Israel and the reconstruction of the Third Temple of Jerusalem

Since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, Jews have prayed to God to allow the rebuilding of the Third Temple. Although it remains unbuilt today, the idea and desire for a Third Temple is sacred to Judaism.

Zionism achieved its great goal after the British withdrawal from the British Mandate of Palestine with the creation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. However, certain sectors in particular dream of rebuilding the Temple of Solomon in what would be the third version of this place of worship.

Aside from the natural problem of removing the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which would provoke a war against Israel that would devastate even the West, the great danger of establishing the Third Temple in Jerusalem would be against modern Judaism itself and the State of Israel itself.

The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70, when troops under Emperor Titus Flavius ​​Vespasian (39-81) surrendered the sanctuary and demolished it, although the "Jewish War" would continue for some more years until the fall of Masada in 73. However, in this context it will be Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai, from his academy in Yavneh, who will reconfigure Judaism so that it can survive without the Temple, establishing new norms and placing the Torah (the holy book of the Jews) and its mandates at the center of worship instead of the now-disappeared Temple.

This quickly caused the surviving faction, the Pharisees and rabbis, to impose themselves as the central vision of Judaism and begin to write down their traditions, collected in the Mishnah, the Gemara and in different Baraitas, inaugurating the era of the "Tanaim", which would give birth to the Talmud and to different cultural elements and interpretations that would transform into the Judaism that we all know and in its different nuances.

The rabbinical modification caused the holidays to change: lambs were no longer sacrificed on Pesach, offerings were no longer made on the festival of Bikurim (Shavuot), tithes to the Temple were cancelled and all the norms and festivals that had the Temple as their central axis or were conditioned to this sacred place were eliminated. When they ceased to exist, they were modified.

The rebuilding of the Temple means that the rabbis and rabbinical courts would have to subordinate themselves to the Temple and the clergy, the Levites of the tribe of Aaron (who no longer exist as a tribe). This priestly caste would then have to be reconstructed in some way; once reconstructed, these priests would have a special status and would be dedicated exclusively to religious service with limitations as to clothing and food; it would be a separate and superior caste that would dominate over the rest of the rabbis.

Obviously, in the interest of the priests, the power of the rabbis and their governments over the communities would be absorbed by them and, from this caste, they would quickly take control not only of the festivities, returning to performing them as they are written in the Torah, but the Talmud (an eminently rabbinical document) would be a nuisance for these priests, since the central axis is the rabbinical group and not the priestly one. The most normal thing is that the new Cohanim carry out a puritanical reform.

At the same time, would Israeli society be willing to have a Third Temple in Jerusalem with constant animal sacrifices, as well as offerings of agricultural products and incense? Such practices would take away all power from the rabbis and their educational institutions.

What would be the central axis of the Jewish faith in this era, the Torah and the synagogue as in the last two thousand years or the religious service from the temple with its annex centers? Without the political power derived from such a rebuilding of the Temple, it would be like returning to the first century and its struggles between Hellenized Jews and nationalist Jews.

With time and the influence of the Temple and its Sanhedrin, with its social influence, once that of the rabbis had gradually been displaced, converted into mere representatives of the Temple instead of being the leaders and guides of the communities, the political struggle would be the second stage: establish a Jewish government.

The struggle between the Knesset and the government against the power of the Temple could predict a future similar to that of the Khomeini revolution (1979) in Iran: Social influence could spark a Jewish religious revolution and change the state if the rebuilding of the Temple produces a religious and charismatic leader strong enough to confront the Israeli government, overthrow it and transform the state into a country entirely governed by religious rules.

If the intention is to rebuild the Third Temple of Jerusalem as a mere nationalist monument and put little more than actors to play a role, the war that would come would be meaningless. But if it is a question of providing the new Temple of Jerusalem with a religious body of a priestly and separate court, as the Torah says and as it existed from the times of Solomon and later of Ezra, with the reconstruction of the Temple until its destruction by the Emperor Titus, the future of the State of Israel would be to become a Jewish Republic of Israel in the purest Iranian style, since the monarchy would be impossible in the absence of a Davidic, Hasmonean or the much-hated Herodian dynasty.

The dream of the Third Temple of Jerusalem

A few hours before Shabbat, a hall is filled with voices. About twenty Israelis are preparing the choir for the Temple that they want to rebuild in Jerusalem, two thousand years after its destruction, on what is now the Esplanade of the Mosques. For these nationalist Jews, the Third Temple in Jerusalem symbolizes redemption and is supposed to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. But for his detractors, many within Judaism, it amounts to playing with fire in a place that is at the heart of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.

The Jewish people have been "waiting" for this temple for 2,000 years, explains Shmuel Kam, 53, a member of the choir made up of descendants of the tribe of Levites, once responsible for the songs and music in the sanctuary.

"I believe I will live to see the temple rebuilt... it is inevitable," he added. These apprentice choristers come from all over the country to a Tel Aviv suburb to immerse themselves in ancient chants.

"When the Temple is rebuilt, we will ask the Levites to come and sing, and they won't know how to do it, so we will have to teach them," explains Menahem Rozenthal, director of the choir created a few months ago by the Temple Institute. This organization has been working since 1987 on the reconstruction of the Temple, training choristers and priests and creating objects for worship.

"They can say what they want, this is the place of the Jews," says Haim Berkovits, who believes that reconstruction is "a matter of time."

This 50-year-old French-Israeli is a member of the Boneh Israel (Build Israel) organisation, which wants to "accelerate redemption".

In 2022, the group brought five red heifers from Texas to Israel for slaughter. According to Talmudic rules, people must anoint themselves with a mixture of water and ashes from the burning of this cow before entering the holy place. Without this condition, the Israeli rabbinate prohibits Jewish visits to the Temple Mount. Therefore, the heifer rite is crucial.

Their "return is a messianic sign," says Berkovits at a farm in northern Israel where veterinarians and rabbis inspect heifers hair by hair to ensure their skin remains red as they grow.

"We pamper them and save them for when the time comes," he added, adding that his organisation has already acquired land on the Mount of Olives, a Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem, with a view to burning the animals in front of the Temple Mount. For Yizhar Beer, these "Third Temple lovers" are nothing unusual. Beer, director of the Keshev Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, has followed the development of this sector of Israeli society.

Twenty years ago they only had a few "dozen members", but their number continues to grow and their ideology "has spread to the centre of the political sphere".

The UN has repeatedly called in recent months for "respect for the status quo" at the Temple Mount, whose entrances are guarded by Israeli police but administered by the Habiz, a Jordanian Islamic institution. El Habiz insists that the Temple Mount is an exclusively Muslim site and denounces Israeli attempts to "Judaize" it.

Any incident could become "an atomic bomb," Beer warns. "It's a mixture of religion and politics (...) An explosion there could blow everything up."

Yitzchak Reuven, communications officer for the Temple Institute, accuses the Palestinians of fueling "the controversy over the Temple Mount" and of being responsible for the frequent violence with Israeli forces. But it does not clarify what should happen to Muslim holy sites when the Third Temple is built in Jerusalem.

It is not included in the plans of the organizations working on its construction, and all claim that it is impossible to build it anywhere other than the Temple Mount. "This is the place that God chose," says Reuven. "It's a dream, but the return of the Jews to Israel was a dream and then it became a reality."