I once walked on the top of the wall that surrounds the most fiercely disputed real estate in the world.

Clueless American tourist that I am, I had purchased a ticket from a guy in a booth at a place called the Citadel of David. So my wife, son, and I had obtained what seemed to us to be some kind of official clearance to take a hike along the ancient rampart top. Our sunlit sojourn there afforded an elevated, comprehensive  view of the old holy city area.

As it turned out, however, our purchased tickets provided only limited access. We encountered an  impediment on the south end, somewhere near the Zion gate, which required that we  descend to the ground via a narrow stone stairway. So we wandered back through the old city, generally north by northeast, past the wailing wall (a different wall), and far beyond it. At some point in, I think the northeast quadrant of that temple area, we were able to get back up on the perimeter wall and continue walking. We were no longer in, as they say, the Jewish quarter.  But getting back on the wall required us to crawl under an immobilized turnstile in a place where nobody could see us.

This did not seem like something that officially authorized tourists would do. Nevertheless, we resumed our stroll from that point. I remember thinking that, somehow, the value of our wall "tickets" seemed questionable, or perhaps, dare I admit it, worthless. Passing from one domain to another brought us under a different set of rules.

Sure enough, a couple of military guys discovered our adventure and asked some nosy questions.  We showed them our tickets, but they were not impressed.

So we had to get off the wall again.

And this is what I thought about when I saw, last night, a scene in Simone Bitton's 2004 documentary movie,  Wall.  Many scenes in the film  showed real-life westbank residents climbing over "the wall," or through breaches in it and around barbed wire that enraps it. This movie is about the wall being built by the Israeli government to separate two ethnic groups, Palestinians and Jews, on the west bank.  

So I, subjectivizing my experience of the movie as people do, remembered myself crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in old Jerusalem, and feeling a little guilty, or threatened, or something dubious like that, about it. Although I'm talking about two different walls here, the  idea is the same: a wall is intended to keep one people group on one side, and a different people group on  the other. But one of the great lessons of human history is that where some folks build high walls, other determined souls find ways to  get over, around, or through them. A couple of relatively recent examples would be  the Berlin wall, or the Dachau wall.

Anyway, my  crawling under an abandoned turnstyle in Jerusalem was one little memory that crossed my mind. There were other memories evoked as I watched this documentary. In my mind's ear I heard  echoes of Itzhak  Perlman's wailing violin that came at the end of Schindler's List.

This potent strain of musical pathos drifted into me when Simone presented in her film an interview with an Israeli citizen, Schuli Dichter. His description of the wall in Samaria found me smitten with the tragedy of it all. With video footage of the Samarian chainlink wall, Schuli's testimony includes a mention of his home kibbutz, Maanit, which had been founded in the early 1940's by some of the first Jewish settlers in that area. Here are a few of his statements that propelled Perlman's violin strains into my mind:

"Our parents in Maanit came here from the shtetls of Lodz."  and   and "This fence has eliminated... the possibility of a Jewish home in this world."

So what has changed since Nazi walls enclosed victims 69 years ago?  In some ways, the world has seen many changes. In other ways, perhaps not so much. People build walls, and other people find ways over, through, or around them. From one side of a wall to the other, hapless human beings overcome one bondage only to encounter  another.

"Closure and enclosure are the cornerstones of our lives here," said Schuli to Simone, as he drove her through Samaria to the west bank.

That's when another memory that came crawling under my radar. It had been recorded thousands of years ago by an ancient, emotive documentarian, Jeremiah.  He wrote: "Indeed, who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem, or who will mourn for you, or who will turn aside to ask about your welfare?"