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A rabbi tours the outside of the Western Wall (David Silverman/Getty Images)
The most dangerous piece of real estate on earth can be found in the Old City of Jerusalem. An elevated piazza, looming over the warren of lanes below, it’s known as Temple Mount by Jews and the Haram al-Sharif by Muslims. Venerated by both religions, this tangle of bricks and stone is also steeped in mythology. And soon enough, if a group of Jewish extremists get their way, it could spark a cataclysm.
For Jews, Temple Mount is where God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As Abraham set out to obey God’s instruction, an angel appeared to stay his hand. A ram is caught and sacrificed instead — a founding event of Jewish theology. This place would later become the site of Solomon’s Temple, the spot where God was called down to be among His people, and where priests made daily sacrifices for the atonement of the people’s sins. Even before the Babylonians destroyed this First Temple in 587 BC, violence and religion sat side by side here.
In 70 AD, the Romans razed the so-called Second Temple as punishment for Jewish rebellion. They built a shrine to Jupiter on the site of Jewish sacrifice, and slaughtered pigs there as an insult. Later, Christians would use the site as a rubbish tip, doubtless for similar reasons. It became a holy space again only with the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in the seventh century. It remains the oldest surviving example of Islamic architecture. This was where Muhammad was said to have landed on the back of a winged horse to lead Abraham, Moses and Jesus in prayer. For Muslims, then, this is the spot from where Muhammad ascended to heaven.
Ever since the Crusaders were ejected from Jerusalem by Saladin, the hill has been administered by Muslims. But when Israeli paratroopers re-took East Jerusalem during the Six-Day war, in 1967, they raised the Israeli flag over the Temple Mount compound. Watching with his binoculars a few miles away, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan ordered the soldiers to take the flag down. “Do you want to set the Middle East on fire?” he apparently barked down the radio. The flag was removed. For a brief moment, Jews had taken back control of Temple Mount. But even in the midst of victory, Dayan knew this was a step too far. The third-holiest site on earth to Muslims, the Star of David had the potential to engulf the region in an apocalypse of Biblical proportions.
To this day, Temple Mount is administered by Jordan. Even the Rabbis have been remarkably consistent in forbidding Jews from climbing up the hill. The place is just too holy, and without being properly purified according to ancient custom, the very act of walking on the site constitutes an act of defilement. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a very direct statement to his Security Cabinet that there has been no change to the status quo regarding Temple Mount — nor would there be. Even Netanyahu knows how dangerous such a prospect would be.
But the very fact the prime minister felt forced to clarify Israel’s position is worrying enough.
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SubscribeThe last Jewish independent kingdom stood 80 years. The last Jewish polity of Judah ended as a result of extremist fanatics taking over. Let’s see how much better the current version will fare.
The Zionist lunatics will destroy Amerikka and cause WW3. White Supremacy and Zionism will destroy a good chunk of mankind before its over. Hopefully Black Africa will not be dragged into this this White SUPREMACIST Madness of establishing a white military base in North Africa called Israhell.
See things as they are.
If I recall the apocalyptic evangelical Christian literature of my youth in NI (“The Late Great Planet Earth” if anybody knows it also), then the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem is a sign that the End Times are upon us, the Anti-Christ will rise, and the smart folks will have a ticket out in the Rapture before it all really kicks off. Good times, good times.
That would be quite worrying if one were a Christian.
According to Pascal’s wager, the Christians are the ones who don’t have to worry!
I do not think it’s strategically wise for Israel to rebuild the Temple. But I understand the desire, and cannot stand The Good Western Christian attitude towards the Middle East:
“If only the Jew would not provoke the Muslim, there would be peace!”
Of course. God forbid the Muslim world have to share their third holiest site with the most holy of a much more ancient religion. The horror!
Israel’s largest failures derive from their desire to behave like a Western country instead of properly ruling over their dominion. Peace is not made, it is enforced. So do it!
