How to Finally Get Egalitarian Prayer at the Western Wall

It hasn’t been an easy month for American Jews, more than two-thirds of whom voted for Hillary Clinton and many of whom are terrified by the election of Donald Trump. To the already growing list of political bad news, then, it gives me no pleasure to add one more setback: the delicate negotiations over egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall, the subject of guarded optimism earlier this year, have come to a very public impasse after a coalition of rabbis, led by the heads of the American Conservative and Reform movements, marched into the Kotel plaza on November 2 and were immediately confronted by security officials and enraged haredi worshipers alike.

The rabbis were there to protest the Israeli government’s failure to implement its plan to dedicate an ecumenical prayer space in Judaism’s holiest site. Though Israel’s Supreme Court had given the government until November 17 to explain why it had yet to put its plan into motion, the rabbis felt that they had waited long enough. The protest, as the Reform movement’s Rabbi Rick Jacobs later told the press, was “an act of spiritual disobedience.”

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