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On the 9th of Av, just after dawn, I took a bullet-proof bus over the Green Line, through Beit Lechem, to the Tomb of Rachel.
The room where we pray is like a cave that comes to a wall of velvet veined in gold.
The sepulchre itself is draped in darkest blue velvet, embroidered in gold, and covered in thin vinyl.
For four hours I sat and swayed as that small space filled and half-emptied with tides of teary women, pressing against the tomb and receding.
We'd come to mourn the loss of the Temple, but most of us there suffering more ancient sorrows:
the loss of health, hurt in the family,
the grief of missing children who may never be born.
In my turn, I pressed up to the Tomb, and I-- a Jew who prays only to the One G'd-- laid my hands against the vinyl and my head against my hands and said,
"Imma, Imma."
All around me were women-- who were there because they were Jewish-- reading complicated special prayers that all boil down to saying,
"Rachel, I am your child too; Imma, weep for me and get me mercy."
Is this Jewish?
How do we come to this from the words of Yermiyahu, idol-stomper?
These questions did not occur to me there. There, I was seeing these words everywhere.
From the gates of Yad Vashem to the bazaars of the Old City,
"Rachel is weeping...
...your children will return to their country."
Jerusalem has been rebuilt on these words.
To be there, is to live them.
It is only here, half a world away, that these question occur as I try to explain--
without using phrases like "modern recurrence of pre-Enlightenment ancestral intercessory supplication".
Yet I find I have brought my answers back with me, too, from half a world away,
from a place that in Hebrew they call a "Beit Avot", in English we say, a... "convalescent" home.
There was a tiny woman with dancing eyes who was determined that we could connect on important issues despite the poverty of my Hebrew.
"Yesh lakh ba'al? (Do you have a husband?) Yofee! (Lovely!) V'yeladim? (And children?) Ohhhh."
Then she called over the activities director to translate and began telling her story as fast as she could speak.
She was sixteen, in Greece. Her mother woke her, told her to dress in her best clothes, and took her to the wealthiest family in town.
She sold her-- four years of service, and they passed her as their daughter and brought her to future Israel.
Of her whole family-- a Greek Jewish clan of over a hundred cousins, second-cousins, uncles, aunts, brothers, mother--
she was the remnant who lived.
And then she laid her hands on me and blessed me for a large family, b'ezrat Hashem.
How was this blessing transmitted?
Was the power of blessing in her hands? Then those in that room, in that Beit Avot, who had lost the use of their hands had lost the ability to give blessings.
Was the power of blessing in her voice? Then those who have lost their voices have lost the power to give blessings.
Was the power of blessing in her presence? Then how have I brought it back with me?
Was the power of blessing, kanehora, dependent upon her being alive? Then what would be the point?
A blessing has to come soul to soul.
Who is Rachel to me? A story to study, a symbol to evoke, or, dare I say, a disembodied soul with whom I have a relationship?
Then she is not the only soul with whom I have a relationship.
The metaphysical element of this relationship is all on my side, because I have become the Dream.
I have become the Dream of the old woman, that there shall again grow sprawling Jewish families.
We are the Dream of Rachel, who died praying and dreaming that her children should live in safety and peace and home.
We are the Dream of Yermiyahu, who dreamed of Jews praying to One G'd, and treating one another ethically.
This is Jewish: to bring memories to life, to carry a dream l'dor v'dor,
and on this Sunday, to lay our hands against the tombstones of the souls with whom we have relationships, and pray,
because people are holy.