If you think Israel can defend itself against just about every Muslim nation in the Middle East then go for it. I don’t think there’d be much of an Israel left if they tried to demolish the mosque though
The Muslims have been promising to wipe Israel out for nearly 80 years. Where are they?
You will be next
Israel couldn’t rule over anything if it wasn’t backed by American money and weapons. In it’s current configuration it is not a viable State and is one of the principle destabilizing factors in the world. If they’re so certain that God is on their side then let’s withdraw all the foreign support and see how they get on. But I’m tired of my taxes being used to prop up this basket case quasi-ethno/confessional freakshow of a nation.
There are a number of middle eastern states which would crumble without western support. Israel isn’t one of them.
Every war they’re in ends when the West cries that they’re winning too hard. Enough. Stop the aid and let Israel win. Russia or China will be happy to sell them weapons— And not cry when they use them.
I’d be happy to bet that Israel will exist in ten years time. But ten years after that, is a bet I wouldn’t make
The World we be a very different place ten years from now
Maybe. But I don’t think so.
Israelis are a tribe in a way other nations no longer are. They’ve been far poorer, more outgunned, and survived. Other nations without nationality anymore…good luck
Wanna bet US lasts to 2050,?
How are you taxes being used to prop up Israel?
What taxes? Please elucidate.
Absolutely right. This may not be the moment for the Temple to be rebuilt, and that moment may not come for a long time, but in any reasonable world it should happen.
TBH how could it possibly be worse? Iran and half the Middle East want to nuke Israel and will do. What have they got to lose?
A favourite lie of the Muslim supremacists to whip up a murderous pogrom alleges Jews threatening Al Aqsa. See Amin al-Husseini in 1920, 1921, 1923, 1929 etc. Arafat in 1996 and 2000. It seems we get repeatedly all the downside anyway but none of the benefit of actually doing it! Maybe the solution is to kick the Waqf out and really raze Al Aqsa.
Don’t you see the misery and blood-shed that would result from your recommendations. I’m guessing that you are at least somewhat serious about your Judaism; do you imagine that either God or your fellow Israelis would approve?
Perhaps you should concentrate on suppressing the violent ideas in your own mind. Israel has enough troubles right now.
I’m not Jewish. I am a Christian who comes from a country that is OK losing its wars and abandoning its Allies to be killed by Islamists…
…and then lectures the Jews on what they should do.
I don’t see what this would actually cost Israel aside from more threats from people who’ve been threatening them every day for decades.
REALLY? You’re neither Jewish nor Israeli but you’re advocating a policy that would be deadly and destructive for Israel and Jews around the world ?
Just for your own entertainment.
Sheesh!!
You are right. Let Muslims kill all Jews slowly and peacefully
It’s currently Jews killing Muslims by 10,000s
The Jews are still blind to the fact that the temple no longer is a building in Jerusalem. When Christ died on the cross there where many signs like the sun not shining, earthquakes, dead people rising, but perhaps most important the covering of the temple, separating what was Holy from everything else, was torn in two.
Through the atoning death of Christ, God made a new covenant with his people. No longer was there need for animal sacrifices, and ritual cleansing of the temple. Like in the foreshadowing of Abraham sacrificing his son, God sacrificed His Son, and on Him all sin of the whole world was laid. Jesus was every believers substitute, He had lived the perfect life we cannot attain to, and He paid the ultimate price for our sin which we cannot pay. Through faith we receive what the Pharises hope for, the resurrection from the dead and everlasting life.
And God no longer lives in a building, but in every believer. The apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”
I look forward to your imminent interview with Tucker Carlson
Why does Paul, a Jew writing at the time the Jerusalem Temple still existed, use this metaphor? Isn’t it more likely that Paul was referring to the Greek temples?
Paul is complaining at his Corinthian converts. Even more egregious to Paul than the man who committed the sexual transgression is the fact that all the other members of this church, to whom Paul is clearly writing, not just to the officers, did not think it wrong.
