You’ve been able to fax or email your prayers to the Western Wall, or The Kotel, for a few years now, but the tradition of placing written petitions in the crevices of the ancient temple wall has become very 21st century thanks to Twitter. (And you thought Facebook had a wall. The Western Wall is thought to provide a direct line to the Almighty.)
The Associated Press reports that Alon Nil, a 25-year-old, Jerusalem-based economist started the @TheKotel service after recognizing the power of the microblogging social network during the recent election-related riots in Iran. “There are an infinite number of uses for Twitter,” Nil told the AP, “and I thought ‘What can I do that is new and creative and might benefit the people of Israel?’”
Once the prayers are “tweeted,” or sent, they are printed out and taken to The Wall by Nil who hopes to graduate the service from a hobby to a sponsored operation due to its immense popularity. Currently, donations can be made at the accompanying website, Tweet Your Prayers.
And while the site is extremely popular, that popularity doesn’t seem to extend to users openly sharing their submitted prayers. Most of the prayers are sent as private messages, the AP reports, “but Nil encourages his followers to make their tweets public.” And while the idea of sharing is nice, the real question is would you publicly tweet God? Or would you care to keep your petitions private?
What do you think?
