WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Abbas just proclaimed on the UN’s world stage that the Temple Mount (expressly Western Wall and all) is exclusively Muslims’ . Bibi rightly answered back, but the very epicenter of the Jewish faith is Diaspora Jews’ likewise to defend. Some US Jewish leaders might, but we grassroots must.
Answering Abbas: The Task Not Just of Bibi and Diaspora Leaders, But of We Grassroots American Jews
Last week, Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, standing at the podium of the United Nations during its celebration of “Nakba,” an official international commemoration of Israel’s sovereign rebirth as a “Catastrophe,” threw down this gauntlet:
“the ownership of al-Buraq Wall [the Western Wall] and al-Haram-al-Sharif [Temple Mount] belongs exclusively and only to the Islamic Wakf alone” [bracketed insertions Jerusalem Post’s].
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu honorably answered Abbas (see, e.g., Jerusalem Post, May 21, Netanyahu Calls Out Abbas Lies About Jewish History in Jerusalem), citing the Temple Mount “on which King Solomon built the First Temple of the Jewish people” and “the heart of the historic State of Israel, the City of David,” which “was here 3,000 years ago.”
Well said, but answering Abbas et ilk’s’ denial of Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and historic Jerusalem isn’t Israelis’ obligation alone. A fortnight ago in BSMW #1164 I quoted Israeli Amb. Alan Baker calling the Temple Mount “the very epicenter of the Jewish faith” [emphasis added] and calling for Jews’ “right of worship” there “parallel to exercise of the same right by Muslims.”
So it’s not just Israelis’ but all Jews’ [meaning primarily we American Jews’] obligation to answer Abbas’ assertion of Arab ownership of the Temple Mount (including Western Wall) by ourselves actively unequivocally asserting that holy site’s [if there’s any site that’s a holy site] aboriginal Jewish connection. In last week’s BSMW #1165 I quoted respected Elder of Ziyon:
“… the entire Temple Mount was built by Jews, in sections, from the time of the Biblical kings to the Hasmonean extensions to the Herodian extensions. These extensions can be seen from the Eastern Wall of the Mount.
“The entire Temple Mount is proof of the Temples!”
But on the subject of “we American Jews,” this week I ordered from Amazon Charles Jacobs’ and Avi Goldwasser’s new book, Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership. It came yesterday, and I’ve begun reading it. It’s grim reading, this shining of light, says its cover, on “the devastating failure of the Jewish establishment, including its leaders and major donors, to defend and protect American Jews.” The book’s 22 essays by different authors, some of them – Tobin, Dershowitz, Glick, Klein – Jewish household names in America, deplore our U.S. Jewish organizations’ leaders’ abandonment of defending our community’s stakes both here and re our people’s homeland. I expect you’ll hear more from me anon on this Betrayal book, but my fixation as always is not with our American Jewish community’s communal leaders, but with my fellow U.S. Jewish grassroots. We too, the American Jewish “street,” have to assert our people’s answer to world stage denials of Jewish claims to Jerusalem and its Jewish Temple Mount.
Two Jewish Temple Mount misperceptions must be overcome – misbeliefs that over the past two millennia since Herod’s Second Temple’s destruction by Rome all but maybe faintest traces of Jewish connection to “the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound” have disappeared, and that in any case the sacred “status quo” precludes not just Jewish prayer but all but minimal Jewish “visit” there.
Physical Evidence of First as Well as Second Jewish Temple Is Still There Today
Biblical Archeology Review editor Hershel Shanks wrote that archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer “makes quite a good case” not only that evidence of the layout of the First Temple’s 500 cubit square Temple Mount still exists on today’s Temple Mount, but that even that “the exact spot where the Ark of the Covenant rested” in the First Temple’s Holy of Holies can still be seen! (Foreword to Ritmeyer, Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, pp. 8-9). Yes, this is one acknowledged expert’s conclusions based on detailed observation and passages of Josephus (first century CE) and the Mishnah (second century), but Shanks was right he “makes quite good case.” See especially Ritmeyer’s full version, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. At least the short version, Secrets, is worth every Jew’s read, but start here below with this lay Diaspora Jew’s sketchy summary while you stand on one leg. Appreciating that this physical evidence still exists will help overcome reticence for us to claim that the site’s still the Temple Mount and not “Al-Aqsa Compound” as others call it.
Extant Evidence of First Temple’s 500 Cubit Square Mount
Evidence extant today starts with a slightly skewed set of steps. The Dome of the Rock sits on a raised platform on Herod’s Temple Mount. Eight sets of steps ascend to it from the Mount’s plaza, seven of which are precisely parallel to the side of the platform to which they ascend. The eighth, in the platform’s northwest corner, is slightly skewed. It’s 3.5 degrees east of north, parallel to the central section of the Mount’s Herod-unchanged eastern wall, its oldest part. The bottom step’s main stone is unusually large, hewn in pre-Herodian style with a large frontal boss (since covered up by the Mount’s Muslim caretakers, but a pre-coverup photo showing the boss exists), suggesting that was part of the pre-Herodian Mount’s western wall, now inside Herod’s western wall).
Somewhat to the east of this platform northwest corner flight of steps is an explored-by-Warren underground cistern with a flat southern wall suggesting it was shaped to support an east-west wall of the platform and prior walls. An east-west line extending from the northern edge of that skewed step through that cistern’s southern wall to the Mount’s eastern wall is 500 cubits.
