[A-List] The New Cult of the Temple

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Uri Avnery

Antiwar.com (September 21 2004)

The Security Service is haunted by a terrible fear: that another Israeli prime
minister will be assassinated. The extreme right wing, which does not hide its
admiration for Yigal Amir and his deed, harbors some who dream of a similar
action. After all, if Amir succeeded in murdering the Oslo process, why
shouldn't another Amir succeed in murdering the process of dismantling the
settlements in the Gaza Strip?

But the Security Service also entertains an even greater fear: that a Jewish
terror group will bomb the mosques on the Temple Mount.

Years ago, a Jewish underground organization was preparing to do exactly that.
It was uncovered before it could carry out its plans. Now similar plots are
afoot.

The Security Service believes that this action is intended to put an end to
Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. Bombing the al-Aqsa Mosque and/or the Dome of
the Rock would inflame the whole Arab and Muslim world. It would cause profound
upheavals, bring down Arab regimes, perhaps ignite a fundamentalist revolution
throughout the region. In such a situation, who would think about evacuating
settlements?

All this is true, but it does not touch the roots of the conspiracy. The bombing
of the Haram al-Sharif mosques is an enterprise that goes well beyond topical
issues - it is a revolutionary act that would change the Jewish religion itself.
From the point of view of the potential bombers, that is the main thing.

In Israel, Jewish history is divided into three "houses", meaning three temples:

The First Temple was supposedly built by King Solomon in the tenth century BC
and destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in the year 568 BC. The
people of Judea were taken as captives to Babylon and about 50 years passed
before they were allowed to return to Jerusalem and build the temple again.

The building of the Second Temple was finished in 516 BC. It was renovated and
expanded by King Herod around 20 BC and destroyed by the Roman general Titus in
70 AD.

The Third Temple does not exist, but the new Jewish community that started to
establish itself in Palestine in 1882 often calls itself the "Third House". 
(When Moshe Dayan became hysterical at the beginning of the Yom Kippur war, he
started lamenting the "Destruction of the Third House".)  But this is only a
symbolic term - not one of the Zionist movement's Founding Fathers nor any of
the founders of the State of Israel dreamed of building a new temple.

The reason for this is rooted in the events of 1,934 years ago. When the Romans
besieged Jerusalem, before the town fell and was destroyed, a leading rabbi,
Yokhanan Ben-Zakkai, was smuggled out in a coffin. He approached the Roman
commander and succeeded in getting permission from him to establish a Jewish
religious center in Yavneh, between Jaffa and Asdod.

That was the beginning of a revolution in the Jewish religion.

"The First House" was a rather insignificant edifice. Contrary to the Bible,
there is no historical evidence whatsoever that the empire of David and Solomon
ever existed. Jerusalem was a mere hamlet, Judea a negligible entity. The Jewish
religion as we know it came into being only in the Babylonian exile, and since
then two-thirds of the Jews (as they have been called since then) lived outside
of Palestine.

The "Second House", too, began as a rather insignificant affair, as attested by
a contemporary prophet, but it spread in the course of time. King Herod, a great
builder, tried to win the hearts of his detractors by converting the Temple into
a magnificent structure.

Even before that, a priestly aristocracy had sprung up around the Temple and
established its position in the Jewish community of Judea. Its political
expression was the Sadducee party. Against it an opposition party, the Pharisees,
was formed. They allowed for a much wider interpretation of the holy scriptures
and believed in another world. At the time of this struggle, Jewish religious
creativity flourished and the Bible was written. Since the priestly
establishment was in power, the Temple plays a central role in the Bible. The
ritual sacrifice of animals accompanied other practices connected with the
Temple, the symbolic habitation of the Almighty.

Jesus, a Jewish revolutionary, rebelled against the commercialization of the
Temple, as did many of the Pharisees. The Hasmonean dynasty, which was based on
the priestly aristocracy, considered the Pharisees its enemies and executed many
of them.

