End of Days: "Temple will be rebuilt only when God sends his messiah"

On June 7, 1967, the third day of the Six-Day War, Israeli troops took East Jerusalem, bringing the Temple Mount under Jewish rule for the first time since the year 70. Israel's leaders decided to leave the Mount, Al-Haram al-Sharif, in Muslim hands. The decision kept the ingredients for holy war apart, just barely. Instead of the Mount, the Western Wall drew Jewish pilgrimage.

Yet the separation made by the civil government would not have worked without a hand from Jewish religious authorities. From the Six-day War on, Israel's leading rabbis have overwhelmingly ruled that Jews should not enter the gates of the Mount. One of the most commonly cited reasons—even if the sages have not always explained their decree in full—is that under religious law, every Jew is presumed to have had contact with the dead. For lack of a red heifer's ashes, there is simply nothing to be done about it: no way for Jews to purify themselves to enter the sacred square, no way for Judaism to reclaim the Mount, no way to rebuild the Temple. Government officials and military leaders could only regard the requirement for the missing heifer as a stroke of sheer good fortune preventing conflict over the Mount.

In any legal system, a technical ruling can mask deeper considerations. The statement issued by Israel's Chief Rabbinate in the summer of 1967 ends with the prayer that "the Holy One Blessed be He will speed our full Redemption, and we will joyously...visit His sanctuary and serve with a full heart, quickly and in our days." Decoded in traditional manner, that would mean that the Temple will be rebuilt only when God sends his messiah: in a future for which the faithful should pray and wait. Conquering the real estate isn't enough.

Unless the future is now. Unless the waiting is over, unless history is literally drawing to its climax, ancient prophecies coming true before our eyes.

That idea, too, can strike the modern mind as foreign, but this time the distance is an illusion. Belief in the End is part of our lives. Tens of millions of people speak of it openly in the traditional language of religion. Widespread predictions that the year 2000 marked the hour were only one expression of that belief. After that year is past, the last of three zeros clicked over to 1, it's likely to grow stronger. Many more people, even those who laugh at religious language, have held a fragment of a hope that they are living at history's dénouement. Some, for instance, would have at least an embarrassed memory of a tremble on hearing words like:

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden.

The idea that human beings are in exile from the Garden, that we're on the verge of returning, wasn't born in the 1960s. pause before you mock.

The concept of an End of Days, in which God's kingdom will be established on earth, exists in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, though it's often suppressed in all three faiths. If there's one thing that has made it difficult to repress that subversive idea today, it is the existence the state of Israel. The creation of Israel in 1948 and its conquest of Jerusalem in 1967 aren't ordinary history: For those inclined to hear them, they're divine proclamations that the hour is near. For liberalists, the venue for the final events is Jerusalem—and at its center, the Temple Mount.

This may be a myth, but the Mount is not a mythical spot. It is in the midst of a very earthly city. It is a short stroll from the business districts of West and East Jerusalem. The dispute over who owns the Mount is one of the most intractable issues of real-world Middle Eastern politics. The conflict is intense because of the Mount's place in history—but even more because of its place in the future. For a small but growing group of Jews on the Israeli religious right, every day since 1967 has been a missed opportunity to begin building the Third Temple. For a far larger number of conservative Christians elsewhere in the world—and particularly in the United states—building that Temple is an essential condition for the Second Coming. And for many Muslims, any attempt to destroy the shrines of Al-Aqsa is a sign that the Hour is at hand.

Should such beliefs matter to anyone else? In 1984, the Shin Bet stumbled onto the Jewish settler underground's plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock. One of the group's leaders explained that among the "spiritual difficulties" that kept them from carrying out the attack was that it is forbidden to enter the Temple Mount because of impurity caused by contact with the dead—that is, they lacked the ash of a red heifer. In a verdict in the case, one judge wrote that if the plan had been carried out, it would have "exposed the State of Israel and the entire Jewish people to a new holocaust." The danger hasn't gone away: The Temple Mount is potentially a detonator of full- scale war, and a few people trying to rush the End could set it off.

The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount
Gershom Gorenberg, Oxford University Press (April 15 2002) pp. 13-15

NOTE: If this page was accessed during a web search you may wish to browse the sites listed below where this topic or related issues are discussed in detail to promote global peace, religious harmony, and spiritual development of humanity:

www.adishakti.org/
www.al-qiyamah.org/
www.adi-shakti.org/  — Divine Feminine (Hinduism)
www.holyspirit-shekinah.org/  — Divine Feminine (Christianity)
www.ruach-elohim.org/  — Divine Feminine (Judaism)
www.ruh-allah.org/  — Divine Feminine (Islam)
www.tao-mother.org/  — Divine Feminine (Taoism)
www.prajnaaparamita.org/  — Divine Feminine (Buddhism)
www.aykaa-mayee.org/  — Divine Feminine (Sikhism)
www.great-spirit-mother.org/  — Divine Feminine (Native Traditions)

"Now, the principle of Mother is in every, every scripture - has to be there." Shri Mataji, Radio Interview 1983 Oct 01, Santa Cruz, USA