the law ‘is not in the heavens,’ then it is neither rigid nor static. Holding up feminist ideals, they assert their right to pray communally and wear highly meaningful ritual objects traditionally reserved for men. For these women, engaging with halakha through the lens of contemporary political concerns is a teaching the Talmudic story is meant to impart. As the feminist rabbi and activist Dianne Cohler-Esses has written regarding the biblical passage, ‘It is not in the heavens’:

The Torah belongs to every one of us, not just to experts or to certain segments of the community; it does not belong to men alone. As this parashah [Torah portion] reminds us, the Torah is far more democratic, fluid, and subjective. (2008: 1231)

In various segments of secular and religious Israeli society, Women of the Wall are criticized specifically because their prayers take a provocative and confrontational form. Their overt political goals are seen as tainting, thus making infelicitous what should otherwise be a pure outpouring of the heart to God. ¹⁵ Ultra-orthodox women with whom I have spoken claimed that the showy exhibitionism they see in the feminist women’s prayers proves that they are put-on for the sole purpose of irritating those who desire a quiet status quo in the women’s section. These women also maintain that the feminist worshippers’ ritual objects are, in fact, fake. Similarly, the late Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, in a public lecture, reportedly condemned Women of the Wall’s actions, for the ‘silliness’ of their wearing tallit and tefilin shows that they are not praying for the sake of God (Nachshoni, 2009). Likewise, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, the current rabbinic authority presiding over the Western Wall site, stated that Women of the Wall’s actions are

an act of provocation that seeks to turn the Western Wall into disputed territory and [are] in violation of a High Court Justice ruling. A prayer that causes contention and desecration of the sanctity of the Western Wall has no value. It is an act of protest. (Weiss, 2009)

Consequently, I locate these acts within Dave’s definition of activism as ethical and relational practice (2012). Dave writes that such activism is ‘an effect of three affective exercises: the problematization of social norms, the invention of alternatives to those norms, and the creative practice of these newly invented possibilities’ (3). And while Dave distinguishes such practices as ones that work to undermine rather than inhabit law, I nevertheless apply her schema at the Western Wall because both groups of women problematize and offer alternatives to social norms and endeavor to institutionally legitimize civil law regarding women’s ritual conduct and deportment. In Dave’s approach, prayer, for feminist women, is performed against the normalization of ultra-orthodox criteria of minhag hamakom (custom of the place) ¹⁶ : they literally and concretely expand the boundaries of normative behavior in the plaza by making feminist forms of worship normative. ¹⁷ At the same time, worship, for ultra-orthodox women, becomes a disruptive response to feminist practices via the public demonstration of an agentive and emphatic, yet traditionally conforming religious female subjectivity. Thus, while feminist and ultra-orthodox women both hold transcendental conceptions of ethics, in practice, for women from both groups, the ethical is also immanent in social relations and action.

Prayer as perlocutionary utterance

In order to further examine what these blessings and curses do at the Western Wall on new moon mornings, I analyze them as speech acts directed not only to God, but also to human actors. In this way, they are not merely forms of communication with the transcendental realm, but also participatory in immanent exchanges. ¹⁸ Moreover, I consider such forms of supplication to be perlocutionary utterances, as this category of speech is presented by J. L. Austin (1965) and developed further by Stanley Cavell (2005). ¹⁹ In this framework, and while mainly traditional in content, the prayers of both Women of the Wall and ultra-orthodox protestors not only express praise, thanks, and supplication, ²⁰ but are also the medium of passionate engagement in human debate–passionate in the ordinary sense of enlivened and fervent expression, and also passionate in Cavell’s sense, where speakers exhibit an element of passivity as to how addressees will respond. ²¹

Following Cavell, without accepted conventional procedure to suggest changes in Jewish law and assert a feminist presence at the Western Wall plaza, the Women of the Wall are on their own in creating their desired effect: an exchange with God, with Israeli society, with ultra-orthodox leaders who oppose their actions, and with sympathetic liberal Jewish diasporas. One might say they are moved to pray in a passionate sense, to assert what they believe is the rightful place of women in this holiest of Jewish sites. Their choice to pray on this international stage, marked by the presence of national and international audiences, notwithstanding the imagined presence of the divine, means that their assertion is not merely an isolated pronouncement of traditional liturgy; rather, a diversity of addressees come critically into the picture, whom the women aim to persuade and convince, and even provoke and incite.

