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As Toby collapsed in a heap on the limestone plaza, a second bottle arrived. It, too, found an appropriate target, striking a congregant named Shira flush on the forehead, a few inches from her yarmulke. Shira recovered the bottle, this one containing orange soda provided by yeshivas to their students as part of a box lunch. Clutching it in her fist, she stalked to the barricades and began shouting at the nearest boys. "What are you doing with a yarmulke on?" one shot back in English.

Shira retreated to apply an ice pack, as Toby groped her way to her feet and into a friend's embrace. The service proceeded, with a woman chanting the Haftorah, the reading from the Prophets. The assault proceeded, too, with more bottles and a few bags of rugelach pastry, accompanied by a song whose Hebrew words translate as "You're desecrating the mitzvah [commandment] place."

As Ehud Barak prepares to assemble a new government, the clash at the Wailing Wall underscored the religious divisions he must try to bridge to govern more successfully than his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Wall is so central to Israeli civil life that Netanyahu prayed there the morning of last Monday's election; Barak did the same the morning after his victory. Precisely because the Wall is the holiest site in Judaism, it has been the setting for repeated confrontations between non-Orthodox congregations, which permit women to fully participate in worship services, and the ultra-Orthodox known as haredim, who consider such practice to be blasphemy. Friday's showdown follows even more vicious ones last year on Shavuot and in 1997 on both Shavuot and Tisha b'Av, the date of fasting and mourning for the destruction of both temples. At the worst, haredim threw feces and urine on the egalitarian worshipers.

These events resonate in profound and profoundly different ways in Israel and America. For Jews in the United States, more than 90 percent of whom are not Orthodox, the attacks at the Wall have become emblems of their illegitimacy in Orthodox eyes. But in Israel, the struggle at the Wall means relatively little in terms of conflict between the branches of Judaism. The Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements represent only a small fraction of Israelis, who tend to identify as either Orthodox or secular.

What does matter enormously in Israel is the relationship of religion and state. Orthodox control of the Wall galls liberal Israelis as a symbol of overreaching religious power in the state. In exchange for the religious establishment's support for Zionism, Israel's secular founding fathers guaranteed the Orthodox rabbinate dominion over many areas of civic life. What the secular leaders never anticipated was that the haredim -- who had opposed Zionism because they believed only the Messiah could restore Israel -- would not only emigrate by the hundreds of thousands but would come to dominate religious life here. So while secular Israelis may not speak with nearly the outrage of American Jews about the assaults on mixed-gender worshipers, they complain vociferously about the Orthodox monopoly over marriage, burial and even the public-transportation schedule.

And these issues played out quietly but unmistakably in the recent election. In a campaign otherwise notable for its caution, Barak raised the issue of separating church and state by proposing to end the military exemption for yeshiva students. And though Barak never raised it directly, the influence of religious parties in Netanyahu's coalition polarized the electorate. The anti-religious Shinui party, until now a flyspeck in Israeli politics, led its parliamentary ticket with an especially caustic commentator named Tommy Lapid, who is sort of a cross between Don Imus and Madeline Murray O'Hair. It won six seats of the 120 in the Knesset, enough for it to press for inclusion in Barak's ruling coalition. On the right, meanwhile, the relatively secular Likud Party lost seats, while the intensely religious Sephardic party, Shas, whose leaders claim the endorsement of rabbis both living and dead, leaped from 10 seats to 17. It, like Shinui, could end up in Barak's government.

But those partners are mutually exclusive, and the rancor at the Wall on Shavuot helps explain why, for it revealed the chasm that still separates the traditional Israeli conflation of church and state from the American-style separation that liberals here now seek. The confrontation simply displayed the divide in a particularly crude way.

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