NYTimes obituary of landscape architect LawrenceHalprin

While the choice of this site may be grass-roots, the religious practice as described doesn’t sound that way. Conservative and Modern Orthodox Judaism, Evangelical Christianity, Islam – all of these are organized religious movements or religions. But there are true grass-roots, folk-religious sites in Israel: the graves of famous rabbis. They’re sites of pilgrimage for both religious and nonreligious Israeli Jews (mostly Sephardi it seems), many of whom arrive on chartered buses.

Also, your description of the scene at the kotel (Western Wall) actually sounds pretty good by the standards of this article. It’s multivocal (“different styles”), lively (“cacophonous”), “incomplete”, “unplanned”, anarchic. The tayelet by contrast, despite the free activity there, was carefully, consciously, rationally planned by architects. So that one paragraph on the kotel kind of subverts the message you were overtly trying to get across.

Anyway, there’s only one kotel, so it’s a good thing that it’s controlled by some single traditional voice of Judaism. It’s a good thing that the tayelet and other unofficial sites are not under any such control. Once again, the State of Israel manages to find, implicitly, a workable arrangement with Judaism. And the establishment hasn’t tried to suppress or co-opt pilgrimages to rabbis’ graves – a true folk religious practice – so I wouldn’t worry too much about the tayelet either.