Loose Translation from the Hebrew!
When we davened for two thousand years begging to return to Zion, we mainly meant returning to the Bais Hamikdash , the Har Habayit, but when we finally did return, we left it neglected and forgotten.
The picture of the Har Habayit is present in every house in Gaza, but almost impossible to find in Jewish homes.
Last Friday, Hezbollah supporter Sheikh Akrama Sabri eulogized Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on the Har Habyit without anyone stopping him, but Jews who dare bow on the Mount, or dare dance and sing there, or dare sneak tefillin into its area, who dare sneak in a Shofar or lulav or even if they just deviate slightly from the specific path permitted to observant Jews, are immediately detained, and often arrested and banned for long periods.
The Temple Mount – the object of dreams of many generations of Jews –have ten gates, nine of which only Muslims can enter , but there is only one open to non-Muslims (Shaar Hillel).
Unlike the other 9 gates, this one gate is open only five or six hours a day, and only five days a week. Observant Jews are not allowed to ascend the Mount freely even during the few hours of entry, but are required to wait for a close and supervised escort by the police • On the other hand, the mountain plaza serves as the playground of four Muslim schools. No wonder Muslims watch football matches on the Har Habayit almost every day.
According to Jewish law, ascending to the Temple Mount is permitted only after immersion in a mikveh, without leather shoes, and around the site of the Temple and not to the place of the Temple itself.
The Mishna in Mesactas Keilim teaches that the sanctity of the Temple Mount is expressed in the fact that unclean people who have not been purified in the Mikveh are not allowed to ascend to it.
According to the Mishnah, the The Har Habayit is an exact square of 500 by 500 cubits, about 250 by 250 meters, but the Har Habayit today is a square that is not equal to all sides, and its area is much larger:
The length of the Western Wall alone is almost half a kilometer, Because Herod expanded the area of the mountain south, west and north.
Only Herod did not touch the route of the eastern wall of the mountain, the one facing the Kidron River and the Mount of Olives, and it therefore contains remains from the First Temple period, and more precisely from the time of King Hezekiah .
The construction of the Western Wall – the most well-known and popular of the walls of the mountain – had not yet been finalized when Titus arrived and destroyed the Temple in 70 AD .
By the way, According to Prof. Dan Bahat, who was the archaeologist of the Jerusalem District of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the first evidence of prayer at the Western Wall itself dates back to 1625, "only"399 years ago.
Jewish prayer on the Har Habyit itself took place over long periods of time in the two-thousand-year-old exile, especially during the early Muslim period .
Rabbi Pesachyeh of Regensburg, 12th century, wrote about the early days of Muslims in the Holy City:
"And Pritzim came and informed the king of the Ishmaelites (Caliph Omar, A.S.) and said:
'There is one old man among us who knows the place of the heichal and the azarah'; And the king pushed him away until he showed him. This king loved Jews and said:
'I want to build a heichal there so only Jews can daven there,' and he built a hall out of marble stones, a beautiful building made of red and green marble stones and all kinds of colors."
The description of the "beautiful building" corresponds to the appearance of the Dome of the Rock known to us, a building made of marble in a variety of colors built according to the accepted practice in 691. According to this description, the dome was originally built for the Jews.
The Karaite Salmon ben Yeruham, a resident of Jerusalem in the tenth century, also confirms the description of the founding of a Jewish worship site on the Har Habyit
: "And when,by the grace of God, the Romans were removed from Yerushalyim, and the kingdom of Ishmael appeared, permission was given to the Jews to enter and live there, and they were given the courtyards of the house of the Lord and they prayed there for years".
An orderly archaeological excavation was never conducted on the Temple Mount, Nevertheless, several ancient Hebrew inscriptions were found there.
They prove that Jews were definitely at the Har Habyis whenever permission was given to them.
In 1863, the French scholar Félicien de Soucy found in the ancient corridor of the double gate, under the Al-Aqsa Mosque, an inscription of the following four lines:
"Jonah and Shabthia, his wife from Scalia, were strong in life" .
Scalia is distant Sicily, where Jonah and Shabia, a couple of pilgrims, took pains in the Middle Ages to cross the full distance between it and the Temple Mount just to pray there to have a long life.
Today, unfortunately, this inscription is almost completely erased due to new plaster that the Waqf glued to the walls of the place
Another inscription was found in 1908 in the inner structure of the Shaar Harachamim , in the southern wall:
"Abraham bar Luless with strength ", was written there
The root "strong", repeated in the inscriptions, reveals, in the opinion of archaeologist Meir Ben Dov, the main reason for ascending Mount Moriah at that time:
Thanksgiving for being cured of illness, using the word "strengthening" in their language.