They have misunderstood what Paul has advised them previously. They ceased to associate socially with others in Corinth, a city so notorious for moral corruption that it gave rise to a phrase in Greek, to ‘Corinthianise’, but retained their moral degradation.
In saying that each person in this church is a temple, Paul is saying that their previous behaviour is what should be purged, left behind. Paul reinforces this by telling all these people that they are not rated according to class or office but spiritual power. Each ‘gift’ is a manifestation of the Divine Spirit, and as the variety of spiritual gifts have one source all participate in the expression of them, even if they don’t perform a particular act themselves.
If the Jewish Temple were rebuilt, how would that affect Christians? Originally the Ecclesia Dei had orbited the Temple. After its destruction the Ecclesia Dei became associated with the Roman Empire and with it the world; the Empire being to the Romans ‘the empire of the whole earth’.
You are mistaken. Christ himself confirms the words of Paul.: “So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. ” John 2,18-21
Hell of good rhetorical composers created the Gospels.
I fully agree. Paul teaches the Galatians that the church of Christ is the Israel of God, and writing to the Ephesian Christians he leaves on record that they “are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” (Eph 2:19-22)
As if we needed evidence of the sheer insanity of religious doctrines, this article puts it front and centre. The author deserves praise for bringing this to our attention, but nowhere does he indicate (from his own CofE stance) how destructive, how utterly stupid, this mis-step of humanity into the mire of religion during early civilisations has been.
“Heifers are being bred” “Winged chariots”. Come on, just think about the idiocy of this, and everything – the whole mindset – that flows from it.
Enough is enough, surely? When will it finally dawn on the religious that they’re part of a toxic aberration; that “belief” itself is the problem? I try to remain positive, and seek for signs that humanity isn’t a worn-out species, brought down by millennia of dogmatic religious superstition, suprematism and authoritarianism, but a young species undergoing ‘growing pains’ which can be overcome.
I can just hear the “wailing and gnashing of teeth” at these thoughts. Read the article again, and weep.
That was my reaction. We’re going to bring down Armageddon based on unverifiable myths, thousands of years old. Seriously!
Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan His work in vain,
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.
Give it a rest, you religionists have had your go and made a right mess of the world. We’d all be far better off without it, and those who’re too thick to look out into the cosmos and marvel at life without recourse to the nonsense you’re quoting.
Can you can explain the measurement problem of quantum mechanics?
https://plus.maths.org/content/physics-minute-double-slit-experiment-0#:~:text=It demonstrates%2C with unparalleled strangeness,dramatic effect on its behaviour.
The double slit experiment suggests that light particles ‘know’ that they are being observed.
If you took one possibility from this experiment and said therefore all matter could be conscious, you could then extrapolate that the consciousness that exists within all matter is God.
Nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain the measurement problem. Until they can, I feel like it is wise to remain open minded as to the existence of God.
If there’s no God, what do you care what happens to humanity? We’re of no more value than a hive of ants. If we’re all going to die and cease to exist, as will our descendants and everything else in the world, what does it matter if it’s today, or 100 years from now?
Why is it so hard for religious folks to understand that you can do two things at once: Not believe in a God, and also be a caring compassionate person? Many atheists are loving people, and many religious people are…not very loving. Religion may have helped some people establish a moral compass, but good parenting should also establish the same.
I absolute understand that some atheist are caring and compassionate. I’m simply saying there’s no logical reason for them to be that way.
If there is no God, then selfish nihilism is pretty much the only logical worldview. No reason for you to care anymore about an unrelated child dying than about a squirrel dying. We’re all just animals right?
I am lapsed Catholic but if you consider alternative dogmas to Christianity, Communism and Nazism, I would argue that godless world might be much worse.
