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God Has a Fax: Hot Line to Heaven at the Wailing Wall
| Article
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12271 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1994 |
2,294 Words |
| Author
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Dennis Eisenberg
Dennis Eisenberg is an international journalist whose articles
have appeared in leading newspapers and magazines around the
world. He lives in Jerusalem. |
Lili David is no ordinary postal carrier "I don't deliver letters, only fax messages, and there is only one address that I visit," says the 28-year-old, Jerusalem-born, blue-eyed blonde: "The Wailing Wall." David is God's private postie. She is in charge of all the faxes addressed to God that arrive in Jerusalem. Several times a week she makes her deliveries: "I spend hours folding the faxes into tight wads," she explains. "When my folder is full I drive or walk to the Old City and find a home for every single message in the crevices of the wall. After I have completed my delivery I close my eyes in front of the wall and add my own private prayer asking that all the pleas, requests, and appeals to God be answered.
"As I am a believer in God, I'm in awe of the very personal nature of the messages that have been placed in my trust. I feel an obligation to the senders to be faithful to their confidence in the fax facility that has been set aside by Bezek, the Israeli telephone and communication company, especially for this purpose.
"I'm careful not to read, or even glance at, the contents of the faxes. They are private communications addressed to the Almighty and nobody else."
Bezek opened the special fax service, a hot line to God, early in 1993 as a "good-will gesture to mankind." Since then, over forty thousand messages have been received in Jerusalem for delivery to the wall. But the practice of placing notes in the wall began over seventeen hundred years ago, sometime around the second century A.D. Since then devout Jews have been writing personal notes and inserting them into the cracks of the massive structure. Every note is a personal prayer, a plea for help, or an expression of gratitude to God for a recently granted favor.
The Walling Wall, more properly the Western Wall, is all that remains the Second Temple complex, which was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. The wall is a 37-meter-high structure, one of four such walls that supported a vast marble platform upon which the second Temple was constructed. Tradition holds that the Shechinah, the holy presence of God, hovers over the vast edifice. Consequently believers have faith that every note is brought to the Almighty's personal attention.
Bezek treats every communication as a strictly private matter between the transmitter and his Maker. The messages come in all languages--English, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Swahili--and in scripts David has never seen before.
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