This inscription is dated to an unknown date In the Middle Ages
Jews came here from far and wide, a once-in-a-lifetime experience for them, and engraved their names there so that their memory would be preserved forever in the Hall of God.
Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the Holy Land in the 12th century, mentioned this custom regarding the southeastern part of the mountain, which the Crusaders called "Solomon's Stables":
"And there in Jerusalem in the house that Solomon had his stables for his horses... the Jews who come there write their names on the Wall"
A moving inscription was discovered in the As'ardiya madrasa at the northern wall of the mountain. Jews who made the journey all the way from Greece for this purpose wrote these words on a pillar from the Second Temple period more than a thousand years ago:
"The Lord the God of Tz'vois, will rebuild this house in in my lifetime , signed
Jacob ben Joseph and Theopulectus and Sisinia and Anastasia Amen ,Amen Ve'Amen Sala"
Another inscription, about a thousand years old, was located in the Shaar Harachamim compound only last year .
Close-ups of the first page engraved on the pillar of the Shaar Harachamim reveal Hebrew letters that every Jewish child in Israel in 2024 would be able to read.
Archaeologist Tzachi Dvira reads, among other things, the words
"I have won." Next to those words were engraved on the pillar the name "Reuven Bar Mecher", as well as the word "Flag".
At the bottom of them is the name "Yosef ben", and his father's name may be Aryeh, there are additional names engraved, but are more difficult to identify, have been engraved on it.
Prof. Hagai Misgav of the Hebrew University assumes that the inscriptions are from the 10th or 11th century CE, that is, they are a thousand years old or more. It should be remembered that later the Shaar Harchamim was sealed – for security reasons – and remained sealed on its exterior to this very day
Shaar Harachamim is sealed!
The Shaar Harachamim compound became a mosque just five and a half years ago. On its roof, the waqf had Muslim there for decades.
During the War of Independence Arabs would use snipers and shoot Jewish convoys on Jericho Road.
During the Six-Day War, on 28 Iyar 5727, Jordanian snipers soldiers shot at a paratrooper unit force that made a mistake on its way and descended to the Kidron Bridge. Five Jewish martyrs were murdered in that battle
The structure of the Shaar Harachamim dates to the seventh century CE, that is, long after the destruction, but archaeologist Lynn Rittmeier was convinced that a gate has stood here since the First Temple period as early as the seventh century BCE, the time of Hezekiah
Rittmeier suggested that the Shaar Harachamim is the gate known in the Mishnah as the "Shushan Gate", through which the scapegoat left on his way to the desert and the Para Adumah on the way to the Mount of Olives .This gate compound is now locked to Jews.
While Jews roamed undisturbed under the auspices of the Muslim rule of the 11th century, we 21st-century citizens of the so-called free Israel are not allowed to go there!
"Even Hashatiyah"
The rock in the center of the Dome of the Rock is the summit of the Temple Mount, and in our sources is called the "Even Hashatiyah".
In our modern language, we would call it the foundation stone, the place from which the world was created according to the Midrash, the heart of the world and the place of the Holy of Holies.
It measures about 14 by 17 meters, and at its peak is 1.77 meters above the floor of the Dome of the Rock.
On the other hand, in the days of the Temple, the Holy of Holies area was only twenty by twenty cubits, which is about ten meters by ten, and the Even Hashatiyah stone rose to the height of only three fingers, which is about six centimeters.
Generally, when one digs ancient sites one must dig deep in order to reveal the past, but at the top of Mount Moriah things are the opposite, and the area is more visible than it was in the distant past.
In fact, there is an explicit verse in Tehillim that refers to this:
ערו ערו עד היסוד בה
"Wake up Wake up.. till the foundation in it" – due to the destruction, the foundations of the house are visible and the area is more exposed than would normally be.
On the rock, it is possible today to identify several indications of quarrying from different periods, among them the foundation for the Western Wall of the Holy of Holies, the one from which the Shechinah "did not move" (Note: this not the Kotel of today, today's Kotel is the outer wall not at all connected to the Bais Hamikdash).
Evidence of quarrying from the Crusader period can be identified on the rock. The Christians who ruled the land and the mountain at that time used to take pieces from the rock and sell them as souvenirs.
In any case, on top of the Foundation Stone there is also a quarrying in the exact dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant, two and a half on a cubits by a cubit and a half, and some archaeologists suggest that this is where the Ark of the Covenant was placed during the First Temple period, before it was lost.