Giles should really stick to reporting on Church politics rather than writing these half-baked concoctions based on Haaretz reporting and op-eds, and dystopian fantasy fiction. Well actually, a lot of what is written in Haaretz is also dystopian fantasy fiction, so let’s just leave that as “half-baked concoctions based on dystopian fantasy fiction”
Is this not an example of all the tensions in the Middle East, the smouldering beliefs, resentments and prejudices of the ancient and brutal past? My support in the Middle East us for Israel, but as a modern nation it’s up to them to break this endless cycle of ignorance and hatred based on long gone tribal beliefs.
I firmly believe that Jews should be able to pray freely on the Temple Mount, just like Muslims and Christians should be able to pray freely beneath it. Apart from fear of Jihadic wrath, I can’t see why anyone should have a problem with that. And I don’t see why the World is so OK with the cleansing of Christians, Jews and other religions of from anywhere claimed Muslim.
Alongside that, I am also firmly against rebuilding the Jewish Temple on the Mount for plenty of reasons for that don’t include fear of the wrath of Islam.
We Jews don’t need a regressive anachronistic copy of our temple on Temple Mount. And that’s about it.
I tried to, but as they reminded me, its them who are holding the machine guns, not me.
But it never hurts to ask.
Of those Jews who question the “status quo” on the Temple Mount, you represent the vast majority. My guess is that that is true of Ben Gvir’s voters as well. It’s a shame that Giles Fraser, who is generally a supporter of Israel, got sidetracked by a marginal fringe and by an article in Haaretz.
Exactly … the only reason Muslims have had the Temple Mount for so long is that they took it by force. Made up their own myths about it … And kept it…. By force. They have all of N Africa, C Africa and the ME. Israel should be for Jews. Especially as W Europe will have to be abandoned by Jews and many of us Christians soon due to the never ending ‘invasion of diversity’ so enriching our countries at present.
Meanwhile, there is no god. So go figure.
I believe what you mean is that you think there is no god.
That is true, but it seems a reasonable stance given the entire absence of any evidence whatsoever that there is some sort of higher being in charge. Let’s face it, if there was we would rather expect them to do a better job!
If a higher being exists I don’t imagine what we think matters.
They did do a better job, but we were cast out of the garden.
See the measurement problem above.
Maybe it’s not God’s job to do any job. If God started doing jobs where would he stop? Can you imagine trying to solve every human problem or ‘be in charge’ of an entire planet.
You seem to imagine god as some kind of benevolent manager of human affairs.
I’m not sure that’s really the idea of God that’s portrayed in the Abrahamic religions.
I used to like this quote:
“Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
I have since demoted that quote to mere rhetoric, since many good people often practice their various faiths in non-confrontational ways. However there are still some people who seize on their religion, or are seized by it, and nothing else is more important to them. These people are the poisoned ones, in my opinion.
But most normal religionists don’t do this.
Remember, aside from telling a bunch of lies, and his books replete with countless errors (was he drunk when he wrote ?) Christopher H was a polemicist, and hence no better than what he was attacking most of the time.
Quite.
Saint Augustine? Erasmus? Thomas Moore?
I enjoy reading Hitchens, Dawkins and Pinker, but all of them use their own definition of faith as a strawman to argue that religion is hostile to reason, when in fact faith doesn’t even have to have a religious foundation.
Faith isn’t necessarily belief without evidence (Dawkins, Hitchens) or belief without good reason (Pinker).
It is, in Christian terms, belief in what you hope for, which matches the colloquial concept – George Michael was surely not singing ya gotta have belief without evidence.
If you are a proselytizing atheist, you might, like Janan Ganesh, rejoice in the idea that religious belief is declining among young people in the UK, and hope that will lead to a more enlightened and humane world. If you believe in what you hope for, one might almost call that faith…
We know God by the Spirit He gives us… nothing irrational within the heart of true Christianity.
The whole Buraq episode – which stands out like dog’s balls in the Quranic narrative – seems to have been inserted to create a Muslim claim to the area. The Dome of the Rock being where Muhammad is alleged to have begun his Night Journey.
Why Jerusalem ?
