The Western Wall Tunnels

We joined my Schechter classmates this morning for a tour of the Western Wall tunnels - i.e. walking along the part of the western retaining wall of the Jerusalem Temple complex which has been obscured from view for many centuries by the arches and buildings built above it. The Temple Mount complex was built by Herod in the 1st Century B.C.E., and the main street and marketplace of Jerusalem ran along its western wall. Long after the destruction of the Temple, Mamluk builders (after Saladin's conquest in 1187) sought to raise up the level of the city to the level of the Temple Mount plaza, and filled the area below with arches in order to support the new city above. Thanks to the Israeli excavations of the past thirty-five years, it is now possible to walk below those arches along what was once a wide, main street open to the sky at the foot of the Western Wall, and to see the original stones put in place by Herod's builders. Some of the stones, for what it's worth, are amazingly large, like this one pictured below, which may well be on of the largest building stones of antiquity - it measures 13.6 meters long, 3.3 meters high, and 4.6 meters thick, and may weigh as much as 570 tons. The plaster coating and holes that you can see were added by later Byzantine Christian builders as part of a project to build a cistern adjacent to the wall.


A portion of the Western Wall is, famously, above ground (and, in fact, visible 24 hours a day by internet!). But it was striking to us to realize how much of the original 485-meter long wall is now beneath the ground. It's in quite good condition, thanks to being underground and not being smoothed by countless hands the way that the stones of the exposed wall have been.

We also got a careful look at the way the wall was built, so that each stone is set slightly further back from the one below it. This means that when you stand at the base of the wall and look up, you don't feel like you're about to be crushed by the wall that towers forward over you; rather, the wall looks perfectly straight.

At some places along the course of the wall, we were able to get a fairly good glimpses of it:


We travelled on through the tunnel along the course of the wall:


We spent some time at one of the Western Wall gates - Warren's Gate - which, according to some accounts, may have been the gate standing opposite to the Holy of Holies, the place of spiritual centering in Jewish tradition. Though Judaism has always preferred focusing on sanctifying time rather than sanctifying space, space is indeed made holy over time, and no space in Jewish tradition has been imbued with more holiness than the Holy of Holies, the earthly focal point of Jewish prayer for millenia. Warren's Gate is also a space that itself carries a powerful aura: for much of the time after the destruction of the Temple that Jews were permitted to live in Jerusalem, this space was used as a synagogue marking the most accessible point close to the Holy of Holies. It was in use until it was blocked up by the Crusaders of the late 11th century, who allegedly closed off the space by trapping as many Jews as they could inside and burying them alive. When the tunnel excavation began and this space was discovered, many argued that it should be restored as a synagogue, but the Chief Rabbi of Israel at the time ruled against it, apparently motivated to some degree by a fear of violent Muslim passions being inflamed by the presence of a synagogue under the Temple Mount complex; and so the space was newly sealed up:

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In addition to dealing with ancient and underground things today, we also had the pleasure of continuing to enjoy the present-day spring in Jerusalem. The almond blossoms here are still beautiful, and many other flowers seem to be springing up all over. We had a wonderful afternoon of buying groceries at Jerusalem's outdoor market and enjoying the weather.