I have a confession to make about me and the Western Wall. We have, if you will forgive the pun, a rocky relationship.

In the late 1980s, around the time the Women of the Wall first organized to assert the right of women to pray as a group and read from the Torah at the Kotel, an Israeli colleague approached me and asked for my support. “The Kotel?” I remember saying to her. “Why would you want to pray at the Kotel?” I explained that I never felt spiritually inspired there. I found synagogue prayer much more uplifting.

At the Wall, I always felt jostled and alone amid a cacophony of strangers. In a shul or chavurah, you could hear the words of Torah being chanted, and your voice intertwined with other voices in song. Intellectually, I understood the importance of the Wall to centuries of Jews. But emotionally and spiritually, I preferred to pray elsewhere.

“Well,” my colleague responded, “isn’t that precisely the point?”

READ: WHY ORTHODOX JUDAISM NEEDS FEMALE RABBIS

She was right, of course. The type of praying permitted to women at the Wall has been radically different from that allowed men. A man can come alone or with other men. If he chooses, he can wrap himself up in solitude in a tallit and share his voice only with God. Or he may pray as part of group, sing, chant from the Torah, receive an aliyah. A women goes solo, wrapped in solitude, perhaps, but never in a tallit. Even on Rosh Chodesh, the new moon festival, designated since ancient times as a women’s holiday, she prays only as an individual.

Some years ago, I accompanied a friend to the hospital for breast cancer treatment. I was planning to leave soon for Israel. When I drove her home, she asked me if I would put a note on her behalf into the Wall. Ask God, she said, to let her recover. Ask God to help her son grow up and marry a Jewish woman, no matter what happened to her.

Although I have lived in Jerusalem and travelled there for frequent and extended stays, until that time, I had never placed a note into the stones of the Kotel. I felt that inanimate objects, even the foundational stones of the Temple Mount, were simply inanimate objects. Notwithstanding the moving lyrics to a 1966 song that, echoing Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook, declares: “There are people with hearts of stone,/ There are stones with human hearts” – and with respect for those who place heartfelt and impassioned kvitelach into the cracks of the Kotel – I never felt comfortable doing it. To me, the practice feels idolatrous.

But I could not refuse the request of a friend struggling with cancer. So I went to the Kotel, wrote a note on her behalf, and placed it in a fissure. And then I thought: what? I should put in a prayer on her behalf, and not one for myself? So I did. Contrary to my own ideas and feelings, I penned a kvitel and left it there.

READ: CELEBRATING WOMEN’S GRADUATION AS SPIRITUAL LEADERS

If the Kotel has the power to move us spiritually, sometimes against expectations, it is because of its long history in the hearts and minds of Jewish people. To exclude anyone from praying meaningfully there is wrong.

The recent designation of a portion of the area along the Wall for pluralistic practices is a step in the right direction. Some women are unhappy with that compromise. For one thing, it denies that the carefully delineated practices of Orthodox women in the group fit the framework of Jewish law, making haredi Judaism the final arbiter of Halachah. That, of course, is part of a larger issue of contention that spills into areas such as marriage, divorce and conversion. But designating a space that recognizes Jewish pluralism makes for a good first step. Take it as a metaphor.