What happens after the dream comes true?

In September 11, 2001, I was supposed to board a plane to Israel. The world changed that day, and I remained in New York through those weeks, eventually arriving in Jerusalem just before Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur night, my new flatmate and I walked together to the Kotel.

Sitting outside the prayer plaza, he turned to me and said something I have never forgotten.

“Intellectually,” he told me, “I don’t even know why this wall should matter to me. I don’t long for a Third Temple. I believe God is everywhere, not in one place. Rationally, I don’t understand why this place should hold such power.”

Then he paused.

“But every time I walk up to those stones, press my face against them, and begin to pray, I start crying uncontrollably. My heart and soul just don’t seem to understand what my intellect is telling them.”

Jerusalem has always carried a strange power over the Jewish soul, even for Jews uncertain what they believe about the Temple, holiness, nationalism, or redemption. I find myself returning to a paradox: how a place that stands as our holiest shared site can feel, for others, less and less like a place fully their own.

This year, around Yom Yerushalayim, I kept thinking about Naomi Shemer’s Yerushalayim Shel Zahav. What many people forget is that the song was written before the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967, during the years Jews had lost access to the Old City under Jordanian control. It was not originally a song of triumph. It was a song of longing.

“How the cisterns have dried, the marketplace is empty, and no one visits the Temple Mount in the Old City.”

After the Six-Day War, Shemer added a final verse celebrating return: “We have returned to the market, the cistern and the square.” But embedded in the song is one of the great spiritual questions of modern Jewish history: what happens after return?

Old photographs of the Kotel from the Ottoman and British Mandate periods show something striking: not a grand religious complex, but a narrow, weathered place of shared yearning, where Jews of many kinds came simply to pray. The Mishkan in the wilderness carried something of this same spirit: a sacred centre belonging to no single tribe, a makom hefker, an ownerless space held collectively rather than possessed.

After reunification, the dream of return became reality. Over time, though, the Kotel became increasingly formalised and controlled under the Chief Rabbinate. The wall that once seemed to belong to the entire Jewish people began, for many, to feel like it belonged to one part of it.

The Knesset recently gave preliminary approval to legislation that would extend the Chief Rabbinate’s authority over the entire Western Wall complex, including the egalitarian prayer area at the southern end. Under the proposal, certain forms of non-Orthodox prayer could carry criminal penalties, including prison sentences of up to seven years. The egalitarian area, though precious to many Jews worldwide, remains unfamiliar to much of the Jewish community as it sits outside the main plaza, beyond the primary security entrance to the Kotel complex.

I raise these concerns from within the Zionist story, not outside it. The Jewish people needed sovereignty. We needed safety. After exile, persecution, and the ongoing rise of antisemitism, no serious person can deny the necessity of Jewish self-defence and security. But Judaism has never asked only how we survive. Jews have disagreed profoundly across generations and somehow remained part of a shared story. The question of how we hold that disagreement without exclusion has never been more urgent.

This is urgent at a moment when Jews around the world are already being forced to defend their belonging in public spaces. If non-Orthodox Jews begin to feel they no longer fully belong at Judaism’s holiest shared space, what does that mean for Jewish peoplehood itself? Is this the division we can afford right now, turned against millions of our own?

The prophet Isaiah imagined a Jerusalem in which “beiti beit tefilah yikare l’kol ha’amim” — “My house shall be called a House of Prayer for all peoples.” Our mission was never survival alone. It was to become an or la’goyim, a light unto the nations, building a society rooted in justice, dignity and holiness. Perhaps Yeru-shalayim, the city of Peace, was never meant to mark the triumph of one group over another, but to stand for the harder work of holding holiness and human dignity together across difference.

If we cannot do that within our own people, at our own holiest place, what becomes of the larger prophetic dream?

The Jewish task has never been only to inherit sacred places. It is to build a world worthy of them.

Rabbi Yonatan Sadoff is the spiritual leader of Kehilat Nitzan (Masorti Synagogue) in Melbourne.