Petra was the place where Mahomed likely lived. There’s no proof he ever went to Mecca, since there was no Mecca there to go to; it was a tiny village at the time if it existed at all.
But Petra was not suitable on two counts.
It was dying. An earthquake had cut the springs that supplied it with fresh water, hundred of years prior. It was on the way to abandonment by 700AD.
And theologically, Petra was also linked to the embarrassment of the Satanic Verses and the ‘three cranes’, the Nabatean goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat.
So, not convenient for a strident and simplistic monotheism.
The Night Journey and the embarkation point seem concocted to link the prophet to the building. With the Jerusalem party in the ascendant and the Dome of the Rock well on the way to completion, why not use this huge building for something ? Even if the Jerusalem party would lose out in time.
Islam wasn’t a settled faith at this time, remember.
Al-Aqsa Mosque became necessary since the contortions to fit the Dome of the Rock into the picture themselves resulted in awkward questions . . . it isn’t a mosque, it’s obviously Byzantine (!!) so why commemorate the fantastical journey there?
All of this is about geopolitics and real estate, with Islam trying to simultaneously align while at the same time trying to distinguish itself from neighbor faiths. It probably created more problems for itself than it needed, by concocting myths to balance interests both to avoid schism, and likely, just to avail itself of the damn real estate.
So it’s ok for the Jews to rely on fairy tales but not the Muslims?
Do you have any kind of an adult comment ? Perhaps not.
But anyways.
Islam is particularly vulnerable to this, more so than Judaism or Christianity because it sets store by two things, and only two – the bloke and the book.
It is unstable because of this.
Christianity and Judaism have pretty much withstood 150 years of historicity motivated examinations of their texts, the customs, the architecture, the archaeology. And they’ve proven fairly durable.
Islam ?? I don’t know if it can cope with this. Foundationally, my guess is that it is more precarious, less durable.
And if it falls over ? I would not want to be there.
I think you are saying that the story of the ascent of Mohammed into heaven from the temple mount might not be literally true and that the discovery of this might cause Islam to collapse because Islam is rendered brittle by over-reliance on a single text – the Quran? Have I got you right?
I bow to your scholarship but satisfy the curiosity of an ingnoramus. Are not the Jews the people of the book? Is Torah not central to Judaism in the same manner that the Quran is central to Islam?
I appreciate that Torah is not the whole of Jewish scholarship of course. But nor is the Quran the whole of Islam. What, after all are the Hadith? How else could there be sects? Isn’t a Fatwa an ostensibly infallible but, often, in practice disputed extension of doctrine?
Aren’t all major established religions vast grab-bags of wisdom, myth, analogy, truth and so on? Aren’t they all vastly larger than one soul can grasp? And from that, doesn’t it follow that they are all big enough to survive most of the shocks that mere history can throw at them?
And, if you don’t believe me, consider what happens when Millenarian cults (theologically far smaller and weaker) encounter such obstacles as the predicted date for the end of the world. Does everyone wake up the day after and convert to CofE? No, of course not. They come up with another date.
Christianity survived heliocentrism (it turned out that none of the sun goes round the earth stuff was in the book in the first place) all three of the monotheistic faiths seem to have survived Darwin, Gagarin, cloning, votes for women and the gays.
I’m not saying that. What concerns me is more the whole issue of the historicity of Muhamad and what examining that would do to the mainstream of Islam as it is today.
Not that M. didn’t exist at all – tho there was a German Islamic (academic) scholar and convert who came to that conclusion but it remains very much a fringe view.
But that Mohamed’s biography – and by implication the early history of Islam and what’s in its book – is pretty much fabricated, edited and very much to be seen a a myth.
Since Islam is very much about one bloke, one book in a way that Judaism isn’t, this has a huge impact on it.
Hadiths are an interesting case in that the currently dominant ‘Quranists’ since the 80s and up to today, despise them, because of their unreliability.