In the eyes of ultra-orthodox leaders, the perlocutionary aspect of the women’s prayers, both unconventionally performed and passionately recited, is precisely what marks their worship as insincere. It is implicitly argued that if prayer is partly perlocutionary, it should only be directed to convince or persuade God. ²² Yet, as Cavell notes, forms of refusal do not make perlocutionary utterances infelicitous. Likewise, rejection by ultra-orthodox protestors of the persuasive practices of Women of the Wall does not challenge the felicity of the latter’s performance.

Consequently, for the ultra-orthodox women who utter supplications from the same liturgical tradition as the religious feminists, their blessings and perhaps even their curses can be examined as perlocutionary acts participating in this heated debate. With no conventional method to stop actions they see as spiritually abominable, they use their swaying, praying bodies, prayer books in hand, to physically impose themselves between the Women of the Wall and the sacred wall ahead of them. Fervently turning their backs to the religious feminists, they send a message to media cameras and to the Israeli public, persuading all who are watching or listening that the Women of the Wall are halakhically in the wrong and need to go somewhere else. Their proximate position and intermittent whistle-blowing communicates intimidation to the women behind them. All these acts, including explicit invocations (within the daily liturgy) of blessing for the righteous and punishment for heretical teachings and wickedness, participate in an effort to encourage God to take appropriate measures.

There are also the curses, either boldly written and worn, or zealously called out. ‘You are cursed’ could denote that the subject (who invokes the curse) is actively cursing the object (who is being cursed). Indeed, there are Talmudic accounts and present-day reports of such direct cursing practices. ²³ However, arguably within Judaism, invocations of infliction, especially those that make use of biblical language, must necessarily come from God; such invocations cannot be enacted by humans. As one ultra-orthodox woman reassured me after I recounted a chilling damnation invoked on the Women of the Wall, humans cannot curse each other in the Jewish tradition. In a sense, then, ‘You are cursed’ may also be understood as reminding addressees that God will come to curse them. At the Wall, this meaning suggests that ultra-orthodox women who utter it are trying to persuade and consequently warn religious feminists that their actions are heretical and evil in the eyes of God.

Accordingly, the refusal of Women of the Wall to accept these forms of persuasion and intimidation is, as Cavell would say, part of the performance. Regarding both sides of this passionate debate, ‘We may understand such exchanges as instances of, or attempts at, moral education’ (2005: 182). In other words, acts of prayer, both in their performance and content, carry perlocutionary effect and become modes through which disagreement about the interpretation of religious law is conveyed, modes fervently expressed and responsive to how the other will react in action. Whether intended as blessings or curses, these acts contribute to larger debates on imminent social and political measures–in the symbolic space of the Western Wall, and more widely across multiple facets of Israeli society.

Sweet prayers and silent prayers

Sarit, a woman in her forties who formerly attended Women of the Wall services, recounted to me the challenges she confronted praying in the tense environment at the Western Wall. She related her initially strong affective imagination of the site, having grown up hearing stories of her grandparents’ meaningful visit from London, UK, in the late 1960s. In her mind, the plaza was a perfect postcard. Once she showed up to pray with other feminists like herself, however, she realized that prayer was more like an act of demonstration. Sarit recounted feeling angry and frustrated at one particular Women of the Wall event, one Rosh Chodesh Tammuz, the new moon of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, in which the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple is said to have begun as God’s punishment for the baseless hatred in Jewish society at that time. Ultra-orthodox opposers had shown up in large numbers to counter the feminist service. She described how they said nasty things and engaged in senseless hatred of other Jews, which was precisely at the core of what they were mourning that month. She was even more incensed by the fact that they taught such hatred to children who had been brought along for the demonstrations. The experience had a strong effect on Sarit; part of her felt emotionally pushed away from the site. Yet, she was present when police arrested others wearing prayer shawls, and wanted to support the feminists’ right to this interpretation of Jewish practice that authorizes women to use such ritual garments traditionally reserved for men. Sarit’s resolution was to offer what she called–enunciating slowly and with a hint of defiance–‘sweet prayer.’