All this changed when the Temple was destroyed. The structure disappeared,
together with the cult of sacrifices. The Jerusalemite aristocracy was
eliminated, the priests lost everything. The Jewish religion changed course.

From then on, the rabbis, successors of the Pharisees, were dominant in the
Jewish community and its religion. Long before the destruction of the Second
Temple, the great majority of Jews lived outside Palestine. After the
destruction (and the futile Bar-Kokhba rebellion of 135 AD), the Jewish
community in Palestine dwindled. Jerusalem became a dream, and all significant
events in the development of the Jewish religion occurred far away from there.

After the destruction of the temple, the Jewish religion became a matter of laws
and commandments unconnected with any particular territory. The Land of Israel
and Jerusalem became more symbols than a territorial reality. Judaism did not
even demand that its believers make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as Islam requires
its believers to travel to Mecca at least once in their life.

Until the advent of modern Zionism, Jews never once tried to return en masse to
Palestine - indeed, this was explicitly forbidden by their religion. When half 
a million Jews were expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492, they dispersed
throughout the Muslim Ottoman Empire, but only a few went to Palestine, which,
too, was an Ottoman province. Napoleon's call to the Jews to set up a Jewish
state in Palestine fell on deaf ears. The first proponents of the modern Zionist
idea, long before the appearance of Theodor Herzl, were Englishmen and Americans
motivated by Christian religious impulses.

During the last few centuries, European-American Judaism became more and more a
religion imbued with a universal moral message. Jewish thinkers believed that it
was the "mission" of the Jews to bring universal ethics to the nations of the
world, seeing that as the real substance of Judaism.

Zionism came into being as a part of the nationalist revolution in Europe and as
a reaction to its generally anti-Semitic character. It originated the theory
that the Jews are a nation like other European nations, and that this nation
must set up its own state in the country now called Palestine. Not by accident
did the teachings of Herzl arouse the violent and vocal opposition of almost all
the great rabbis of his time, whether Hassidim or their opponents, the Mitnagdim,
whether orthodox or reformist.

But when the Zionist community in Palestine established a state, something
happened to Judaism there. The connection with the territory, the soil, changed
the face of the religion, as it did to all other parts of national life. It is
no exaggeration to claim that the Jewish religion in Israel underwent a mutation,
which has become more and more extreme in recent years.

A religion with a universal message became a tribal cult. A religion of ethics
became a religion of holy places. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a Jew of the old kind,
defined the religion of the settlers as a pagan idolatry cult.

The new cult of the temple is the climax of this process. The practical
preparations for the destruction of the mosques and the restoration of the
temple, together with animal sacrifices and other temple cults, constitute a
break with the last two thousand years of Jewish religion. It is a religious
revolution of historic dimensions.

If this tendency becomes dominant in the state of Israel, it will not, I believe,
lead to the building of the Third Temple but to the destruction of the "Third
House". The Second Temple, together with the Jewish people in this country, came
to a violent end because a small minority of fanatical Zealots, who were very
similar to today's extremist settlers, came to power in the Jewish community and
dragged it into a mad, hopeless war. That can happen again.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/avnery.php?articleid=3614

Uri Avnery is a longtime Israeli peace activist. Since 1948 has advocated the
setting up of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1974, Uri Avnery was the
first Israeli to establish contact with PLO leadership. In 1982 he was the first
Israeli ever to meet Yassir Arafat, after crossing the lines in besieged Beirut.
He served three terms in the Israeli Parliament (Knesset), and is the founder of
Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc). Visit his website:
http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html


Please also see:-

"Pollardites in the Pentagon?" 
by Patrick J Buchanan, Antiwar.com (September 08 2004)
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=3517

"If Americans Knew: What every American needs to know about Israel/Palestine
(Pressure Groups and Censorship in Israel/Palestine)" by Alison Weir, Founder
and Executive Director of If Americans Knew (September 15 2004)
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/sides.html

"A Nation? What Nation?" by Uri Avnery, www.avnery-news.co.il (September 25 2004)

Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/