If the mainstream edifice of Islam, falls, hadiths presumably will be left, along with fringe sects, but they’re kind of at the margins in this period it seems, and I don’t think they’d ameliorate the crisis.
Not all of Islam has bet on Mahomet so heavily, but certainly the proselytizing branch has. And virtually all of Saudi Arabia. The parts of Islam that haven’t put their eggs in that basket are for the most part now seen as heretics by the Sunni mainstream.
Christianity didn’t ‘survive heliocentrism.’ Specious analogy – it didn’t seem to have thought anything much about it prior to 1615 and it’s mainly an issue because of the Galileo Affair.
The issue in the Galileo Affair was, as Galileo himself put it, what would occur in the ‘two books’ doctrine if heliocentrism were proved ? Noting that G. himself felt it had not been.
I think the whole notion of the Catholic church ‘surviving heliocentrism’ is just a lazy & simplistic 20th century interpolation about what was going on there. You can read a lot about it, by a great atheist blogger, here : https://historyforatheists.com/2022/07/cosmic-skeptic/
“Since Islam is very much about one bloke, one book in a way that Judaism isn’t, this has a huge impact on it.”
You could say the same of Christianity except that it has two books (with the various letters, works of the Saints etc being roughly comparable to the Hadiths). No religion is immortal but both Islam and Christianity have settled all over the globes in wildly different nations and cultures, it seems unlikely that the immolation of the Middle East or Europe would actually mean the end of either, though it might cause schisms and change the seats of power.
I concede that heliocentrism was not the biggest challenge ever presented to the historicity of Christianinty. But I think you miss the wider points I was making.
The first of these was to wonder whether it is correct to suggest that Islam is more fragile in the face of factual challenge because it is about one man and one book. I challenged that not only because Torah is surely at least as important to Judaism as the Quran is to Islam. Moreover, one could argue that the Islamic tradition is broader than either Judaism or Christianity since it recognises the prophets of both.
My second point was that, major religious faiths do not tend to collapse in the face of factual challenges. They just work their way around it through some measure of cognitive dissonance. Very few Christians take the genealogy terribly seriously, creationism is a pretty fringe part of Christendom, and not many get upset about the precise age of the patriarchs. These things are understood as “poetic” truths.
Finally, even if we concede that Islam is somewhat more fragile than Judaism or Christianity, it is certainly more robust than any number of small millenarian sects, many of which have survived the fact that their confident predictions of end times (often the main organising principle of the cult) have not occurred. The date shifts and on the adherents go. See also, for example, Scientology – which has been exposed, debunked, and so on, many, many times, but which staggers on nonetheless.
In short, Muslims will continue to Muslim, whatever the archaeologists say about the Temple Mount.
Your comment started out like a giant rising to fight another giant, but ended up like a car crash involving a hearse. How specious.
This may be the strangest thing that anyone has ever said to me.
The Jewish claim to Jerusalem is not based on myth but on verifiable history that it was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Judea. The Muslim claim though is rather more dubious, and “third holiest site” really doesn’t come up to par. But there are a few billion of them and they have lots of guns.
Yeah Like Fake ASHKENAZI Jews who claim they are from ancient Israel. The REAL Jews are Black they are not from Poland & Russia.
Genetics prove you wrong. Come up with a better hate meme
My goodness, the gymnastics on display in this paragraph.
Most of the time, when we see a nation engaged in a vicious decades-long conflict against an ethnic tranche of its own population, we might at least admit that this casts a certain ironic light on its “purpose” as a safe haven for its other ethic bloc.
And, if we were aware that a senior member of the cabinet of that country kept a picture of a mass murderer on his wall, and harboured ambitions to carry out an act that would “set the Middle East on fire” (in the words of that cowardly old peacenik, Moshe Dayan), might we not ask ourselves whether being a safe haven was right at the top of the agenda.
It’s not as though this is a recent discovery about Ben-Gvir. It isn’t as though he was expelled form the cabinet in consequence. Far from it. The man represents a constituency within Irael, which is far too powerful for that to be possible.