Sarit is serious about her spiritual practice, and this was a surprisingly audacious proposition. While her words did not change, her sweet prayer was meant to counter ultra-orthodox appeals in the transcendental realm by offering more deeply intentional praise and supplication; simultaneously, sweet prayer was also a method of more vocally and emphatically countering protestors on the ground. As part of the interactions between multiple actors at the site, we may view Sarit’s sweet prayer as the expression of a multi-valenced judgment that, in this distinct space, takes on passionate perlocutionary effect as it aims to implore, persuade, and intimidate.

On an earlier visit to the Western Wall, when a Women of the Wall service was taking place, I met Rina, a petite ultra-orthodox woman in her late sixties. We were standing in the back of the plaza toward the end of the morning service, and she was explaining the tensions at the Western Wall to an American journalist. She narrated how that morning she had approached a police officer standing guard between the feminist and ultra-orthodox women. While Rina tried to hush the feminist women and solicited the officer to intercede, in the end it was Rina who was asked to leave the area and pray elsewhere. To emphasize ultra-orthodox alterity in the context of the struggle, Rina recounted how, a few months earlier, an 80-year old ultra-orthodox woman, praying in front of the feminist worshippers, barely brushed her elbow against one of them and was subsequently arrested. She explained that the police now protect Women of the Wall, and she and other ultra-orthodox women who are disturbed by the feminist services cannot touch them. Since a major Israeli court decision in 2013 prohibited police from arresting Women of the Wall for their ritual activities, she reported that most ultra-orthodox women do not go to the Western Wall anymore on mornings of the new moon; instead, they go to the underground tunnels adjacent to the plaza.

The American journalist seemed to have heard all the details he was seeking, but I was still engaged. Rina, asking if I had a few minutes, offered to take me to these tunnels. Through a maze of damp, dark stone corridors, we arrived at a hushed narrow passageway where ultra-orthodox women silently mouthed their prayers. Above and below this passageway were communal men’s services. Rina explained that this geographic position is understood to be one of the closest places you can get to the inner sanctuary of the ancient Jewish Temple, and thus it carries the highest sanctity. Yet, while ultra-orthodox women have this holier place to pray, some, like Rina, remain in the plaza, endeavoring to counter the feminist new moon services. In later conversation, Rina spoke about her personal protest against these women who engage in a desecration of God’s name by staging a show to provoke God and incite the ultra-orthodox community. At the Western Wall, she further explained, God is close and present; prayers should be recited in a silent whisper.

While Women of the Wall participants aim to liberate the site from ritual norms that they see as representing Jewish patriarchal control and limiting women’s devotional expression, ²⁴ some ultra-orthodox women try to protect the site’s sanctity from feminist actions that they see as spiritually corrupting. Consequently, women like Rina who approached the feminists and demanded quiet–or the women who penned their curses in black marker and taped them on their backs and umbrellas for positioning directly in front of the feminists they wished to inhibit–are engaging in judgments about others’ interpretations of religious laws and actions as dangerously infelicitous. Further, their particular performances and location mean that their prayers and curses do not merely have illocutionary force, but are perlocutionary gestures where the women performing them single out their addressees with passion and call forth responses in kind. For Sarit and others, the public encounter through which ultra-orthodox women present their judgments, even if it carries a spiritually vicious tone, nevertheless solicits engagement.

It could be argued that, at the Western Wall, different parties may stake their claims through passionate speech expressions, yet no one, except perhaps God and the media, is actually listening. Indeed, there appear to be few pauses for reflective deliberation, which might improve understanding. While this may be true, the ‘sweet’-ness of Sarit’s utterances, Rina’s demands, as well as the curses of other ultra-orthodox women, are fundamentally responses to each other’s actions. In enunciating divine-directed ‘sweet prayers,’ Sarit directly performs a spiritual counter and thwart to ultra-orthodox protestors’ curses, yet as she amplifies the volume of her sweet prayer, more curses are addressed to her. At the same time, Rina uttering her silent prayer, visibly in the center of the plaza, attempts to spiritually drown out the actions of the women behind her, even as she models for them what she considers to be the right form of female worship. Such forms of refusal of others’ practices, when they elicit further confrontation, nevertheless suggest that attention is paid and reactions desired in an ethics of encounter, even if the interval of hesitation (Sidnell et al., 2019: 17) is brief, judgments are stated quickly, and efforts to appreciate others (and their distinct interpretations) are limited.