Starting from that point on the Mount’s eastern wall, which had been first extended southward by the Hasmoneans and then northward and southward by Herod (see quote from Elder of Ziyon above), a measurement of 500 cubits southwards reaches a slight bend in the eastern wall, which Ritmeyer plausibly interprets as the point where the Hasmonean extension began, the stones of which are now deep underground, and hence the beginning of the original Mount’s southern wall, now buried within Herod’s Mount.
Further evidence which Ritmeyer cites includes the interior of Barclay’s gate on the Mount’s western face, originally a set of steps to Herod’s Mount’s plaza, which makes a right-angle turn to the south at the point where it would have run into the original Mount’s and Hasmonean extension’s western wall.
Extant Evidence of Where the Ark of the Covenant Stood
Can this really be!? Ritmeyer here too “makes quite a good case.” The mountain didn’t come to King Solomon. King Solomon went to the top of the mountain, Mt. Moriah, and there built his Temple, with its summit, the Foundation Stone, not the Altar, as some have proposed, at the center of both Jewish Temples’ Holy of Holies. That somewhat flat summit is visible today as the Muslim Dome of the Rock’s Rock, from which Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to heaven. It is surrounded above by a circular balcony of the Dome, from photos looking down from which Ritmeyer makes his Ark resting place case.
He first sets the 20 cubit square walls of Solomon’s Temple’s Holy of Holies, starting from what he assesses as foundation trenches cut on the Rock for the Holy of Holies’ southern wall. He draws the western wall along the Rock’s natural western scarp (aligned not coincidentally 3.5 degrees east of north), and then the northern wall along the cut northern edge. The eastern separation from the Holy had been according to the near-contemporary authorities wooden doors.
We come now to my bar-mitzvah portion (all right, seventy years ago, but what’s seventy years compared to three thousand?), including Exodus 25:10 – “And thou shalt make an ark of acacia-wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof ….” See now Ritmeyer in The Quest, p. 268 et seq. “Exactly in the center of the Holy of Holies,” and “with the longitudinal axis coinciding with that of the Temple,” is a rectangular slot in the top of the Rock, two and a half cubits long and a bit more than one and a half cubits wide (the extra width Ritmeyer attributes to the scroll of the law to be placed “beside” the Ark ultimately read by the high priest to King Josiah). “This small basin which Solomon had made has been preserved until today,” The Quest, p. 273. Eliminating conceivable alternative purposes of this Holy of Holies-centered, longitudinally Temple-aligned man-made slot, Ritmeyer ends that “the conclusion that this depression marked the emplacement of the Ark of the Covenant inside the Holy of Holies is inescapable,” Secrets, p. 109.
But is all this the emes? Ritmeyer himself concedes “the hypothesis presented here also needs to be verified by archeological excavations,” The Quest, p. 12. But guess who’s not wild about that happening. “My” rabbi (Orthodox in Jerusalem’s Old City, and himself a qualified archeologist) isn’t convinced of all of it, but I think it’s solid enough for us to claim and we must, all of us, not least we American Jewish grassroots, based on physical along with Biblical evidence, that it’s still our Jews’ Temple Mount, our people’s holiest site, and not the whole site “Al-Aqsa Compound, Islam’s Third Holiest Site.”
What Status Quo?
Following cabinet minister Ben Gvir’s Temple Mount visit last week, the U.S. State Department last Sunday, May 21, issued a statement that
“we affirm the longstanding U.S. position in support of the historic status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites ….”
So what’s that “Status Quo”? It has Ottoman era roots, but the present version dates back to Dayan, after Israel’s liberation of historic Jerusalem from the invader Jordan in 1967, with practical effect described in a recent, 4/25/23, AJC Global Voice article, What To Know About Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and the Status Quo Agreement:
“… Israeli police manage access to the site and monitor activity, while the Waqf is responsible for managing the site’s religious affairs, such as prayer times and religious services. Jewish visitors are allowed to visit the Temple Mount during certain times, but are not permitted to pray there, in order to avoid provoking interreligious conflict.”
Jim Crow was the “status quo” for a long time in America, not just in the south (consider Jackie Robinson’s reception all over the National League), but it was inherently discriminatory and unjust, and if the Black American grassroots hadn’t non-violently on their part protested it, they’d still be riding in the back of the bus. So I think a status quo in which
“Jewish visitors are allowed to visit the Temple Mount during certain times, but are not permitted to pray there” [emphasis added] is discriminatory and unjust to us. People aren’t “visitors” and don’t “visit” places that are their own, and only at “certain times,” and are “not permitted” to do things that others do there. By me, our Temple Mount “visits” are in the back of the bus.
So, my grassroots American Jewish readers who unlike me are of the Democratic Party persuasion, what I appeal to you now has as much to do with my personal presidential candidate Donald Trump as with Donald Duck: Protest to your Party the injustice to us of “the longstanding U.S. position in support of the historic status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites.”
And let’s all of us grassroots American Jews, regardless of political party affiliation and liberal-conservative differences, actively affirmatively assert that the Jewish people’s Temple Mount is not “the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound” but is, as Amb. Baker just put it, “the epicenter of the Jewish faith” and that we go, not just “visit” there.