Israel is not a lion trying to work out how to lie down with neighbouring lambs (or vice versa). Ben Gvir is not an aberration, he is a part of what Israel is.
NB, I do exhort people to follow that link in the article about Baruch Goldstein. And to read down to the condemnation of him and the massacre he commited by Yitzhak Rabin in the Knesset.
And then, maybe to dwell for a moment on what happened to Rabin himself.
Thank-you Giles and UnHerd. I liked this article. I found it informative in a way I didn’t expect to. Having said that…
Venerated by both religions, this tangle of bricks and stone is also steeped in mythology.
Even before the Babylonians destroyed this First Temple in 587 BC, violence and religion sat side by side here.
It became a holy space again only with the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in the seventh century.
The place is just too holy, and without being properly purified according to ancient custom, the very act of walking on the site constitutes an act of defilement.
Until the Temple is rebuilt, they think, God will not act with favour towards his people.
I recently read the old testament, the new testament and the koran. I was particularly amused with the bits that dealt with the proper way to build a sacrificial altar and just precisely how the drapes for an altar tent were to be made and of what color. And on and on and on. Oh! And all of the ancient bigwigs lived to be anywhere from 400 to 777 years old. Or was the top end over 800? I can’t recall. The koran read to me like someone just quoting back the torah with some stuff added in to spice it up.
Anyway, those quotes I listed above seem about right. This is never going to end until all of the ‘believers’ of those books fight it out over that ‘holy space’. I am so tired of all this bulls^&t.
I’m no expert, but I can’t help thinking that Islam is primarily about obedience as evidence of faith. Catholicism includes so many saints and resorts to so many small miracles that it’s far more varied and personal. And Judaism is all about the finest details of their Covenant with God; it’s an endless debate. God says X and the Jews respond “With all due respect, Sir, what exactly do you mean by that?”
Maybe one day the Muslims will have a Reformation of their own. But until then what they have is a dangerous reliance on simple obedience.
(Please don’t cut my head off!)
Agreed. Catholicism could bloom a thousand flowers. Orthodoxy too.
Islam has a few branches, but the intolerance of imagery & their disdain of little cults to saints (except in Lebanon where the Muslims all venerate the Virgin Mary) restricts the creative impulse.
What would the most holy Jewish site be?
Brooklyn?
The Even HaShtia stone under the Muslim golden dome on Temple Mount.
‘For Jews, Temple Mount is where God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As Abraham set out to obey God’s instruction, an angel appeared to stay his hand.’
“If I could do anything I wanted, I would put an Israeli flag on the site.” Since taking office, Ben-Gvir has visited the site at least half-a-dozen times’
Since Judaism, Islam and Christianity are all Abrahamic faiths, surely a better goal than raising the Israeli flag over it would be to make the temple mount open to people from all of these faiths? If a third temple were to be built, would it not be better to represent the Abrahamic faiths all equally on that site?
You are the why dont we all get along guy? Everything interesting requires conflict.
Yes and also the let’s not blow up the entire middle east over a very small mount guy.
However I also accept that alot of things in the middle east are blowing up at the moment and probably will continue to do so for quite some time.
I support Israels offensive in gaza, maybe they should hoist the Jewish flag up on the Mount if that’s what they want to do. I’m neither Jewish nor Israeli, so what do I know.
In Britain we have freedom of religion, all the Abrahamic faiths are welcome and people haven’t blown each other up over it too badly yet – my post is based on that really, it works here at the moment, I accept that Israel isn’t Britain though.
Maybe, in a country that wasn’t actively seizing the land of the people currently in control of the Temple Mount and dropping bombs on them, that might be possible.
But since Israel has been seizing Palestinian land for decades, you can hardly wonder why the Palestinians would opt to treat it as a bargaining chip rather than welcoming people of all faiths and none.