Ethics as immanent and imminent

Lambek puts forward a notion of ethics that is intrinsically part of everyday life, and of our interactions with others around us. He writes,

Sometimes [ethics] is objectified into an argument, code, or rulebook (or even discipline), but mostly it appears simply (immanently) as the ongoing orientation, enactment, and evaluation of human activity and character as constituted in and through what I have called the articulation of performance and practice. (2015b: 228)

Correspondingly, recent Jewish thinkers maintain that it is through an ethical practice of everyday judgment (which I understand as a form of debate within the self ²⁵ ) that the legal code is carried out–both immanently and imminently–in each moment of one’s life. For the contemporary Jewish religious philosopher, Aharon Lichtenstein (2003), judgment and interpretation are constant features of ordinary Jewish practice regarding correct deportment in ritual moments and beyond, in the entirety of one’s life. In many cases, he notes, the specificity of everyday situations cannot be resolved by reference to a code. Rather, Lichtenstein writes, ‘traditional halakhic Judaism demands of the Jew both adherence to Halakha and commitment to an ethical moment that though different from Halakha is nevertheless of a piece with it and in its own way fully imperative’ (1975: 83). For him, that ethical moment is the instance whereby the transcendent law is immanently considered alongside a determination of ‘the right and the good’ (cited from Deuteronomy 6:18), where interpretation necessarily proceeds beyond the letter of the law (since the law is inevitably situational and needing constant interpretation). In comparison, referencing medieval Jewish scholars, Lichtenstein shows how a person who strictly follows the law, refusing to acknowledge the importance of contextual judgment, is considered to have acted unethically.

Reading the contemporary Jewish theology of Michael Fishbane together with the thought of Pierre Hadot and Primo Levi, philosopher Arnold Davidson (2013) locates ethics in the practice of dialogue. ²⁶ According to his argument, interpretation and judgment, as ethical modes, are realized in ordinary social interactions. Davidson reads Fishbane’s

social ethics of hermeneutic responsibility as a call to dialogue, not in the trivial sense that one usually employs this term, but in Hadot’s sense of dialogue as spiritual exercise … in which each participant wrestles with the other and struggles with himself. (2013: 455) ²⁷

Within the same discussion, Davidson also cites the approach of the preeminent modern Jewish philosopher, Joseph Soloveitchik. Jewish ethics, for Soloveitchik (1978), involves a simultaneous balance between, on the one hand, constructive evaluation and judgment, and, on the other hand, retreat from what one desires most and volitional submission in the face of transcendental laws that cannot be assimilated rationally. Likewise, Soloveitchik distinguishes between two forms of biblical statutes: the mishpat – before which one enacts intellectual judgment and thus participates in a creative act, and the chok–before which one accepts commandment and thus engages in submission and the suspension of judgment. For Soloveitchik, like Lichtenstein and Fishbane, judgment is distinctly one part of, yet also an extension of, the legal code; it is inherent and forthcoming in each scenario. As Soloveitchik suggests (1993), each deed is only complete when it is experienced in practice, and each judgment and application is particular to every distinct person and moment.

Though it depends upon how ethics is defined in each case, all these thinkers identify a position where halakha cannot be easily and smoothly translated as an ethical code. While many Jewish laws coordinate with practices for the ‘good’ of individuals and/or communities, the ethical is usually a qualification cited after a divine imperative. In point of fact, the sometimes unintelligible and seemingly irrational nature of certain statutes is an important topic of conversation in Jewish traditional texts. In the parable cited in the beginning of this article, for example, the intricate details of the purity or impurity of the special clay oven do not seem to directly imply any necessarily moral action or qualities necessary for living a good life. ²⁹ Rather, as these thinkers suggest, interpretation is the place of the ethical: in this sense, ethics is both immanent and imminent within this idea of religious action. ³⁰

The Jewish specificity of this case study notwithstanding, I suggest that it may also be applicable to a discussion of ordinary ethics more generally, a parallel to the counterbalance between the norms and rules held by each person, and the creative processes through which each person assesses and inhabits every forthcoming encounter. While in the context of Jewish ethics, judgment is ideally located within the parameters of halakhic discourse (even if it exceeds it each time), it is necessarily informed by multiple other traditions within which those who are interpreting and practicing also think and live (Lambek, 2015b). Reading Das and Lambek’s positions together with these Jewish thinkers suggests that ethics at the Western Wall be examined not in the transcendent religious laws that structure women’s worship and comportment, but in the practices through which such rules are performed, judged, and debated.

