Steven Waldman concludes his post on the publication of Barack Obama’s Western Wall prayer note, with a request for responses to the candidate’s prayer. So here is mine: It’s a perfectly appropriate spiritual offering which even reflects many poetic formatics of traditional Jewish prayer.
Obama’s prayer began with the needs of others before turning to his own. He acknowledges that he is not without sin and makes a point of articulating which two of them he must be currently wrestling with. And for those who would have liked an exhaustive list, think again. How many sins can any of us deal with at a single moment?

Obama concludes with the awareness that being right and being just are often two different things, and that he hopes for both. That insight alone is worth sharing with the world. How often do we allow our sense of what is right, i.e. the way we think things should be, to harden our hearts about what is equitable and just? In Hebrew prayer it is why we use both the words tzedek and mishpat to capture that distinction.
The fact that it is a lesson worth sharing though, in no way excuses this violation of one of the most personal and intimate conversations that one can have. And that is what prayer is, whether it is with a God in the sky, or one who hangs out by a wall, or with your own inner voice. It’s just wrong to have made that public, and totally against the tradition of such prayer notes offered at the Wall.
And since “Reaganite in NYC” asked, about the distinction between the Wailing Wall and the Western Wall, I will explain. There is none. They are the same place. The name Western Wall refers to the fact that the current site is a portion of the western wall which ran along the base of the Jerusalem Temple during the first century BCE reign of King Herod the Great.
The name Wailing Wall refers to the tears that have accompanied the prayers of millions over thousands of years. And it may also be a reference to the ancient rabbis who taught that after the rest of the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE; all the gates of heaven were locked, except the gate of tears, through which prayer could always be heard.
Both that wall and the tears shed there are reminders to all people that even when we think all is lost, and all the vehicles, institutions and traditions that we know have failed, we always have within us the ability to offer a prayer and any place can be the right place for doing so.