Flames rose from the area near the al-Aqsa Mosque on the plateau of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, a place known to Muslims as Haram esh-Sharif, and to Jews as Har Ha-Bayit. Cheers rose from a crowd of Israelis gathered in the plaza in front of the Western Wall; many initially believed that the flames had consumed the mosque itself – it was only a cypress tree that had accidentally caught fire – and had begun singing “O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes,” a militant song associated with the ultranationalist Kahanist movement, and chanted “death to Palestinians.”
The Israelis, virtually all of them members and supporters of the State of Israel’s far-right, radical Zionist movement, were there to celebrate Jerusalem Day. The violence on the Har Ha-Bayit began, in fact, with a heavy-handed police intervention ahead of an annual march through a Palestinian Arab neighborhood. Every year, extremist Israelis parade with flags passing through the Damascus Gate in a demonstration of Jewish supremacy. It is a ritualized humiliation of the Arabs eerily similar to the Protestant Apprentice Boys’ march through Catholic Derry and even the National Socialist Party of America’s aborted march through Skokie, Il in 1978. It is meant to be a provocation, an insult, a gesture that puts the other in its place.
This, however, is something that the marchers usually only mutter in sotto voce. More often, they claim that they are simply celebrating a national holiday that marks the State of Israel’s capture of Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war. The most striking image of that conflict was of one-eyed Moshe Dayan, the State of Israel’s minister of defense, surrounded by the cream of Israeli youth in fatigues and combat helmets at the Western Wall as IDF Chief Chaplain Shlomo Goren led them in prayers. “The wall is ours,” Rabbi Goren said at the time. “We shall never leave it. We make a vow never to leave it.”
There was an apocalyptic ecstasy in what seemed to be the culmination of a messianic narrative. The following week, as Shavuot, one of the pilgrimage holidays mandated in the Torah, brought “thousands of devout Jews to pray in freedom before the historic Wailing Wall for the first time in centuries,” the editors of Time magazine wondered, “has the time now come for the erection of the Third Temple?”
It is hardly an idle fancy. Radical Zionists have held the idea of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, on the site now occupied by the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, since before Israeli independence. A little more than six weeks ago in fact, Andy Blumenthal, a US Department of Commerce official appointed by the Trump administration, mused in The Times of Israel that “the day is coming soon when the Jewish Temple will be rebuilt in shinning glory and we can worship G-d just as we did in times before.”
Never mind that this would mean erasing the Muslim presence on the Temple Mount, and demolishing their sacred sites, Zionists like Blumenthal declare; this, and especially the Western Wall, is Judaism’s holiest site!
Only… It isn’t. There are no Jewish “holy sites.” In Judaism, only ideas, words, and people can truly be holy because only these can contain the ineffable essence of God. Holiness does not – indeed cannot – inhere in things, the Torah tells us. That is explicit in the first two of the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods besides Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.”
Whether or not the Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures) can be taken as literal history (in fact, even few Orthodox scholars insist that it is literal), one of its striking features is the absolute absence of a fixed location for God or, for that matter, holiness. This was unique in the ancient world, where the Israelites’ Canaanite neighbors worshipped deities tied to specific sites on mountain tops, and even the ancient Greeks revered sacred locations like Delphi which were immovable conduits to the divine.
The ancestors of today’s Jews were, of course, mostly nomadic pastoralists moving from place to place, seeking the best pasturage for their flocks of goats and sheep, and they temporarily invested whatever place they stopped at to perform religious ceremonies before pulling up stakes and moving on. Some of the sites repeat, like Mount Moriah, where Abraham bound Isaac, where Isaac and Rebecca prayed to God, and where Solomon eventually built his Temple, but there is no suggestion that the site, rather than the acts that occurred there, had any intrinsic sacred value.
Indeed, in the Torah the Israelites don’t go to a location inhabited by their God, they bring him along with them in their journeys, pitching tent and erecting a tabernacle – the mishkan, God’s place of residence – as circumstances demanded along the road. Like his peripatetic people, God has no fixed address.
That changed when the nomads settled, of course, and at first, they set up the portable mishkan in places like Bethel (literally “home of God”), where Jacob had once built an altar years before, and Shiloh, but these were not fixed locations and, more importantly, the tabernacle did not endow the sites themselves with any holiness. In fact, the Israelite priests made a big point of that once the mishkan relocated to what was supposed to be its more-or-less permanent home on Mount Moriah after David captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites.
