The announcement that a live view of the Western Wall in Jerusalem will now be available on the World Wide Web of the Internet is yet a further trivialization of the Diasporic Jewish relationship to the Land of Israel. According to press reports, a firm in Jerusalem will carry a live video picture of the Western Wall in Jerusalem over the Internet beginning Chanuka 5757. This bit of commercial hype is a carry over of the crass attempt by the Israel telephone company, Bezek, to increase revenues by stimulating overseas phone calls to Israel. The Bezek plan, initiated some years ago, allows anyone in the world to fax prayers to a special Bezek service. The telephone company would then insert the facsimiles into the Western Wall (Kotel). It has been a long standing tradition that Jewish worshipers when visiting the Kotel write out a prayer on a small piece of paper and place those prayers within the many crevices of the Wall.

The next step of this "its as good as being there" effort was free "e-mail to G-d," taken by the same self-promoting company now installing the video camera. The idea was identical to that of the telephone company, only in this case the prayer was e-mailed via the Internet. The "service" was free, but the petitioner was forced to go to the cyberspace shopping mall of this company in order to place the e-mail to G-d. Good business is good business, however, the ramifications of "its as good as being there" are great. After all, the intention of the tradition of placing prayers in the Kotel was to create an incentive to visit the site of the Temple, to be in Jerusalem, to pay respects to the destroyed holy place.

It must be kept in mind that this "Kotel" promotion is primarily aimed at the diasporic orthodox Jewish community. Now, visiting the Kotel in Jerusalem will require nothing more than a computer terminal and a modem. The object of "the going" is the "being there." That is to say, the act of virtually doing something is not the same as actually doing something. It might be a curiosity to see the Western Wall on the computer screen and for those who do not understand the essential import of actually being in Eretz Israel, in Jerusalem, at the Western Wall it might suffice. Those that know better should find virtually being there quite repugnant and in fact injurious to the intent of the tradition.

Perhaps next we will have virtual kashrut or virtual prayer or for that matter virtual aliya. The world's orthodox community would be better served by the promotion of ways to enhance a real relationship to the Land of Israel. Instead of profit motivated schemes that distance Jews from the need to be in the Land, all Jews should be searching for methods to stress the Jewish obligation of aliya. The these times of cyberspace reality one thing must not be forgotten: the yet to be fully realized struggle for the Land of Israel by the Jewish people remains firmly on the ground.
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