The Western Wall Tunnels are more than an archaeological passage beneath Jerusalem’s Western Wall: they are the book’s most concentrated setting for religious inquiry, inherited authority, and the unstable boundary between contemplation and violence. In the tunnels, Chaim Lerner brings Judah Loeb into a learned circle where disagreement is treated as a spiritual practice; years later, Rabbi Kaplowitz inherits that circle and its institutional machinery. The same underground complex also becomes the setting for an interrogation about Chaim’s death and for a sudden attack whose explosions and smoke break through the language of theology.

Sacred and Intellectual Setting

The tunnels are introduced through a narrow, subterranean chamber reached by way of a stone archway. The larger passage is already crowded with black-hatted, black-coated men who sway, chant, mumble, and touch the stones of the Wall with their fingertips or foreheads. Chaim leads Judah beyond them to a room about the size of Judah’s childhood bedroom, lit by a single bare bulb and furnished with roughly a dozen folding chairs arranged in a circle. The unvarnished concrete floor, dampness, and associations with cobwebs, mice, and dungeons give the room an austere physical character, yet the circle of chairs makes it a place of communal study rather than mere confinement. The class is attended by middle-aged men in dark business suits and large black yarmulkes. Some read Hebrew newspapers while others converse quietly, and Chaim identifies several participants by their public importance: a deputy defense minister, a former finance minister, the director general of the foreign ministry, and the chief executive of Bank Leumi. The setting therefore joins mystical learning to the machinery of state and finance. At seven o’clock, an ancient-looking teacher enters with the assistance of two younger Haredim, who also carry thick books. Once the class begins, newspapers disappear and the room falls silent, giving the study session the solemnity of worship and the concentration of a political chamber.

The Zohar and Disputation

For Judah, the class is initially almost inaccessible. The readings are in Aramaic, while the explanations, arguments, digressions, jokes, and questions take place in Hebrew. He understands almost none of the languages, but he can recognize repeated words such as “who,” “what,” and “why,” along with expressions of sharp disagreement. The linguistic barrier places him physically inside the circle while leaving him intellectually outside it, a position that mirrors his broader role as an American reporter and student trying to interpret Jerusalem’s religious and political worlds. Chaim explains that the group is studying a passage from the Zohar concerning the names of God. The Hebrew word for “who,” in the phrase asking who created the heavens, is treated by the rabbis as a divine name. A question is thereby transformed into a statement, and then transformed back into a spiritual principle: invoking God means asking, searching, and refusing to close inquiry. Chaim presents spirituality not as passive certainty but as an active investigation into the meaning of creation and suffering. The class’s loud quarrels are equally important. When Chaim asks a question, other participants answer with insults, laughter, and denunciations; he responds by shouting, singing his objections, and rolling his Rs. The elderly teacher eventually pounds his book, calls for silence, and ends with what appears to Judah to be a prayer. The participants then stand, shake hands, smile warmly, and leave as though no intellectual combat had taken place. Chaim insists that this is not simply an argument but a makhloket, a “disagreement for the sake of heaven.” The tunnels thus preserve disagreement as a religious form: conflict is not necessarily a failure of community when it remains directed toward understanding rather than bloodshed. Chaim extends the lesson from divine names to grief. A verse asking what can comfort a person who has lost everything appears, on its surface, to mean that nothing can help. For Chaim, however, the passage opens another inquiry into how language carries suffering and how religious tradition can keep questioning even when consolation seems impossible. This interpretive method connects the tunnels to Chaim’s larger theological project, which seeks to rescue religious language after the Holocaust without pretending that suffering has an easy explanation.

Authority and Institutional Change

When Judah later meets Rabbi Kaplowitz in the tunnels, the rabbi is no longer merely one of the young attendants who served the old teacher. Kaplowitz has inherited his father’s titles and duties, becoming both teacher and religious authority. The encounter reveals continuity through altered form: the same world of books, learning, and Haredi discipline remains, but Kaplowitz now occupies a position of public administration as well as scholarship. The physical setting has changed dramatically. An office about one hundred feet into the tunnel contains a gleaming black desk, two computers, a laser printer, a copier, a fax machine, leather couches, an oak conference table, eight high-backed chairs, and five overstuffed armchairs. Kaplowitz regards these conveniences almost as a punishment. He says that he belongs in the beis midrash with his books, while the new offices in the tunnels and in Pisgat David represent an institutional burden. The underground sacred space has become an organization with equipment, branches, appointments, and political reach. The transformation is even clearer years later. The former circle of folding chairs has become an auditorium with plush movie-theater seats and at least one hundred male participants. The class includes black-hatted schoolboys, men in suits with knit yarmulkes, and secularly dressed attendees in jeans and T-shirts. A video camera records Kaplowitz from the back of the room, and he teaches from a lectern while the audience laughs at his jokes. The tunnels have expanded from an intimate study circle into a mediated educational institution capable of reaching a large, socially mixed congregation.

Investigation, Violence, and Memory

The tunnels are also linked to the investigation of Chaim’s death. Before Judah and Hannah Loeb confront the balcony where Chaim fell, they pass through the Lerner house and approach the place of the fatal fall as a site of physical evidence. The tunnels provide a contrasting investigative space: instead of an exposed railing and an absent body, they contain books, teachers, offices, and competing accounts. Judah’s encounters there make religious authority part of the field of possible explanations for Chaim’s death, whether as a source of wisdom, ideological pressure, or institutional power. The setting’s religious disputes acquire a sharper political edge when Charlie questions Kaplowitz about whether someone from his circle might have responded violently to heated emotions about Chaim. Kaplowitz rejects bloodshed emphatically. Yet the conversation is interrupted before its implications can settle. While voices outside chant, cantillate, mumble, and pray, the noise suddenly gives way to three exceptionally loud blasts, screams, sirens, and smoke seeping beneath the office door. The tunnels’ atmosphere of prayer is invaded by terrorism, and the sacred underground chamber becomes a place of emergency and uncertainty. That interruption embodies the book’s recurring collision between theology and public violence. The tunnels appear to offer enclosure, continuity, and a protected route into tradition, but they cannot seal out the political world. The sounds of prayer are followed by explosions; theological questions are pursued amid the consequences of terrorism; and the supposedly secure interior is penetrated by smoke from the street. The spatial contrast is not absolute protection but permeability.

Later Meaning and Narrative Significance

In later years, the tunnels remain connected to the transmission of Jewish spirituality. Rabbi Kaplowitz gives Hannah a book titled Returning for the Answer: A Guide to Coming Home for the Young Jew. She eventually identifies it as her most important religious influence and, years afterward, enters rabbinical school. The influence of the tunnels therefore extends beyond Judah’s investigation and beyond Chaim’s generation. Their teaching travels through a book into Hannah’s adult vocation, linking an underground Jerusalem classroom to a future shaped in North America. The Western Wall Tunnels also provide a material counterpoint to Chaim’s theology. Chaim is described as a secular thinker who nevertheless believes that God remains central to Jewish consciousness and that theology must explain God in light of the Holocaust. In the tunnels, that project is enacted through the insistence that God’s name is a question. The location does not resolve suffering; it creates a disciplined setting in which suffering, authority, and belief can continue to be contested. Finally, the tunnels concentrate the book’s geography of boundaries. They lie beneath a sacred wall, connect ancient texts to modern offices, bring Haredi scholars into contact with state officials and secular students, and shelter both spiritual instruction and political danger. Their repeated return shows that Jerusalem’s underground is not outside history. It is one of the places where history is interpreted, administered, remembered, and suddenly forced back into the present.