The Prophets Hosea, Jeremiah and, especially, Amos spilled a whole lot of ink denying the holiness of holy sites. In Amos Chapter 5, the prophet explicitly pronounces “seek not Bethel” and even if there is a conflagration in the “House of Joseph” (the northern Israelite kingdom) “there be none to quench it in Bethel.” After hundreds of pages railing about Ashtarot and mountain sanctuaries to the various Baals, it’s pretty clear that, to the Israelite mind, there can be no holy sites; a place is just a place.
Yet, places can be important, even if they aren’t holy, and the city of Jerusalem (David’s and Solomon’s capital) and the Temple within its walls were certainly important. The Temple, in particular, was the administrative and ritual center of Israelite religious life.
The Judaism practiced during the First and Second Temple Periods (roughly 950 BCE to 70 CE, with a 70-year break for the Babylonian Exile) was very different from what we practice today. It was a temple cult whose observances were the three pilgrimage festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, during which the faithful would travel to Jerusalem, and the daily animal sacrifices on the Temple altar for thanksgiving, remission of sin, and praise. For most of a millennium, the kohanim (the hereditary priests) and the soferim (the hereditary scribes) were the only people with direct access to the Torah, although that began to change later in the Second Temple Period.
Very few of the practices that we consider central to Jewish religious life today – Torah study, disquisition, daily prayer, holiday observance in the home – were even remotely common during most of the time that the Temple, in its first and second iterations, stood in Jerusalem. Modern Judaism is very much a religion without place, while the Israelite temple cult was explicitly a religion that justified the centrality of place. During the First Temple and the Hasmonean periods, it was, as the historian Lester Grabbe has noted, the validation of monarchical authority, and big business. It was the sinecure of the tribe of Levi, which supplied the kohanim, soferim, and the religious bureaucracy, but which did not control its own territory. All of those burnt offerings were the Levites’ barbecues and, since they controlled the Temple bureaucracy, they administered the money offerings and bequests that entered its coffers.
It was a sweet deal for the Levites – and admittedly also for those Jews who did not want to trouble themselves with complex matters of theology – but it all came crashing down in 70 CE when the Romans crushed the First Jewish Rebellion and obliterated the Temple. Things were so bad for the Jews that the leading sages, rabbis like Yochanan ben Zakkai, Yehoshua ben Hananiah, and Shmuel ha-Katan began to conceive a way to continue Jewish religious life without the Temple. Even if the legendary Council of Yavne is a myth, the ideas it stands for created a revolution in Judaism.
The Jews would no longer be tied to place; like their nomadic ancestors before them, they would bring their God along with them, but this time there would be no mishkan. Jews would bring holiness within them. After Yavne, Judaism would be built on Halakha, the codified oral law, and on knowledge of Torah. Above all, it would be based on ideas like the commandment of Deuteronomy 16:20 – “Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof” (justice, justice, you will pursue”) – and the Mishnaic injunction of Tikkun Olam, to always act beneficially, to repair the world.
With no Temple, no kohanim, no passive cult of animal sacrifice, this new Rabbinic Judaism became a religion of morals and ethics. One sanctified the world through righteous acts and justice and, in so doing, we sanctified ourselves. Rabbi Simlai offered that “Torah begins with chesed and it ends with chesed.” It is almost impossible to render a word as expansive as chesed in English, but it means something that encompasses, love, kindness, and decency. This was the charge given to Jews when they lost the physical Temple in Jerusalem.
Yet, a life of justice, healing, and decency can be difficult. Except for the most righteous tzaddiks among us, we often fail to meet the standards that the rabbis set. Rabbinical Judaism demands kippur for sins and moral transgressions, a process of atonement that requires personal reflection and an honest effort to make amends. This is hard work; it would be so much easier to bring a goat “without blemish” to altar and be done with it. No wonder there are Jews like Blumenthal who dream of a restored Temple!
Indeed, the Zionist movement has mobilized these dreams as it has hijacked Judaism and colonized Jewish life around the world. Zionism emerged from the fertile compost of 19th century European nationalism, which supercharged antisemitic violence while, at the same time, appeared to offer its solution. In the racialized discourse of the time, the nation was the only natural category of human organization. Any true people, or volk, worthy of respect comprised a discrete community, a volksgemeinschaft, and resided in their homeland, or heimat.
The French had France, the English England, the Germans had finally coalesced into a singular Germany, and national communities like Hungary, Poland, and Serbia demanded nationhood for themselves, in clearly-defined national territories. If it was good enough for them, the Zionists argued, then it would be good enough for the Jews to define themselves, using the only category then available for modern peoplehood, as a nation. All they needed was a location, a homeland in which to do it. “The content of our life will be national when its forms become national,” the Zionist ideologue Jacob Klatzkin wrote sometime around 1917, while the nations of Europe were actualizing their nation-ness in mass murder and genocide. “Indeed, let it not be said that the land is a precondition for national life; living on the land is ipso facto the national life.”
