What is the Third Temple? (Shabbat & Tisha B’Av Observance 8/8/14)
“What is the Third Temple?” (“It depends on who you ask.”)
Rabbi Amy R. Perlin, D.D. Friday night, August 8, 2014
Shabbat and Tisha B’Av Observance Temple B’nai Shalom
Jerusalem was established as the capital of King David’s kingdom, because it was a neutral piece of land that was centrally located in the center of his kingdom, uniting the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In the history of humanity, the Jewish people is the only nation that has ever made Jerusalem its national capital and the sole center of its religious allegiance.
The First Temple was built by King Solomon, David’s son and successor, in the 10th century BCE, on a piece of land believed to have been the place where Abraham sacrificed Isaac, Mount Moriah, a place we call Har Habayit. From that time until today, Jerusalem has remained the center of the Jewish nation and spiritual universe. We have the oldest claim to the city, which began its existence being called ‘The City of David’ and now has archeological evidence to back up the biblical claims. And the Temple Mount became the most holy place in the Jewish world. The First Temple stood there, until it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, when our people were placed in chains and marched out of the city. Never did we forget or abandon the dream of restoring God’s house.
After many years of exile, Ezra and Nehemiah returned with a remnant of our people to rebuild the Second Temple in Jerusalem, when Cyrus of Persia granted our people the right of return to re-establish the city of Jerusalem and to rebuild the sacred Temple on the site of Solomon’s first Temple. Work began in 521 BCE and was completed in 516 BCE, with the second temple being dedicated the following year.
And no Jew can forget that in 164 BCE Judah Maccabee recaptures the defiled Temple from Seleucids and thanks to that moment, we have Chanukah. We never gave up on the Temple and we never let go of our yearning for Jerusalem as the center of the Jewish world. The egotistical, but architecturally brilliant, Herod the Great completely rebuilds and enlarges the Second Temple from 20-18 BCE, where it remained our holiest place, until it was destroyed and burned by the Romans in 70 CE.
The incredible irony of Jewish history is that both Temples are said to have been destroyed on the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av. From the moment the Second Temple was destroyed until modern times, Jews have commemorated the 9thof Av, Tisha B’Av, with prayer, lamentation, and fasting. It is regarded as the saddest day in our history.
In fact, when I was a child, and we didn’t have a Holocaust Remembrance day, Tisha B’Av was the day we used to remember that tragedy as well. What day could have held our sadness. It was also the day that Himmler received approval for the Final Solution to kill all the Jews, as it was also the day of the mass deportation of the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka concentration camp.
Legend and truth had it that many tragedies befell our people on that day: the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, France in 1306, Spain in 1492. From the Golden Calf to the first Crusade, all these events purportedly took place on this horrific day. Even the bombing of the Jewish Community Center of Buenos Aires in 1994, a place Gary and I visited in December, took place on the 9th of Av, killing 85 and injuring 300.
Our prayerbook and our people have yearned for a return to Zion every day, in every service, since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Jerusalem always remained our spiritual capital and for centuries our people yearned for a Third Temple and a Third Jewish Commonwealth, where the Jewish people would again be returned to a restored City of David.
In the year 610 CE, the rabbis ordered a rebuilding of the Temple and the reinstitution of sacrifices, and the people began. But, the Persians gave control of the Temple Mount to the Christians five years later, and the rebuilding was torn down and the site was turned into a garbage dump, until early Muslims under Caliph Omar, in the 630’s claimed the site for Islam and made it the third most important site for Muslims, building a mosque on the exact site of our original Temple, which today is the Dome of the Rock, the gold dome which has become synonymous with the old city of Jerusalem’s panorama in pictures and postcards. They took Jerusalem by force, murdered our people, and claimed our holiest site as there own.
For over 12 centuries, there has been a Jewish presence in Jerusalem, which was solely dependent on which people came in to massacre us at any given time, be it Christian or Muslim. And when while Jerusalem was not our national capital, garbage often covered the ancient walls we now consider holy. I remember the garbage dump next to the Wall when I lived in Israel in 1972. Today, that old excavated garbage dump is Robinson’s Arch.
Since the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews have made sacred pilgrimage to The Wall, the final remnant of that Second Temple, praying for a Third Temple to be built again on its ruins, or in the very least, for Jews to be able to return to that sacred Wall in safety and freedom. From 1948 to 1967, the Jordanians forbid Jews into the old city, to access our holy sites. We have never denied any people access to their religious sites, since the founding of the State of Israel. Our prayerbook has always contained prayers for a rebuilding of Zion and a return to our Temple in Jerusalem, our holiest city. We have married our ancient yearnings to our modern realities. Today, with a mosque on the site, we must be satisfied with the tunnels under the Mount, and the Wall of the Second Temple.
So what is the third Temple? The third Temple is the Temple that was to built in the Third Jewish Commonwealth, when once again Jews would be self-governing on our land. For a traditional Jew throughout the millennia, Tisha B’Av mourned the destruction of the first two Temples and included a hope for the rebuilding of a third. But, that oversimplifies the answer to my question:
What is the third Temple? Well, my friends, it really depends on who you ask:
Ask the average modern Jew in NY or LA, and the answer might very well be, “Who cares?” Or it might even be – “Well, I belonged to a temple as a kid, then we belonged to a temple when we first got married, and now we really don’t want to belong to a third temple.” The apathy toward Jewish history is magnified with a lack of connection and caring for the institutions that will preserve Judaism for the next generation.
