Temple in Jerusalem Abomination of Desolation
Temple News Story 04-35
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A mounting sense of urgency
By Nadav Shragai Last week dozens of agents of the Shin Bet security service came to the home of Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, head of the Temple Institute in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. They came not to arrest him but to listen to him. Ariel, 60, is categorized as a "retired revolutionary" by the Shin Bet's unit to avert Jewish subversion. Today, the Shin Bet is searching intensively for the next generation of Jewish fanaticism, the new revolutionaries, who believe the time has come to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount, perhaps as a way to torpedo the disengagement plan under which all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and a few in northern Samaria are to be evacuated. Ariel, who was one of the settlers evacuated from Yamit - the northern Sinai settlement that was demolished by Israel before the area was returned to Egypt in 1982 - has for years been making vessels for the Third Temple. He embodies the potential of the ideological connection between the Temple Mount and Gush Katif, the settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip. Thus the Shin Bet decided to request that he give the agents and officials a talk. Many thousands of schoolchildren, students and soldiers have already visited his institute, watched the films and performances, listened to the lectures and run their hands over the vessels and other objects that the Temple Institute is planning to place in the Third Temple. Ariel's books about the temple and the prayer books for Jewish holidays that the institute has published are bestsellers among the national-religious public. The Shin Bet, though, is interested in the practical aspects of his doctrine. Ariel, who in the 1970s held the No. 2 slot on the Knesset list of Kach, the ultranationalist movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, was the head of the Yamit yeshiva at the time of the evacuation in 1982. As such, he became the first rabbi in Israel to call on soldiers to disobey an order. A military court sentenced him to a six-month suspended sentence. A year later, in 1983, he was arrested together with a group of yeshiva students from the settlement of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hebron, on suspicion that they had formed a plan to seize the Temple Mount and barricade themselves at the site. The Jerusalem District Court acquitted them. Last week the Shin Bet personnel asked Rabbi Ariel to estimate the scale of resistance the public in Gush Katif will put up against the evacuation. They also wanted to find out about the possible connection between Temple Mount activity and opposition to the evacuation. Ariel preferred to talk mainly about the scenario for Gush Katif. He painted a harsh picture and said he was concerned about a possible civil war. Destroying the homes of the just It was only a few days later, last Wednesday, on the fast day of the 10th of Tevet, that Rabbi Ariel, at a public event, described the possible connection between the Temple Mount and actions to prevent the disengagement plan from being implemented. Ariel was the first speaker at a gathering on "the struggle for the Land of Israel in the context of the temple," which was held at Yeshivat Hakotel in the Old City, one of the more consensual and conservative yeshivas of the religious-Zionist movement. Ariel did a kind of internal but trenchant stocktaking which provides at least a partial answer to one of the major questions being asked by the Shin Bet: Will there be Jews today, as there were at the time of Yamit, who will try to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount, or will a more moderate approach be adopted, on the assumption that this will thwart the disengagement plan? Ariel was pessimistic. "My experience tells me that there are few consolations for our public. There are some who are asserting unequivocally that there will not be an evacuation. So they said. I said the same thing. I also prophesied at the time that there will not be an evacuation, that it will not happen. So I prophesied! The fact is that there will be an evacuation! The fact is that things have happened! It is all from above. Divine Providence fomented this, not the hand of man. Today we have to ask ourselves: What has God done to us? Why, after two decades, are we again confronting a crisis of this kind? Why are the homes of the just being destroyed? Why are the homes of the just people in Gush Katif under threat? A place of grace, work, heroism and precepts?" The answer, according to Ariel: the disengagement and the threat of additional territorial withdrawal is punishment for the neglect of the Temple Mount. "I will say only this, that when the Creator, the Holy One, has nowhere to place his shekhina (Divine Presence), why should we have rest? When years pass and the right action is not taken, the plague comes. In the time of David, 70,000 people paid with their lives because the tabernacle was not moved to Jerusalem - so what do we want today? We who have not