יש לבבות ויש לבבות.

It is now almost fifty years since I visited Israel with my Jewish youth group. I sometimes feel as though I have spent all that time coming to terms with with that experience: occasionally by confronting my memories directly, often by trying to suppress them.

Yesterday Judy gave me a coffee table book with beautiful photos of Machu Picchu paired with the poems by the 1971 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pablo Neruda of Chile. It is not insignificant that Neruda was poisoned by the fascist regime of General Augusto Pinochet just days after the coup d'etat in which they overthrew Chile's democratically-elected government. It is not insignificant that this coup took place with the connivance of the United States, nor that Neruda was one of many thousands murdered by the junta.

The introduction to the book of photos and poems was written by the novelist Isabel Allende. It is not insignificant that she is the cousin of Dr. Salvador Allende, the social democratic President of Chile, whose second election in 1973 was the reason for that fascist coup. It is not insignificant that years of violence followed the overthrow of Dr. Allende.

In her opening lines, about Machu Picchu itself, Allende wrote:

Hay ciertos lugares donde viven los espíritus atrapado entre piedras. Esos lugares, construidos por hombres antiguos y hoy abandonados, fueron tan sagrados, que su energía continúa vibrando durante siglos. Es casi imposible pisar esas piedras si sentir el clamor del pasado y la tremenda fuerza allí concentrada.

The translator offers us this

There are places where spirits live trapped among stones. Those places, constructed by ancient man and today abandoned, were so sacred that their energy continues to vibrate through the centuries. It is impossible to walk on those stones and not sense the clamor of the past and the enormous force concentrated there.

I read those words and was immediately put in mind of a reading our group leaders offered us that summer long ago, when our group first visited Ha-Kotel Ha-Ma'arvi, the Western Wall, for Friday evening prayers. In Hebrew it reads:

.יש לבבות ויש לבבות. יש לבבות אדם, ויש לבבות אבנים.  

.ויש אבנים ויש אבנים. יש אבני דומה, ויש אבנים-לבבות

A serviceable translation is: 

There are hearts and there are hearts. There are human hearts and there are hearts of stone. There are stones and there are stones. There are silent stones and there are stones which are hearts. 

I should say right here that — at the time, that very night — I didn’t find what they described. In my journal I read 17-year old me reporting that I found only stones, an object, a retaining wall. But the passage had its impact. The me of today remembered that poetry and not my reaction to it. I had to pull that old journal down from the shelf to be reminded that I didn’t find hearts or souls in those stones.

But even rereading that journal entry, the me of today was curious. Who wrote those powerful words about hearts and stones?

I found that they come from an essay by Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, written in 1937, and called “Behind Our Wall.” That title is from a line in the Biblical Song of Songs (2:9) which reads: 

“My beloved is like a gazelle, or a fawn. There he is, standing behind our wall, looking through the windows and peering through the lattice.” 

The imagery suggests a veil between us and what we look at, unable to touch. And that date means that it was written before partition, when Jews still had access to the Wall. When I visited, that access

was newly restored by the conquests of the Six-Day War. So the spiritual significance of praying at the foot of the Temple Mount was strongly overlain with a secular triumphalism. Photos of heavily-armed Israeli soldiers praying at the Wall in tallis and tefillin were popular among American Jews at the time. I remember those images in coffee-table books.

So who was Rav Kook? Why he was the spiritual leader of Gush Emunim, the settler movement. He was an affiliate of the Brooklyn racist, Meir Kahane. Kahane’s Israeli political party, Kach, advocated the complete ethnic cleansing of the State of Israel. It was banned by the Israeli government as being too racist. Rav Kook's yeshiva became a center for the most intolerant, land-grabbing, anti-Arab elements in religious Judaism.

I suppose I could conclude that people can be more than one thing. But I go back to Rav Kook’s own words: “There are hearts that are like stones.” So I conclude, instead, that he was — however unintentionally — describing himself. And that the same "spirits" that murdered Pablo Neruda along with Chilean democracy are destroying homes, olive groves and lives in the occupied West Bank. That the same "heart" that inhabits the Western Wall of Rav Kook's imagination, inhabits the 400+ mile barrier that the Israelis have built to imprison the Palestinians of the West Bank. It is a heart -- and a wall -- of stone.