Efrat, Israel - “And they shall make for Me a Sanctuary and I shall dwell in their midst”.

The Sanctuary was the fore-runner of the Holy Temples - the special shrines of our nation during both Commonwealths and the future vision foretold by our prophets and anticipated at the conclusion of each Yom Kippur fast and each Passover seder ceremony. The Holy Temples stood aloft on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem - and indeed the unique sanctity of Jerusalem emanates from the special quality of the Temple Mount. World Jewry was electrified on June 7, 1967, at the zenith of the 6 Day War, when Motte Gur triumphantly and tremblingly announced, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” What national secret does the Temple Mount hold, what national dream does the Temple Mount anticipate? Is it worth disputing over with our Moslem cousins, fighting about, dying for? Apparently the self-appointed architects of “Geneva” didn’t think so, because they gave it up without batting an eye-brow. But since our traditional texts consider it to be the most sacred piece of real estate in the world, and since Jewish groups are now visiting it in droves every day despite the fact that the Moslem Wakf refuses to allow Jews to pray there, it would behoove us to understand the message and mission, the magic and mystery of a mountain which seems to hold the key to our eternity.

The first “message of the mount” is the sacredness of sacrifice. For Maimonides, “the most established place (of the Temple) is that of the altar, and it must never be changed for all eternity… There is a tradition in the hands of all that the place where (Kings) David and Solomon built the altar is the very place where Abraham erected the altar upon which he bound Isaac…. It was likewise (the altar) built by Noah when he emerged from the ark; it was the altar upon which Cain and Abel offered their sacrifice when he was created, and from there (its dust) was he (Adam) created …” (Maimonides, Laws of the Chosen House, 2:1,2).

Maimonides is teaching us that the very world (Adam’s as well as Noah’s) was created from the altar of sacrifice - and that our nation Israel was born from the near-sacrifice of Isaac on the altar of the Temple Mount. The paradox of the story of the binding - “And (G-d) said (to Abraham), ‘Take now your son, your only son, the son whom you love, Isaac, and go to the Land of Moriah and offer him up there as a whole burnt offering’” (Genesis 22:2) - is that the Almighty is teaching the first Hebrew the most paradoxical message of all: you will only merit a future if you’re willing to risk your future, you will only be worthy of descendants if you have the courage to bring your only son to the altar of sacrifice.

I thought often of this painful lesson when I accompanied each of my sons to their army posts not long after we made aliyah; Abraham and Sarah are all too realistic prototypes for a nation reborn which is now experiencing its fifth difficult war in less than six decades. As the prophet Ezekiel expressed it: “And I see that you are rooted in your blood. And I say unto you, ‘By your blood shall you live, by your blood shall you live.”

The altar of the Temple Mount expresses yet a second message, crucially significant in this period of suicidal homicide bombers promised by their god-Satan seventy-two virgins in Paradise. “This is the very place where Abraham erected the altar where he bound Isaac,” teaches Maimonides; bound, but not sacrificed. The Almighty amends his initial command: “Abraham, Abraham… do not send forth your hand against the lad and do not do him any harm” (Genesis 22:11,12). I only meant for you to uplift and dedicate him, not to slaughter him; I want him committed to Me in life, not sacrificed to Me in death. I am first and foremost the G-d of those who live by My word, not the G-d of Shahids who bear testimony to Me by dying and murdering (cf. Rashi, Genesis 22:2, and B.T. Taanit 4a).

The third “message of the mount” is what Maimonides calls its “eternal sanctity of the Divine Presence, a sanctity which can never be nullified, “not even by the most cruel and powerful of enemies” (Maimonides, Laws of the Chosen House, 6,16). Obviously Maimonides cannot possibly believe that the Divine Presence is a physical quantity, since he is the arch-philosopher-theologian who teaches the absolute non-corporeality of the Divine. Apparently Maimonides is referring to the word of the Divine, “the Torah which will come forth from Zion and the word of G-d from Jerusalem,” the idea of Jerusalem (literally, the City of Peace) which is the crowning glory of our mission: “And it will come about at the end of the days when the nations will all rush (to the Temple Mount), to learn from its ways, to walk in its paths… They shall beat their swords into plough shares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, humanity shall not learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2, Micah 4). The vision of Jerusalem is the dream of world peace.

And the final “message of the mount” is that of pluralism over exclusivism, acceptance of all who follow the seven fundamental laws of morality centering around “Thou shalt not murder” rather than rejecting - and even preaching to kill by the sword - all who refuse to believe in a particular ritual life-style or prophetic belief system. Everyone is welcome on the Temple Mount as long as they believe in - and practice - the ideal of peace; “let every individual call on the name of his god, and we shall call upon the Lord our G-d forever and ever” (Micha 4).

The messages of the Temple Mount are the sacredness of sacrifice, the sacredness of life, the sacredness of peace, and the sacredness of humanity. Is this worth disputing over, fighting about, dying for? Is Judaism worth disputing over, fighting about, dying for? The Temple Mount holds the secrets of our past and the visions of our future, the principles which are the very bedrock of our teaching and our mission. The only life worth living is a life dedicated to ideals more precious than any individual life, then it becomes a sanctified life which participates in eternity.

Shabbat Shalom.