Last month, Argentina’s President Javier Milei made an official visit to the Jewish state, where he announced that he intends to move his country’s embassy to Jerusalem. Milei, an unabashed philo-Semite who has spoken about possibly converting to Judaism, also made a stop at the Western Wall, where he was moved to tears. The visit prompted Meir Soloveichik to reflect on King Solomon’s prayer at the inauguration of the First Temple, in which he asked God to answer the prayers of the “Gentile that is not of thy people Israel, but cometh out of a far country for thy name’s sake, when he shall come and pray toward this house.”
In the moment, Milei captured, deliberately or providentially, what the Western Wall is all about. . . . [I]n Jewish law, the Western Wall is no holier than any other site in Jerusalem; in the period when the Temple stood, it was a retaining wall. The notion that the site would serve as a sacred place of prayer would have seemed surpassingly strange.
What sanctified the Wall was Jewish tears after the Temple’s destruction. Under the Ottomans, who governed the area for centuries, the Wall was the closest site to the Temple Mount where Jews were allowed to pray. And mourn for what they had lost. One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, in another fulfillment of Solomon’s prediction, a former American secretary of state, William Seward, visited the city and gazed with awe at the Jews at the Wall: they were “reading and reciting the poetic language of the prophet, beating their hands against the wall, and bathing the stones with their kisses and tears,” we are told in a memoir edited by Seward’s son.
This is the source of the sanctity of these stones. In standing at the Wall, Milei seemed to sense Jewish history itself, realizing that the pain of the current moment merged with the weeping that had gone before. He then gave voice to this insight in reflecting how Israel’s greatness can be understood only through the prism of the past.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/meir-soloveichik/argentinian-president-javier-milei-israel-judaism/