brought even one sacrifice, shall there not be wrath upon us?... "The Holy One wants us to begin and then he will continue. So begin! What does it mean, `And they shall make me a sanctuary and I will dwell in the midst of them'? Does anyone expect the Holy One to do the work for us? If we build him a sanctuary, he will reside in our midst!" Ariel then quoted a few sentences from the Hanukkah prayers which describe how the Maccabees purified the temple and lit candles after liberating it from the Greeks. This was his way of hinting about what has to be done on the Temple Mount, and he added, mysteriously, "If only I could say what is in my heart ..." Back in 1967, in the midst of the Six-Day War, Ariel disclosed some of the secrets of his heart. As a young chaplain he did guard duty at the entrance to the Dome of the Rock, the conjectured site of the temple. He was convinced, he related, that the Muslim shrine would remain empty until the state sent engineers to demolish the mosque - but they never came. Need to act on the Temple Mount Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, head of the Tzomet Institute for technology and halakha (Jewish religious law) at the settlement of Alon Shvut, also drew a connection last week between the "decree of disengagement and weakness of the public" and "the absence of the act on the Temple Mount." Rosen, who is identified with the National Religious Party and is far more moderate than Rabbi Ariel, also spoke at the meeting last week. He did not talk about removing the mosques but about arranging Jewish worship on the Temple Mount. At bottom, though, his analysis was identical to Ariel's: "If there is a weakness in the heart, at the Temple Mount, this is manifested in organs that are far from the source of vitality, at the extremities, such as in Gush Katif and the Gaza District, and in today's reality we truly have a problem with the extremities of the nation and the land." At the same time, Rosen emphasized, "The whole strengthening of the temple is a matter of malchut [rulers of the realm] in Israel, of statehood, and not of private individuals." Rabbi David Dudkevich, the rabbi of many of the "hilltop people" in Samaria, also believes that "weakness at the place of the temple is projected to the external organs." Dudkevich, who participated in the meeting, last week urged the public not to make do with another "outcry to heaven." "Do not address the eternal question - `Until when?' - only heavenward but also inward. It is not so honest to cry out `until when' to the heavens when you are ensconced in your homes. This is a period in which human beings must act, so that this time shall not be as earlier times." This conception, which views the Temple Mount as the source of vitalization and strength, which affects the situation in which the people of Israel finds itself - both for good and for ill, is today shared by most of the Temple Mount activists. Twenty-five years ago, that faith led Rabbi Yeshua Ben Sasson to identify the Temple Mount as a font from which Israel's enemies draw vitality and strength to hurt us. Ben Sasson believed that "the Muslim control of the Temple Mount is the source of the ills in the Jewish people, and that control accords Islam a source of spiritual sustenance from which its believers draw their power of vitality in the land." He and some of his colleagues maintained that removing the "abomination" from the Temple Mount and blowing up the mosques would stop the withdrawal from Sinai. In the end they shelved the plan. Yoel Lerner, who planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock 30 years ago, also hoped that his act would scuttle the separation-of-forces agreement between Israel and Egypt after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Michael Dennis Rohan, an Australian who set Al-Aqsa Mosque ablaze in 1969; Alan Goodman, who opened fire on the Temple Mount in 1982, and the "Lifta Gang" which almost succeeded in blowing up the Dome of the Rock in 1984 - all were mentally deranged, and Rohan and two members of the Lifta Gang were hospitalized in psychiatric institutions. They attacked or tried to attack the mosques after being exposed to extremist messianic ideology. In the case of the Lifta Gang, the process was accelerated when they joined up with criminal elements. In the 1980s a few members of the group were placed in administrative detention (arrest without trial) on suspicion of planning to attack the Temple Mount mosques. Earlier, at the end of the 1970s, the Shin Bet suspected a resident of Kiryat Arba of planning an act of violence on the Temple Mount, but did not manage to interrogate him: he was killed in a terrorist attack. The top investigators of the Shin Bet's department to prevent Jewish subversion are now busy trying to create a profile of the next Jewish terrorist. The most advanced intelligence methods are used to monitor the groups from which the next attempt to wreak havoc on the Temple Mount will emerge. The Shin Bet has a pretty good idea about the method of operation that will be used to strike at the mosques. It will be done from a distance by firing a rocket, missile or mortar (probably using stolen weapons). The