First, the good news: according to Kan 11, for the first time since the summer of 1967, the Ministry of Heritage will finance guided tours of the Temple Mount “to strengthen and stabilize the Old City.” Two million shekels ($543 thousand) will be allocated to the project by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit). The tours are expected to start right after the high holidays.
Don’t forget to hit the mikvah first!
The announcement was followed by a furious front-page ad in the Haredi daily Yated Ne’eman, in Arabic and Hebrew, that could have been written by the folks at Toldos Aharon. It states the notorious lie that “all the rulers of Jewish law over the generations forbade severely the ascent of Jews to the Temple Mount (called by the Muslims the Al Aqsa Plaza), and that view has not changed and it continues to hold.”
The statement (at least in Hebrew) is very misleading, seeing as the late Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Goren Ztz”l, not only allowed Jewish ascent to the Temple Mount but established a small synagogue there, and was planning to establish a yeshiva. He was countered by DM Moshe Dayan who feared the consequent rise of Jewish nationalism and ordered Rabbi Gorn to close shop and get off the mountain. Dayan struck a deal with the Jordanian Wakf that created an Islamist governorship at the heart of the holiest Jewish site on the planet.
Earlier on Monday, National Security Minister and Otzma Yehudit Chairman Itamar Ben Gvir was channeling the late Rabbi Goren when he told Army Radio he was looking into establishing a synagogue on the Temple Mount. Wouldn’t that be nice? Let there be a synagogue for Jews and a mosque for Muslims in the spirit of religious freedom.
Israel’s leftist mainstream media was banging on the fear and hate drums the whole day Monday, rushing in the experts who declaimed the mantra about the Middle East catching fire if Jews pray to God on the Temple Mount. That little tune has been played by Israeli media since 1967, as many thousands of Jews have been ascending the sacred mountain, praying there, and even prostrating themselves on the cobblestones, much as our forefathers had done on Yom Kippur when we had a measure of autonomy in Jerusalem.
The Haredi establishment, including both Ashkenazi parties in UTJ and the Sephardim in Shas, is panicking – not at Ben Gvir’s supposed desecration of the Temple Mount, and not at his “pyromania” as they put it in Tuesday’s front page ad. They fear that Ben Gvir, who has already snatched two seats from them in the November 2022 election, is likely to grab another two because he excites their voters a whole lot more than Yated Ne’eman does.
The Heritage Ministry announced on Monday that it “intends to launch guided tours of the Temple Mount, which will allow thousands of Jews, and hundreds of thousands of tourists who ascend the Mount every year, to hear for the first time about the Jewish heritage of the Mount in accurate historical terms, free of alternative facts and false narratives written to promote an antisemitic agenda.”
The police for its part stated that “the visits will be conducted as part of the regular visits on the Temple Mount area and by the rules.”
That’s all we ask.
It is almost heartwarming to see the coming together of such disparate human beings as the Haredi establishment, the leftover leftist contingency whose hate for Judaism is only surpassed by their hate for Netanyahu, and Islamists everywhere. There has to be a Biblical verse that describes it.
Well, there is one. On Monday night, Heritage Minister Eliyahu spoke at an event in Mikve Israel, an agricultural school founded in 1870. A small group of dedicated anarchists kept screaming the war cry, “Busha, busha, busha” (Shame, shame, shame), unwilling to hear him. Children were crying, parents were distraught, it was a reminder of how these anarchists had been able to bring the country to a halt – even though so few of them are still dedicated to the cause.
השר עמיחי אליהו חטף צעקות “בושה” בעת שניסה לנאום באירוע שארגן משרדו.
אליהו השיב מהבמה: אני באמת מתבייש בכם, אנשים שלא יודעים לתת כבוד למורשת. תתביישו לכם, איך אתם מתנהגים
צילום: @HezkeiB pic.twitter.com/FTRfsNkoMm— יערה שפירא (@yaara_shapira) August 26, 2024
Which brought to mind the verse (H/T Rabbi Yedidya Meir of The Patriots): “God is Mikveh Israel (the source of hope for Israel, a play on the word Mikveh which means both a pool of water and hope), all who forsake You shall be put to shame, those in the land who turn from You shall be doomed, for they have forsaken God, the fount of living waters.” (Jeremiah 17:13).