Location, they used to say in retail, is everything; it certainly is in nationalism. Even today, deploying the hoary, ethically and intellectually-bankrupt idea of nationalism, Zionism is clear that, if we are a people, we are a nation, and if we are a nation, then it must be tied to territory. The inevitable corollary is that the revolution of Yavne, which liberated Judaism from passivity, priestly domination, and the shackles of place was fundamentally wrong.
“Zionism stands opposed to this,” Klatzkin wrote. “Its real beginning is The Jewish State and its basic intention, whether consciously or unconsciously, is to deny any conception of Jewish identity based on spiritual criterial.”
According to this logic, the national state is the sole criterion for membership in the Jewish nation. What makes one a Jew is not knowledge or observance of Torah, the pursuit of justice, or acts to make the world a better place, it is actual or at least aspirational citizenship in the geopolitical State of Israel. And the State of Israel is a jealous God that will tolerate no rivals; it has come to dominate Jewish life within and without its geographical borders, it demands that Jews pray for its welfare in synagogues in Paris, Montreal, and New York, and aspires to silence or expel any Jew who, like the prophets before them, even offers the mildest criticism.
Blumenthal and the rabid demonstrators in the plaza before the Western Wall are only demonstrating publicly and out loud what Zionism has quietly aspired to since before the 1948: a new kind of Judaism, a Third Temple Judaism predicated solely on location and which subverts and erases the ethical revolution of Yochanan ben Zakkai and his fellow rabbis; it simply substitutes the State of Israel for the Holy of Holies. It is a Judaism that demands fervor in defense of its God but obviates any need for introspection or critical thought; it asks for nothing more or less than mute, passive obedience.
There are no “holy sites” in Judaism, but there are in Zionism. Since the founding of the State of Israel, its leaders have invested vast resources in archeology meant to invest locations throughout the country with a kind of nationalistic sanctity. Masada became a secular shrine despite the fact that there is scant historical evidence that the tragedy associated with it ever actually happened. Excavated by General Yigal Yadin – an IDF Chief of Staff who dabbled in archeology – in the early 1960s, even the minimal physical evidence of the “heroic” last stand of the Jewish rebels is now in doubt.
The “Tomb of David,” on Mount Zion, which most archeologists doubt was an iron age tomb, let alone David’s, was a site holy to Christians and Muslims for centuries, but an object of indifference to Jews, even to those pious, pre-Zionist pilgrims of the First Yishuv. Only the exigencies of nationalism, when it ended up on the Israeli side of ceasefire line in 1948, invested the site with a post facto significance and holiness.
Even the Western Wall, reputedly “the Holiest Site in Judaism,” had virtually no career before 1967. Despite the legend, it is not the last surviving remnant of the Second Temple. It is not even the basement of the Temple; it is, rather, one of the retaining walls that help to hold up the earthwork mound upon which the Temple was built. Until 1967, it was just another place in a very old city, where Palestinian Arabs had built modest homes and market stalls. Throughout the years of the First and Second Yishuvs, through each succeeding Aliyah, few Jews thought to visit the site, even in the early days when tensions between Jerusalem’s mostly-Arab residents and their Jewish neighbors were low.
What made the Western Wall a “holy site” was not its history, or Jewish belief, but its value as a symbol when the IDF captured Jerusalem 54 years ago and the one-eyed general stopped by for an impromptu minyan. It became a “holy site” of Zionism once the bulldozers cleared the Palestinian Arabs’ homes and stalls to make way for the vast plaza, administered for profit by Haredi religious authorities. This was the State of Israel’s strategy and bargain – enlist the most regressive, insular, and chauvinistic religious extremists as the kohanim of Third Temple Judaism, and their sinecure will be the take at the door.
For those among our people who find the complexities of the 21st century too confusing, and who have decided that the moral and ethical work demanded by the revolution of Yavne is too onerous, this Third Temple – in their imagination the real, stone and mortar temple they plan to rebuild – offers simplicity, certainty, and ease. They aspire to nothing more than to return to the day when place mattered, when devotion meant coming to a cult site, eviscerating the best animal in their flocks and soaking themselves in gore as they make a blood sacrifice at a rock on a hill.
That is the mentality we saw in the plaza this week at “Judaism’s holiest site.” The State of Israel is more than happy to feed their dreams.