What is the Western Wall?
ReligionForBreakfast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5cu9qnjlMk

Transkript (automatisch erstellt)

0:00 this video is brought to you by the foundation for religious literacy and by our awesome community of patrons on patreon thanks everyone
0:06 the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem also called the Kotel and Hebrew has been a major Jewish sacred site for centuries but what is the
0:15 Western Wall it's called the Western Wall because it's a segment of the Western retaining wall of the rectangular Temple Mount platform this
0:22 was built under the reign of King Herod the Great when he launched an ambitious project to renovate the second Jewish temple in the 1st century BCE and when I
0:29 say ambitious I mean ambitious to make the platform he basically flattened Mount Moriah the site according to Jewish tradition where
0:37 the creation of the world happened and where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac the landscape slopes from north to south down towards the oldest part of
0:45 Jerusalem called the City of David so in order to make a level platform Hera's engineers needed to cut into bedrock on the north side and build a series of
0:54 subterranean arches on the southern side to support the platform the western wall itself is a layer cake of history you can still see the Herodian era blocks
1:03 here they are the biggest ones on the bottom then there are a few layers of Umayyad period blocks from the 7th and 8th centuries when the Islamic Ummah
1:11 dynasty ruled Jerusalem and then you have a few layers of smaller stones up top which are from later Islamic periods what you see in all the pictures though
1:19 is only a very small segment of the Western retaining wall the entire length of the western wall extends for almost 500 metres total and a bunch of it is
1:29 actually underground because the current street level of the old city is a few meters higher than the ancient street level you can still see these levels
1:36 today if you tour the western wall tunnels where you can find some of the largest stones in the wall some weighing hundreds of tons Israeli archaeologists
1:44 are conducting ongoing excavations down here to which I had the opportunity to visit in 2018 Jews congregate here because of its proximity to the Holy of
1:52 Holies the holiest site for Jews where God's presence is said to dwell it was located within the former Temple of Jerusalem before the Romans destroyed it
2:01 in 70 CE II a few hundred years later the Muslim of Maya dynasty built the Dome of the rock over what most archaeologists agree was roughly the
2:09 same spot of the Jewish temple so for centuries the Western Wall has been the closest you can get to the Holy of Holies without actually entering the
2:17 sanctuary itself though technically you can get a little bit closer at a segment within the western wall tunnels which in and of itself has become a popular place
2:25 to pray to we don't exactly know when Jews started to pray at the western wall in the 16th century the ottoman sultan Suleiman issued an edict permitting Jews
2:33 to pray there but the tradition probably stretches back hundreds of years before that early Christian sources from Lane antiquity described Jews praying around
2:42 the ruins of the temple though we're not exactly sure if these texts are specifically talking about the western wall itself but today when we say the
2:49 western wall we generally mean this specific segment which is now an open-air plaza that can hold about 60,000 people though a lot has changed
2:57 in just a century since the founding of the State of Israel if you look at photographs from the early 20th century you can see that access to the western
3:04 wall was possible only through a narrow alley this was because the buildings comprising the Moroccan Quarter and Arab neighborhood founded in the 12th century
3:12 were built basically up to the wall itself as you can see from this old photograph following the arab-israeli war of 1948 Jordan had control of the
3:21 eastern part of Jerusalem and restricted Jews from accessing the western wall but during the six-day war in 1967 the Israeli army defeated the Jordanians and
3:31 then in a controversial move levelled the Moroccan quarter and displaced its residents within a few days this created the open layout of the plaza that we see
3:39 today but it remains a sore spot in the history of the israeli-palestinian conflict today millions of people visit the western wall each year and during
3:46 pilgrimage holidays like Passover Sukkot & Shavuot upwards to a hundred thousand Jews visited each day historically these were holidays when Jews would travel to
3:56 the temple to make sacrifices and although animal sacrifice is no longer practiced many Jews still travel to the western wall to pray during these
4:03 holidays to give you a sense of the sheer size of the crowds I took this footage during Passover in 2018 on the pedestrian bridge overlooking the plaza
4:11 if you visit today you'll see a lot of people praying reading the Torah or even celebrating Bar Mitzvahs but another popular devotional practice involves
4:20 stuffing prayer notes between the cracks of the stone you can see thousands of them if you visit the wall the Kotel Heritage Foundation's website even lets
4:27 you this remotely writing your prayer online and letting someone else place it for you as a paper note two times a year
4:33 workers will remove the prayer notes from the wall but since it's forbidden to destroy them they are buried on the Mount of Olives treated in a similar
4:40 manner to a damaged Torah scroll or prayer book as with many religious sites there's some controversy that's worth mentioning to the area around the
4:48 western wall is officially designated by Orthodox religious authorities as an open-air Orthodox synagogue and thus they enforce separate men and women
4:57 sections here and here women's advocacy groups such as women of the wall have pushed for more a gala terian prayer at the western wall that would allow women
5:05 to pray in the women's section reading from Torah scrolls and wearing Jewish ritual objects such as tefillin and prayer shawls which are generally
5:14 reserved only for men this has periodically sparked conflict from ultra-orthodox Jews who have tried to disrupt these women by shouting over
5:21 them or even going so far as to throw rocks and eggs at them in October 2019 the Jerusalem Chief Rabbi denounced women of the wall calling on Orthodox
5:30 women to protest their prayers a journalist on the ground reported that dozens of boys and men shouted at the worshippers and a loudspeaker from the
5:39 men's section tried to drown out the group's prayer the western wall is thus a glimpse into the diversity of Jewish practice around the world on this issue
5:46 while some denominations will allow women to read the Torah during synagogue services or even ordained female rabbis other synagogues prohibit these
5:54 practices I've been to a lot of famous religious sites but this one really stands out in my mind just looking at the wall you'll see major eras of
6:03 history staring you at the face Herodian Umayyad ottoman but you also see the durability of religious practice how millions of Jews have held this site
6:12 sacred for centuries even as those different dynasties rose and fell if you'd like to learn more about this area check out my video on the Dome of the
6:20 rock and as always thanks for watching and I'll see you next time