Last week, Foreign Minister and alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid stirred up a storm of protest when he declared the Western Wall the holiest site in Judaism.
Lapid’s party colleague, MK Merav Ben-Ari, made similar remarks when asked in a TV interview, although he later corrected himself, while comments from MK Benjamin Netanyahu, the opposition leader from 2013 and then prime minister, were ditched. Where he said that the Western Wall was the holiest site for the Jews.
Problem? The Western Wall is not, in fact, the holiest site in Judaism, but the Temple Mount, which is fortified by the Western Wall, is the true holiest site.
The Temple Mount is where the First and Second Temples of Antiquity were located, where, according to the Bible, Abraham tied Isaac, where Jacob dreamed of a staircase leading to heaven and, according to the Talmud, where the whole world was created Was .
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Why is it that despite the Temple Mount’s apparent connection to Jewish history and tradition, it is the Western Wall that has claimed a place in the national Jewish consciousness as the holiest site in Judaism?
But he noted that when the Crusaders reached the Holy Land and conquered Jerusalem, they forbade the Jews to climb the Temple Mount and that the Jews prayed at the Western Wall.
This was the site where the sacred places of the ancient temples were located, while a midrash (biblical commentary) said that despite the destruction of the temple, the divine presence would never leave the western wall.
This situation persisted for hundreds of years long after the Crusaders left.
When ghettos in the Holy Land began to grow again in the 17th and 18th centuries, Ottoman rulers continued to forbid Jews from visiting Temple Mount, but allowed them to pray at the western wall, the closest accessible location to the site. .
And since the Chief Rabbinet was established, prior to the establishment of the kingdom, it was concerned that Jews would enter areas of the Temple Mount prohibited by Jewish law due to religious purity concerns, and therefore on all travel to any part of the holy site. banned.
After Jordan’s conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1948, even the Western Wall was beyond reach.
But since 1967, when Israel annexed East Jerusalem and Temple Mount from Jordan, there has been little movement to re-establish Jewish rights on the Temple Mount.
The Mughrabi quarter in the old city was demolished to create a prayer plaza on the western wall, and the old status quo in which Muslims prayed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque at the southern end of the site, and Jews prayed at the western wall below. , remained.
“We are a conservative society, and we react slowly to events,” Fried says.
“Many people think that the Western Wall is a sacred site, but it is a wall of something else, not something in itself.”
Yehuda Glick, a longtime Temple Mount activist and former Likud MK, agrees with Fried.
“When you don’t want to go anywhere, you go to the place closest to you. And you get used to what you have,” Glick said.
“We live in an environment in which what we strive for is a summit we didn’t reach 50 years ago,” she continues, praying in reference to the will of the Israelis amid the War of Independence and the Six-Day War. to the western wall.
“Reality is hard to change. After leaving slavery in Egypt, the Israelites began to complain that they wanted to return for all the free watermelons and cucumbers they ate there,” Glick describes the events of Exodus as recorded in the Bible. Said with reference to.
However, Glick insists that it is important for the Jewish people to be associated with that site, despite the apparent lack of public knowledge about the centrality of the Temple Mount to Judaism.
“God chose the Jewish people and He chose the Temple Mount as His one resting place in the world, and as a result, we have a common destiny which is to announce the Kingdom of God from the Temple, which is the source of prayer for all.” The house will be the people, and where all the nations will declare that God is one and his name is one.
“We can only do this from the temple on Temple Mount, where God has chosen to place his palace. We cannot choose anywhere else.”