Why the Kosel Wasn't Destroyed

Ariella of the Kallah Magazine blog asked for the source of the well-known story that when Shlomo built the Beis HaMikdash, the poor people built the Western Wall through their own sweat and toil, and for this reason, it was the only one to not be destroyed.

According to this article, the story of the poor people who built the western wall was told to Zev Vilnay, an Israeli historian and folklorist, by a young man at the Kosel in 1922, and Vilnay included the story in his anthology, /Aggadot Eretz Yisrael/. The aspects of this story that should raise major red flags are that that the Kosel is not the wall of the Beis HaMikdash, but rather one of the retaining walls that surrounded the structures on HaBayis, and that it was built by Herod, not by Shlomo, so that nothing of Shlomo's building survived, regardless of who built it (The pesukim don't specifically say, but I would assume that Shlomo hired professional builders to built it, as befitting the building, in the same way that Betzal'el utilized the chochmei leiv to build the Mishkan. A more populist building project was the rebuilding of the wall of Yerushalayim led by Nechemiah).

Of course, the fact that a story has no extant source doesn’t mean that it’s not true. And even if a story isn’t true, that doesn’t mean that we can’t be inspired by it (perhaps this is more of a chassidic idea?). But in this era in which we have witnessed vociferous debates over what constitutes the truth vis-a-vis the crossroads between our understandings of the Torah, science, and history, as well as in which segulos ride on horses as halachos travel by foot, it seems that one can be excused for wanting to be machmir when it comes to besorah she-nis’aleim min ha-ayin.

In an article that appeared a few months ago, R’ Mendel Weinbach of Ohr Somayach cited an amazing statement made by R’ Eliezer Menachem Man Shach:

“I fully believe only in those things that I am required by the Torah to believe. Why? Because when I reach Heaven and ask to be rewarded for my faith in G-d, I don’t want to be told that I can’t get credit for that because I believed everything else.”