A classical Reform Jew in America of the 19th century might respond that the Third Jewish Commonwealth is America, the new land of milk and honey. For this reason, they did not call their houses of worship synagogues, which had been the name for houses of God after the destruction of the 2nd Temple. Reform Jews called their houses of worship ‘temples’ as there was no yearning for a Third Temple with a capital “T.” And for most of us, that still applies. We have no desire to return to a sacrificial cult headquartered in Jerusalem.
I remember taking our Confirmation class years ago to Kesher Israel, the Orthodox syngagogue in Georgetown. I sat with our girls in the women’s balcony, and I remember like it was yesterday the rabbi looking up and saying, “We from the synagogue welcome you from the temple.” It was not a compliment. It was meant to say that we haven’t given up on the Third Temple and you have.
To my Israeli father and his generation of Zionists, the answer was clear. Israel is the Third Temple. Zionism replaced Judaism as the ideology and passion in the heart of those post-WWII Jews. They saw no need for religious observance and practice, as such. Shabbat, holidays, and Judaism, were to be seen through the Zionist lens of the establishment of a free and democratic Jewish state, the Third Commonwealth, and the land of Israel as a whole is the Third Temple. Where else in the world closes down on Friday afternoon? Where else in the world is silent and free of cars on Yom Kippur?
For Jews of many different stripes, the biblical claim to the land, to Jerusalem, and to God’s promise in the Torah is very real and powerful, and I include myself among them. And that biblical promise and right motivates many fundamentalist Christians, as well. From a biblical perspective, the land and Jerusalem belong to the Jewish people, because God said so. And for those who take the word of God as true, there is no debate.
For the Women of the Wall and our supporters, the Third Temple is not a concern, as such. We want access to the Wall of the Second Temple. We want to pray and read Torah, just as the men on the other side of the mechitza, the partition put up to separate men from women, which wasn’t even there a hundred years ago.
As most Israelis and Jews around the world know, the current Temple Mount has two mosques and that is the way it is going to be in our lifetime. Worrying about a Third Temple is not our issue. We leave that to the Haredim and the Religious Zionists to argue and speculate. We just want equal access in the domains that are in Israel’s ultimate control.
For the Haredim, until an actual Third Temple is built: Hebrew should not be spoken, Israel as a state is not legitimate, and the Temple Mount has with it prohibitions for entry and access. But, these religious Jewish extremists are not concerned about Zionism as a philosophy, or the state they reside in which subsidizes their study and in which they wield enormous political power. They answer only to Jewish texts and those texts demand the yearning for a Third Temple and its ultimate rebuilding. Until then, they have turned the remnant of the Second Temple into their own personal synagogue and extremist shrine.
Religious Zionist, are those people who have united their orthodoxy with their Zionism, especially since 1967. The Religious Zionist’s answer to the Third Temple goes hand in hand with their belief in restoring Greater Israel and uniting the ancient Judea and Samaria to make them a part of the sovereign State of Israel. For the religious Zionist, post-Six Day War when the West Bank came into Israel’s hands, Israel is incomplete without the land promised to the Jew in the Torah and claimed by the Jewish people for the past 12 centuries. The land of Israel, the people of Israel and the Torah of Israel are all united in Greater Israel. To understand the religious Zionist settlers, one must understand that for them, the State of Israel is secondary to the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Israel and at the center of their ideology is the Temple Mount. There are still many of them who believe that the mosques have to go.
Radical Muslims, like Sheikh Raed Salah, told Ari Shavit in his wonderful book, My Promised Land, that the Jews have no historical claim to the Temple Mount — that our story of a Temple on the Mount was all fiction.
You and I use the word ‘temple’ with love. We are connected to our temple. We love our Judaism here. We love Israel and support her in good times and bad. I am not sure Israel is our Third Temple.
For those of us who are Zionists, we feel a sense of fulfillment that the Zion our ancestors prayed for, and we continue to pray for, is actually a reality… an amazing miracle in our history that has known so much sorrow. And for some of us, a proof positive that God kept the promise to return us to our land.
For all of us, it is the prayer and hope and dream that Israel and the Jewish people will continue, l’dor vador, for us and those who come after us. And the reality of a thriving Israel, even when she fights for her security and survival, makes Tisha B’Av a bit more elusive, until you read of the anti-Semitism raging through Europe. It is hard to have a fast day mourning two Temples, when you don’t yearn for a third.
When young Jews go on Birthright and discover Israel, a seed is planted in their Jewish souls. When we teach our little ones about Israel, when we sing Hatikvah, when we pray for the safety and security of Israel’s land and people, when we defend Israel’s right to exist in a world that still breeds anti-Semites, our hearts yearn for a safe and secure Zion and Jerusalem.
Whether touching the ancient stones of the Wall of the Second Temple moves you or not, that place is holy for the Jewish people in a way that some of us really can’t explain.
So….Perhaps for us, the Third Temple exists in the heart of every Jew. And most likely, that is where it will remain.
For this Shabbat, we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, thankful for our return to the City of David, and the land of our sacred beginnings. And we mourn two Temples destroyed, and all the lives that were lost, when we were thrown out of our homeland time and again.
And for this Shabbat, we might just have to agree to disagree on the Third Temple. For whether it will be rebuilt is something only God knows.
Shabbat Shalom.