From the Times of Israel:
“It is not enough to wait and pray for the Third Temple,” the statement added. “It is a Biblical obligation to build it.”
According to Rabbi Chaim Richman, the institute’s international director, the temple would stand in the present location of the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine. Muslims revere the mount as the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary.
But Richman did not set a target date for breaking ground for the construction project. The temple will be built, he told JTA, when “the world will want us to build the temple.”
“The Jewish people have a responsibility to all of humanity, including Islam,” Richman said. “I don’t expect it to come about through any sort of confrontation or any sort of military maneuver. The Jews have to represent good in the world, light in the world.”
Richman quoted the verse in Isaiah calling the temple “a house of prayer for all nations.”
But recently, the Temple Mount has been the scene of confrontation. Palestinian groups have repeatedly protested Jewish groups visiting the mount in recent weeks.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told JTA that on Saturday, a group of Palestinian rioters burned and heavily damaged the police stand on the mount.
Referring to these incidents, Richman said the mount “is overrun by terrorists. This is a tangible fact.” He said rebuilding the temple is the next step to Israel’s current military operation in the Gaza Strip.
“We cannot be the people we’re supposed to be without the Holy Temple,” he said. “So what if we root out the [Gaza] tunnels and missiles? Then what are we doing with our lives? The redemption of humanity is dependent on the Jewish people.”
1 comment:
This subject is, and will continue to be, enormously intriguing, and may be a core element in the future of Judaism. Here is why:
1. Judaism does not recognize the divinity of Jesus, and keeps its vigil for the arrival of the Messiah.
2. We may consider that the Third Temple has already been built on the seven hills of Rome, under the name of the Sistine Chapel, which was designed to be a copy of Solomon's Temple. The measurements found in the Bible are the precise ones of the Sistine Chapel. Also, the sanctuary was built in two levels in order to reproduce the sacred site that existed in ancient Jerusalem, and a huge white marble partition grill with seven marble flames on top was built to represent the menorah in the Jewish temple of antiquity simulating the curtain between the two sacred areas.
Was the building of the Sistine Chapel, as a reproduction of the Temple of Solomon, a fluke of history or was it divine inspiration?
Given that the God of the Jews is the God of Christianity, whether or not our God allows the construction of a new Temple in Jerusalem will be a matter of theological significance. The implications of the construction of a new Temple go beyond the Temple itself.
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