security authorities believe that a frontal attack, like the ones planned in the past by Jewish militants, is doomed to failure because of the considerable reinforcement of security on the Temple Mount and the lessons that have been learned from previous attempts. When it comes to the profile of the coming assailants, the Shin Bet is far less sure. The following story illustrates the complexity of the problem. No squad knew about the others Shahar David Zeliger, a resident of the settler outpost Adei Ad, who planned a shooting attack on Arabs and was sentenced to eight years in prison a few weeks ago, told his interrogators months ago that three of his friends had planned an attack on the Temple Mount and on a series of other mosques as well. "Not one squad knew about any of the others. The whole network was compartmentalized," he said. Zeliger named names. One of them was a prominent hilltop leader in Samaria, another also lived in Samaria, but the third, from the Hebron area, was no longer among the living. He was killed in a terrorist attack. Despite the ambivalence with which the interrogators treated Zeliger's testimony - because some of what he said was self-contradictory - they decided to look into the story. The red light was lit for the investigators by the fact that the suspects were from the Yemenite community and were "Rambamists" (Rambam is the Hebrew for Maimonides), or "Darda'im." The suspicions were intensified after the investigators discovered that Matti Shvu, one of those convicted in the case of the Bat Ayin underground, who is not a Yemenite, is also a follower of Darda'ism. (Shvu, a resident of the settlement of Havat Maon, in the southern Hebron Hills, was sentenced to two years in prison for possessing combat materiel.) The Darda'im - the name is from dor de'a, meaning "generation of knowledge" - is small sect within Yemenite Jewry which follows the teachings of the 12th-century philosopher and physician Maimonides, the greatest Jewish sage of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest arbiters of all time. The Darda'im view Maimonides' rulings as the last and final word on religious matters. They say that he is the only person since Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, the compiler of the Mishna, who wrote an essay on the entire Torah and remained true to its viewpoints and to the views of Hazal, the ancient Jewish sages. The Darda'im tend to ignore the chain of rulings which has been handed down in later periods, from the Rabbinical Responsa and even from "Shulhan Arukh," the 16th-century code of Jewish law. They are especially antagonistic to the "messianic kabbala." "Mori" Yihye Kapah, who was born in Sana'a, Yemen, in 1850, is considered the founder of the Darda'im. His grandson, Rabbi Yosef Kapah, an Israel Prize laureate, who died about five years ago, was considered the most important rabbinical personage close to the Darda'ist movement in this generation, though he kept aloof from disputes related to this approach. An investigation of the leaders of the Darda'im in the hilltop outposts and of their friends - the group whom Zeliger named as potential attackers of the Temple Mount - turned up a bizarre way of life: a fusion of doctrines, beliefs, viewpoints and above all extreme asceticism such as the investigators had never before encountered. An example is Hill 26, adjacent to Kiryat Arba, where Nati Ozeri and his wife, Livnat, lived with their children. Apart from them, there were also a few unmarried people at the site. Ozeri (who was murdered by terrorists about two years ago) and his wife (the daughter of Shaul Nir, a member of the 1980s Jewish underground who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1984 for his part in the murder of students at the Islamic College in Hebron but was released six years later after being pardoned by President Chaim Herzog) at first lived in a car and had a small kitchen and mattresses for sleeping. In their permanent residence, they lived "in closeness to God and to nature." On either side of the room they lived in, which was later demolished by order of the security forces, stood a metal container. One was used as a kitchen, the other as the children's room. For hours Ozeri would walk about his home - the walls were made of exposed limestone and the floor was concrete - wearing tefillin (phylacteries). There was no electricity and no running water or flush toilet. Nor did the lone house on the hill have television, a computer or a stereo system. Progress, and especially electricity and its associated products, were considered almost the enemy in the Ozeri household. When the children fell ill, their parents treated them without antibiotics. After her husband's murder, Livnat Ozeri said that the novel "Gai Oni," by Shulamit Lapid, which describes the harsh existence of the founders of the northern village of Rosh Pina, was one of the sources of inspiration from which she and her husband drew inner strength and fortitude. Nati Ozeri often visited the Temple Mount, contrary to the ruling of most contemporary rabbis; his explanation was that Maimonides, too, visited the site. |
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