According to the accepted version, The Dome of the Rock was built in 691 by the Umayyad ruler Abd al-Malik, but there are some disputes in this understanding.
Among other things, the fact that the dome is octagonal, and thus more similar to buildings from the pre-Islamic period, the Byzantine period, and is not typical of Muslim construction.
Some speculate that the dome was originally built by Jews during a short-lived heyday, the days of the Persian conquest of the country beginning in 614, in which the Jews played an active role, and therefore also enjoyed a rare freedom of worship on the Temple Mount for several years. And what could be more natural than to renew the work of the Temple from where it had stopped?
Here, for example, is a poem by a contemporary rabbi, Rabbi Elazar HaKalir, who hints that the Jews did not delay and strove to establish facts in the Temple area:
"And a few holy men shall be touched, for Assyria (a term for Persia) will permit them to establish a holy temple, and they will build a holy altar there and holy sacrifices will be raised there, but this will not be sufficient for the holy establishment, which has not yet emerged from the holy people."
Prof. Ezra Fleischer has already commented:
"From the language of the poetry, it is clear that the altar was built on the Temple Mount, and that permission was given to establish the very Temple."
Perhaps they also managed to build foundations for a new building, and it later became the Dome of the Rock?
One way or another, after a few years, the Byzantines returned, massacred the Jews and they stopped worshiping G-d there. A few more years later, the Muslims conquered the land, and the memory of this dramatic period sank into oblivion.
In general, Jewish worship on the Mount and access to it were quite free for long periods of time during the Early Muslim period, between 638 and 1099 CE.
In previous and subsequent periods, this place was much less accessible to Jews, often to the point of threatening the death penalty for Jews caught on the Mount. Jews caught even just peeking at him from the outside risked being flogged
Fifty cisterns
There are about fifty underground spaces on the Temple Mount. Some of them date from the Second Temple period and even from the First Temple period, some are even older.
Take, for example, the cave under the Foundation Rock in the Dome of the Rock:
According to Prof. Dan Bahat, this is a burial cave from the 23rd century BCE, Jebusite Jerusalem, which was located in the City of David long before King David, used the Temple Mount rocks for a cemetery. Several underground cavities on the mountain were originally used as burial caves.
In short, when Abraham arrived there to sacrifice Isaac, the cave in question was already hewn in place .
In any case, it may have had a later use. Perhaps it should be searched for the Ark of the Covenant, which disappeared at the end of the First Temple period, and there are several opinions in our sources as to where it was taken.
The main opinion of the Sages is that the Ark was shelved in its place, and so did Maimonides:
"And when Solomon built the house and knew that it would eventually be destroyed, he built a place in it to hide the Ark below in deep and crooked caches" .
Indeed, in the floor of the cave under the Dome of the Rock, some claim that there is a pit called the Pit of the Winds, And there one must look for the Ark of the Covenant .
Today a carpet covers the floor of the cave, and due to the Jews' fear of the reaction of the Muslims, there is no free access to researchers on the Temple Mount.
However, in the distant past, for example in the 19th century, when the mountain and the land were controlled by the Ottomans, access to the mountain and its mysteries was much freer.
The city engineer in Jerusalem in the mid-19th century, Armetta Pierotti, claimed that there was a huge pit under the cave in the Dome of the Rock, and it was full of soil and rocks.
Other researchers, on the other hand, denied that any pit existed there
So who is right? And what's the problem with checking this out?
The State of Israel, however, which eliminated Haniyeh in the heart of Tehran, has not yet summoned the courage to find out once and for all whether there is a hole in the cave under the Dome of the Rock and whether the Ark of the Covenant is hiding in it oscillating between the first Jewish sovereignty after two thousand years of exile and the continuation of Islamic rule as it has been for the past 1,400 years, the holiest place in the world is still waiting for its redemption.
The Rambam went up to the Har Habayis and the Me'eiree writes that there is no issue going up to the Har Habayis! Rabbi Wein in the history series writes that Frum Jews until 400 years ago regularly visited the Har Habayis!
Nowdays even Chareidim go up to the Har Habayis on a regular basis !
1 comment:
Why did we "abandon" har Habayis ? Sorry, no one has "abandoned" Har Habayis.
Happens to be, 57 years ago, a famous "democrat" israeli army general known as Moshe Dayan gave the control of this holy site over to the Jordanian security forces.
Can't figure out if this was good or bad...
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