By the way, non muslims can visit the mount and the mosque except on Fridays and when services are going on. What you can’t do is pray to another faith. That seems to me to be fair enough. I believe that protestants may visit St Peters in Belfast too but, if a group of Orangemen had sought to conduct a protestant service in the catherdral against the wishes of the catholic clergy, we can imagine the result.
‘Maybe, in a country that wasn’t actively seizing the land of the people currently in control of the Temple Mount and dropping bombs on them, that might be possible.’
The bombs are arguably necessary, raping women and kidnapping women and children is not really cricket either is it.
‘ By the way, non muslims can visit the mount and the mosque except on Fridays and when services are going on. What you can’t do is pray to another faith.’ – I think the Jewish people mentioned in the article would like to be allowed to do that, so that is quite beside the point.
Isaiah’s image of “the lion laying next to the lamb”, as the peaceful symbol of the coming of the messianic age, is extremely beautiful and serene. I remember these verses, recited during Advent, since childhood.
Sadly radical Islam will never accept any coexistence of other religions, which could be just united in prayer on the TempleMount without the need of a new Jewish Temple.
After all the beautiful Hagia Sophia, the cultural and historical centre of the Christian Eastern Empire, was turned into a mosque by the Ottoman Empire after over a millennium of “holding a unique position in the Christian World”. The world didn’t end there, and it seems, that the Christian World had to accept reality. I wonder why the “peaceful religion”(so we are told) of Islam can’t accept, that maybe all religions could also coexist on their third most important religious site.
“Speaking at Kanal D TV’s Arena program, PM Erdogan commented on the term “moderate Islam”, often used in the West to describe AKP and said, ‘These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”Source: Milliyet, Turkey, August 21, 2007”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/moderate-turkeys-moderate-pm-erdogan-explains-there-no-moderate-islam-andrew-c
Hagia Sophia was not razed to the ground and rebuilt
How does the creation of the state of Israel feature in relation to the end-of-the-world prophecies in the Hebrew Bible, such as those of Daniel? Wasn’t this creation of a Jewish homeland, accompanied by other events, supposed to set a clock in motion that was to run down to the coming end?
What are the estimations of the zealously religious Jews on this point?
Many Jews see the current age as one coinciding with the preparation for the sabbath, or Friday evening before dusk. Each day representing a thousand years, the year being 5784 now, the year 6000 will usher in the thousand year span coinciding with the arrival of the moshiach, or messiah. My respect and appreciation for Judaism and my life experience have taught me that we (all of us) as individuals will bring about the messianic era when we choose to live in an awakened state with love as our guide. We are each our own Messiah. Jesus taught this, the enlightened rabbis teach this and most modern Jews realize this. To answer your question, it’s one of the reasons so many Jews are uninterested in rebuilding the temple. There is no “coming end” for reasonable, thinking people.
You might have a point but I’m largely preoccupied by the horrendous antisemitism under every Jewish related instagram reel.
How can someone who writes about the “so-called Second Temple” write fairly about a Third temple movement ?
The movement has to start somewhere, sometime, and by someone. It isn’t fair to denigrate the Jews who have prayed there or Ben Gvir. The Temple Mount is 35 acres. There is plenty of room for the Jews and a synagogue. And don’t forget, there are 2 Holy Buildings there, Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, which was not intended to be a Mosque. The Dome of the Rock was built to serve all faiths.
Rebuilding the temple mount is a fringe movement among Israelis. More importantly why should Jews be barred from prayer at the temple mount? This very article describes in great detail their ancient religious ties to the land. Only Islam would view the very presence of an “infidel” on this small patch of land as mortal threat worthy of waging jihad. These are the people Israel is supposed to peacefully coexist with?!
Yeah and why should Palestinians be forcibly evicted from the land that they and their ancestors have occupied for hundreds of years in order to make way for returnees from the US and Europe.
Mystery upon conundrum.
Excellent article.
How is an Independent homeland for Jews ever reliant on US arms to survive??