The light shines on the name and the address so carefully written on the aerogram like a giant Hubble mirror reflecting back to us specks of starlit truth from the faraway heavens.

The letter-writer seeks God. 

Who among us has not? 

In dark moments when our hearts were broken or breaking, have we not called out to Him from the depths of our despair? Or in bright moments when our hearts overflowed with waves of gratitude, have we not thanked Him from the high point of our happiness? 

To be human means, at some point in life, we will seek God. For some of us it means seeking to understand the mystery of our existence, if not also its purpose. But whoever has looked up at a starry night and marvelled at the sparkle, or watched an infant take her first steps has wondered. And whoever has thus wondered has, in some way, sought God. 

But it is where the letter-writer seeks God that catches our attention: the Wailing Wall, Jerusalem, Israel. 

The massive, roughly hewn stones in the background of the photo are probably the most famous and most recognized stones on earth. They form the western retaining wall of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, the stone at the top left bears the distinctive handiwork of Herod’s skilled masons, who dressed it with their signature, carved-out perimeter framing the four sides of the rectangular rock. 

Tiny notes of prayers and pleas can be seen squeezed into the space between that stone and the adjacent one on the right. Perhaps the letter that arrived in the aerogram was one of those notes tucked by a helpful hand into the Wall?

That the address refers to the Wailing Wall suggests that the letter-writer may not be Jewish. For, after the divided city was reunified in 1967, most Jews have preferred to call those stones the Western Wall. The Wailing Wall was the name given to the stones precisely because for nearly two millennia Jews cried there, lamenting that the Wall, the city, the land was no longer theirs.

And that is the next detail that catches our attention. The cry that is mailed in the aerogram comes from India. It is to Jerusalem that the letter-writer in India sends her plea! 

We are not surprised. 

For seeking God in Jerusalem – and especially at the Western Wall – is, after all, inherent in the possibilities dreamed of by so much of humanity for thousands of years. 

Passover, the story of the Exodus, is our annual reminder of that. Even more, the story of the Exodus is in large part the very origin of the notion that human beings can lead and hope for better lives, that justice not power is the foundation-stone of society, that we can help each other for the sake of each other, and that we must help each other for the sake of the world it is our duty to improve. 

During the seder, we attach ourselves to our Exodus forebears. That is the very purpose of the seder: to tell  and remember their story and to understand that their story is our story, too, that each day we must live by its timeless instruction.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg has movingly described that instruction. He points out that the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from their bondage in Egypt is the inspiration for human hope, for the belief that oppressors,  tyrants, strongmen, can be defeated. 

The Exodus, he writes, sets up an alternative conception of life than one that is ruled by evil. “Were it not for the Exodus, humans would have reconciled themselves to the evils that exist in the world. The Exodus re-establishes the dream of perfection.

“Throughout the generations, this view of history has been an enormous source of hope, galvanizing humans to major efforts to improve their conditions.”

The point is explicitly emphasized in the Haggadah. “We cried out unto God… and He heard our voices.”

The notes tucked and stuffed into every available space in the Wall are the cries of humanity seeking to be heard from their own personal slaveries and oppressions.  

Twice a year, prior to Passover and  Rosh Hashanah, the notes are removed from the spaces between the stones of the Wall. The process, supervised by the Western Wall’s presiding official, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, is undertaken with the solemn respect fitting the holy space that houses the notes and the souls whose cries those notes are. The workers use wooden sticks dipped in a mikvah. After the notes are removed and gathered, they are buried. 

On the very morrow of the cleaning, even earlier perhaps than the shining of first light over the eastern edge of the Wall, the notes – prayers and cries from human beings all over the world – appear again between the stones. 

And what we learn at Passover, because of Passover, is that for all time, they always will.