Divine law and ethical immanence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem

This article takes a Talmudic parable as the starting point to consider the ethical as immanent and imminent in an ethnographic case study of contemporary Jewish prayer. I consider the role of blessings and curses at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, as speech acts in protests over Jewish legal interpretation and state-sanctioned laws. I demonstrate how women’s prayer performances, directed to the divine, also reflect judgments about felicitous gendered worship, and, at the same time, passionately solicit ongoing engagement in argumentation and debate with those who have seemingly incommensurable interpretations. Drawing on Das and Lambek’s notions of ordinary ethics, together with Jewish thinkers, I suggest a reading of what happens at the Western Wall that locates ethics not in transcendent, rationally formalized religious rules that frame women’s visits to this sacred site; rather, ethics is immanent and imminent in their practices of interpretation, judgment, and encounter with those statutes.