Prayer and judgment

In the story of the Oven of Akhnai, it is the biblical citations that ultimately trump miraculous interventions. A heavenly voice is heard repeating, ‘My sons have defeated Me,’ referring to the sages who construct textual interpretations and interventions, not to Rabbi Eliezer who summons supernatural signs. In this narrative, which is both within and at the same time about the legal code, divine authority is the source (and also eventually the seal), yet, the decisive verdict emerges from human judgment. With this in mind, it is interesting that, at the Western Wall, blessings and curses that call upon God’s name are the modes through which the law is mainly debated–even though the Talmudic story advises, ‘It is not in the heavens.’ However, these prayers are uttered in such a way that we may consider them not for their content alone, and not merely as modes of communication to the heavens, but for the work they perform in the contest over interpretation of divinely given statutes.

According to some opinions, the Hebrew word for prayer, tefila, is a derivative of the root p-l-l, which refers to acts of judgment, adjudication, and interposition, leading to hope. ³¹ Traditional commentators, in fact, translate words with the root p-l-l as analogous to the term mishpat (judgment, ordinance). ³² In this sense, Jewish prayer can be understood as an immanent human practice of judgment, directed to the transcendental realm, as well as an articulation of expectation and desire. From within the Jewish obligation and rule to pray, comes the creative and personal act that interprets and surpasses it. As a religious Jewish Israeli woman conveyed to me regarding her intercessions for her yet-unmarried daughter, the act of praying demands a recognition of the ultimate lack of control over what happens in one’s life–it reflects the submission and self-defeat that Soloveitchik (1978) describes; yet at the same time, for this woman, prayer is also an act of agency to affect better outcomes, to persuade God to quickly send her daughter her destined partner.

At the Western Wall, the divine is not the only addressee. In clashes between religious feminists and ultra-orthodox worshippers, prayers are uttered to affect a host of better outcomes. It is the primary mode through which both religious argumentation and political protest are expressed. Debate here is not merely carried out in critical-rational form in the papers (Habermas, 1989), or in a study house (as in the Talmudic parable), but rather through distinctly public religious performances. Consequently, it is by way of blessings and curses that religious feminists and ultra-orthodox women engage in passionate encounters–encounters over competing readings of divine commandments and, more broadly, over establishment of state policy concerning the gendering of worship and public space in Jewish Israeli society. The ethical in this scene is not located transcendentally in the heavens or in written codes, but is rather immanent and imminent: an inherent human practice of forthcoming judgment and the interpretation of abstract laws, in a manner that invites debate and argumentation about their felicitous application. In the words of the editors of this special issue, ‘we could say that the ethical is to speech (parole) or action as grammar is to language (langue)’ (Sidnell et al., 2019: 14). In this case at the Western Wall, ethics (engagement and deliberation) is to law (abstract rules) as events (public prayers and debate) are to structure (Israeli law and halakha).

Finally, as Cavell notes, there is risk involved in such engagement. Utterances that work on the feelings and thoughts of others, thereby demanding response, also reveal the practitioners’ interpretations and make them vulnerable to reply and rebuke. As Mittermaier (2011) asks in a different social context, ‘Is the Other to be converted into sameness, to be tolerated, or to be engaged to the extent that one risks one’s own position in the encounter?’ (5). In the Talmudic narrative, Rabbi Eliezer is ultimately banned from the great assembly of Jewish sages, and the head of the assembly dies. In clashes at the Western Wall, whether as feminist or ultra-orthodox, getting involved entails the risk of losing in the battle before God, in claims for Israeli government support, and in cases before the Israeli Supreme Court. Like the parable, confrontations at the Western Wall illustrate the risk of such imminent openness: ‘Response and re-description are about to happen, acknowledgment or disavowal always possible’ (Sidnell et al., 2019: 10). Yet, the case examined here, like the Talmudic story, demonstrates an approach where ethical action involves coming face to face and arguing one’s position, despite the unpredictability and precarity of such an encounter.