Saturday, November 3, 2012

Temple Mount Authority

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat called for the Knesset to allow for Jews the right to pray on the Temple Mount. Yet there are many Rabbinic authorities that hold a position against allowing anyone to pray on the Temple Mount until the rebuilding of the Temple. The Temple Mount is not Mecca nor Medina, it is the Jewish Holy of Holies. Whether or not Jews are encouraged to worship on the Mount is not as important as whether authority will be restored to the rightful guardians of that Mount, the Rabbis of Israel. 

Of course, Jews have that "right", it's just that the government is preventing them from exercising that right.  Yet it is not without significant Rabbinic support that Jewish prayer is withheld from taking place.  But this  is an internal religious matter for the Rabbis of Israel to decide, not the Israeli government nor any other government, nor the practitioners of any other faith. The Knesset should have the Chief Rabbinate set up an authority of the leading rabbis of the generation to regulate all activity on this most holy of Jewish sacred places.

Whereas the Wakf does not have that right, yet the Israeli government has allowed it to act as if it has a right for the past 45 years. It has encouraged violence and destruction of sacred Jewish artifacts that bespeak of any historic roots of the Chosen People to their own land. This is actually a violation of the Koran itself.  If the policy of a religious institution is in the main political, that means that the Wakf has become a political entity and no longer remains a religious one. To continue the status quo muddies the political waters that the current government in Israel is attempting to project, that of a United Jerusalem under Israeli rule. If you don't have the Temple Mount, then you don't have Jerusalem.

This would end discrimination against the Jews, even though it may not change the status quo much, as egalitarianism runs deep in the Jewish faith. The result would be a fair system where everyone would share similar rules, such as current access to the Western Wall, the same rules for the "stranger and the native" would be established. But the legitimacy of allowing the Wakf to continue it's failed guardianship has ended long ago.


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