Temple Mount is the most revered piece of land in the world for Jews.
I will not go into the various rabbinic opinions about going up. There are two sides to the debate.
On our holiest ground Arabs play soccer, have picnics, humiliate Jews and call for their death in loud unison while our police watch.
This certainly hurts me very much as a Jew. I feel the shame of our people and of our God. We ignore His honor.
Only those who have been so totally desensitized to the very concept of the centrality and holiness of that ground does this situation does not cause them pain or even a wince.
“When it hurts you yell” we say. Silence.
In my religious home in Brooklyn, and the yeshivot I attended, I do not recall any mention of the Temple Mount as a real place. This is because the mentality of Exile was smoothly transferred from Europe to the “Goldene Medina“, and the last thing that American Jews were concerned with was what was happening on our holiest place. Thankfully, out of site, out of mind and heart.
We learned the laws of sacrifices and the laws of purity but it was as far as one could get from our “real” lives in the Golden Exile. We were trained to keep the blinders on to any discussion of the Jewish Nation and the miracles that were happening…over there. We were the center of Jewish religion and it’s future, in the real world.
Orthodox Judaism was just not ready for the revealed Hand of God bringing us back home and giving us sovereignty over our own land again. This disconnect helps explain the total snub they give to the site of the Temple. They do not know how to handle Jewish sovereignty. A shul, an organization…but not our People in its own land.
In the renewed Jewish presence and sovereignty, a new strain of Jews are arising who live and breath the Jewish renewal in the land and are capable of drawing upon pre Exile sensitivities and strength. They cry out at the humiliation and desecration on our holiest spot. Their hearts are not closed to the daily desecration. It hurts them.
Make no mistake. The Muslims do fully understand the importance of our holiest site. That is why they immediately built their shrine upon it as soon as they took it in the seventh century Moslem conquest of Jerusalem.
They most certainly understand just what our Torah says, that it is the center of the world. They understand that as long as they rule that spot they are in the “driver’s seat”.
It is for that reason that the few but growing number of Jews who understand this are the ones they fear and hate most. Muslims dislike and fear Jews who do not squirm and apologize and try to please.
For most of the religious establishment, not to mention our Secular brothers, there is no protesting the desecration of the site and no demand that it cease immediately because it just does not hurt.
So no one yells.
THAT is the tragedy.