Jerusalem. The Old City. The Wailing Wall. Jom Kippur, 1974. The sun is bright, the sky blue, the air clear and crisp as worshippers first straggle and then seem to flow into the large square and toward the Wall, having first passed—as we all must—through the narrow funnel of military inspectors. Neither a Jew nor an Israeli, nor an uncritical admirer of the State of Israel, I nevertheless feel the special quality of this religious observance. It is marked not only by its usual solemnity but by the burden of being the first anniversary of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the war that destroyed. the semieuphoria in which Israel had existed since 1967 and placed in new perspective the shifting relations of the nations of the Middle East.