But when you pray, go away by yourself,…
shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private. Then your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.
Matthew 6:6 (NLT)
Now granted this text is written in the Bible so I presume those who don’t follow the good book wouldn’t know it. But I thought that when people prayed, regardless of their religious affiliation and exclusive of corporate prayer, that act was sacred and personal, meant only for that person and God?
Well, part of this blog’s existence is for me to admit when I am wrong when confronted with information. And unfortunately, my aforementioned thought is way off base. Apparently prayer is no longer personal but rather international.
Barack Obama was a visitor to the Western Wall in Jerusalem last week and during his visit, he adhered to the customs of the visit and the site (“He donned a white skullcap and listened to a rabbi read a prayer,…”. I believe the “skullcap” is called a yarmulke…?) and slipped a prayer he wrote into the crevices of the wall. Friday, Israeli newspaper Maariv published the prayer Obama wrote and slipped in the wall. On the paper, Obama wrote:
The culprit was a Jewish seminary student who removed the note immediately after Obama left. The rabbi in charge of the site, Shmuel Rabinovitz, said, “The notes placed between the stones of the Western Wall are between a person and his maker. It is forbidden to read them or make any use of them. (The publication) damages the Western Wall and damages the personal, deep part of every one of us that we keep to ourselves”.
Here’s what bothers me:
It is a known fact that the Western Wall is “the most holy place accessible to Jewish people because of Muslim control of the Temple Mount”. Therefore, wouldn’t a Jewish seminary student be schooled in the rites and rituals associated with the wall, i.e., that when people write prayers and requests and put them in the nooks of the wall, they are not to be divulged or stolen for public perusal? As a seminary student, what happened to the sanctity of not only the wall but also of the personal communications someone has between him and his God and honoring another person’s religious polity? Doesn’t seminary teach that? That’s first. Secondly, even if this student ran to the newspaper and admitted that he had gotten his hands on a prayer Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama had written and inserted into the wall, did they have to publish it? If the student was bereft of the working knowledge associated with the wall, I would think the media would have the knowledge instead.
But EUREKA!!! I found answers to my questions when I stumbled upon this issue of Maariv from January 8 of this year. Now granted the newspaper is in Hebrew so instead of translating it with my non-working knowledge of Hebrew (which I hope to learn soon), I’ll take the most salient part of the issue and paste it below.
Apparently this cartoon was published in the January 8 issue of the newspaper and seemingly questioned whether “Obama was good for the Jews”. In order to find answers to the question, we see that the newspaper published, as shown above, a cartoon depicting Obama (in case you weren’t sure, his name is on the back of his suit) painting the White House black. That ideology sounds familiar. Furthermore, according to Richard Silverstein, the caption that accompanied this photo: The house is still white, but not for long.
???
You know I hate to go there and delve into conspiracy theory but it hasn’t stopped me before:
All these things are coincidences? I think not. In my opinion, this whole “stealing a prayer from a wall” fiasco appears to have been, dare I say it, STAGED. *gasps* Either that or the newspaper was looking for a way to catch an Obama misstep through his prayer writing…? And if there is one, it is grammatical: the omission of the word ‘of’ between ‘me’ and ‘my’. Here you have a newspaper, that apparently leans to the right (Richard said that, not me) and has some inherent issue with the senator such that they contend his first order of business as POTUS will be painting. I can understand the fears that his stance on speaking to the likes of Hamas or Iran may be a threat to Israel and its interests. But how far will anyone/anything go to try and ensnare someone to possibly further political leanings? Is nothing honestly sacred anymore? Now people can’t even pray in peace without the fear that someone will invade their thoughts/words with their maker? (Maybe you can ask TUCC…) And in the end, the newspaper looks (fill in the blank) because all we found out was that Obama is actually Christian (what a shock!), he prays for himself and his family (as he should), he wants to be forgiven of his sins (because that’s what God is in the business of), he wants to make the best decisions for the greatest amount of good (that’s a better plea than other things he could have said) and he wants be lead by God (who wouldn’t?). Maybe what we learned from the publication of Obama’s prayer is the reward Matthew spoke of above, for Obama and us…
Well, in the end, I guess this past week, Obama painted Europe and the Middle East red, white and blue. And at this point, maybe we all should prepare to bring on the black paint.
OJO! I have no political affiliation.
Also, as an aside, I find it ironic that McCain and the GOP/RNC pushed for Obama to go to Iraq, as shown by the timetable ticker, yet now McCain is saying that the successful trip was politically expedient and that we, he and us as Americans, may feel “left out”…? I told you last week, be careful what you wish for…
UPDATE: Shmuel Rabinovitz, the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, continues to speak.
Oh my goodness! You ARE naive! Did you honestly think this “prayer” wasn’t written for public consumption?
Thanks for your comment! I feel like you may be further proving my point? It could be naivete on my part (?) but of course I know that there was some ulterior motive to this “prayer” being consumed by the public. That’s exactly the goal of the post. My resulting question was and is, and perhaps I didn’t elaborate enough, who sought to have it consumed? And I want to believe, though there is always room to be proven wrong, that Obama did not write this “prayer” in order to prove something to the masses, no pun intended, and his campaign people (or for that matter, anyone associated with him) arranged for a seminary student to go steal the “prayer”, only to have a newspaper, who ran a racist cartoon of him but a mere six months earlier, publish the prayer. That elaborate concoction is far-reaching while at the same time, highly implausible considering he was doing what he was told and what millions of others have done at the wall. Furthermore, if Obama’s campaign people wanted to know what was written, he could have broken tradition and told them himself and the public could have found out that way. Likewise, if it was the work of his campaign to have the “prayer” stolen, of all the newspapers in Israel to publish it, why would they choose a right-leaning (as stated in one of the blogs linked above) paper that has already set out to question whether his stances are “good for the Jews” by asserting a subtly (or blatantly) racist cartoon?
It could just be me being naive…