Rooted in Apocalyptic Imperatives

...The answer, strange as it may seem, has to do with the production of a red cow, a matter Gorenberg pursues in considerable detail...

...Forthe Third Temple will require priests (in Hebrew, cohanim) to perform the sacrifices...

...The violence flowing from the Temple Mount confrontation put the entire peace process in danger...

...What, indeed, has prevented Orthodox Jewish fundamentalists from erecting a Third Temple...

...The Conservative movement, a product of 20th-century America, took a more moderate tack while accomplishing the same result...

...But in Islam politics and religion are still one...

...Other Arab riots ensued in Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper...

...What makes this volatile mixture of ideologies even more dangerous, the author maintains, is a kind of negative synergy: The more that Jews prepare for, or even talk about, the imminent construction of a Third Temple, the more fervently their Christian fundamentalist friends expect the quick arrival of Armageddon, and the more credible, in Muslim eyes, become the calls for holy war...

...and shows how elements in the Muslim world are combining old Islamic traditions about the end of days with modern antiSemitism picked up from Christian Europe to argue for a climactic battle to defend the mosques against the Jews...

...Although many Orthodox Jews today would be horrified if it ever actually happened, Orthodox Judaism remains officially committed to the restoration of the temple and the animal sacrifices in a literal sense...

...But while on the surface he seems to have been right about the Temple Mount controversy dooming the hopes for peace, at least in the short run, there is more to this than meets the eye...

...Gorenberg accurately shows how fundamentalist religious trends in Judaism and Christianity can work at dangerous cross-purposes with rational political aims...

...But his thesis that messianic madness is the most likely trigger for war in the Middle East has been superseded, if not disproved, by events...

...A senior editor and columnist at the Jerusalem Report, Gorenberg argues in his just published The End of Days that theological conflict concerning ownership of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a site rooted in the apocalyptic imperatives of three religions, is a powder keg that could set off another war in the Middle East...

...True enough, at the U.S.-brokered Camp David talks this summer between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasir Arafat, agreement appeared close on practically every contentious issue except the fate of the Temple Mount...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Co-editor, "Amerian Jewish Year Book" Rarely does an author get the opportunity Gershom Gorenberg has had to see his thesis tested as his book was going to the bindery...

...There are today families of priestly descent, but Jewish law dictates that they can only attain the state of ritual purity required to do the service—or even to enter the holy precincts—after being sprinkled with the ashes of a red cow that has been burned according to the ritual described in chapter 19 of the Book of Numbers...

...Barak was willing to consider various schemes for joint control, but refused to negotiate away Israeli sovereignty over the spot where the two Jewish Holy Temples stood, which Jews have always considered the holiest place on earth...

...Gorenberg tells them well...

...Fundamentalists live in a completely logical mental universe if you accept their assumptions about the literal truth of Scripture, but that universe is absurd if viewed through pragmatic, liberal and skeptical Western eyes...

...When Benjamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister, he made it a point, on visiting the U. S., to meet with Christian fundamentalist groups (to thunderous applause) before visiting President Bill Clinton...

...Gorenberg's subtitle—Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount—clearly indicates that for him the conflict here, despite its political explosiveness, is essentially rooted in the rival "end of days" visions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam...

...As early as the Millerite movement of the 1840s, Christian groups have calculated and recalculated the date of the "end time...

...Muslim hostility to the Jewish state goes far beyond any perceived threat to the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques...

...Gorenberg relates that as soon as the Temple Mount was captured in 1967, Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, urged military officials to destroy the mosques to make way for the temple, but was rebuffed...

...Moreover, Muslim messianists, who receive relatively little attention, seem motivated only by the perceived threat to Muslim holy places...

...Arafat insisted on Palestinian sovereignty over the Mount, the location of the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques...

...Emphasizing messianists serves to place the onus for any trouble on the Jews and their fundamentalist Christian allies...

...It is now abundantly apparent that Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount was merely a convenient pretext for the latest Arab uprising...

...Interested readers beware: Following Gorenberg through the labyrinth of the fundamentalist mind—of three religions, no less—requires considerable patience and a willingness to suspend one's critical faculties...

...In their theology, the Third Temple is destined to trigger the "time of tribulation"—leading to the ultimate conversion of the Jews, and the second coming of Jesus...

...Despite the hopes and expectations of liberal Israelis, the Islamic political theology that refused to accept the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East before 1967, when Jews had no access to the Temple Mount or any other Jewish holy place in Muslim-controlled territory, still rejects Jewish sovereignty today...

...Gorenberg's depiction of a wide assortment of religious fundamentalists, based on interviews with them as well as an examination of their writings, is engaging and alarming...

...And the establishment of the sovereign State of Israel, which captured the Old City of Jerusalem after being attacked in the Six-Day War of 1967, has changed pious theory into potential reality...

...Since the destruction of the Second Temple by Roman armies almost two millennia ago, Jews obedient to the tradition have prayed three times a day for its restoration and the resumption of the sacrificial rite spelled out in the Hebrew Bible and Talmudic literature...

...Gorenberg suggests that the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the millennial year 2000 have only heightened their conviction that the end of days is near...

...Though most Jewish Israelis were shocked at the depth of the Arab hostility—especially that exhibited by Israeli Arabs—Gorenberg, who completed writing this book months earlier, probably saw it as a prophecy fulfilled...

...Within a week scores of people, the great majority of them Arabs, were dead, and hundreds more were wounded...

...Then, on September 28, the leader of Israel's opposition Likud Party, Ariel Sharon, paid a widely publicized visit to the Mount that ended in bloody scuffles when Palestinian youths threw a variety of objects at him and the Israeli police responded...

...There is nothing they would love more than for the Jews to raze the Temple Mount mosques and begin work on the temple...

...Indeed it could, but so, as we are seeing, could other factors...

...Gorenberg demonstrates, however, that some Christian fundamentalists and Jewish messianists are willing to act in the absence of such a cow...

...For most of that period such prayers had a Utopian quality, because Jews entertained no realistic hope of regaining control of Jerusalem...

...That is why the Chief Rabbinate of Israel forbids Jews from even treading on the sacred precincts, let alone initiating building projects there, and that is what prevented Israel from simply taking control of the Temple Mount from the Muslim authorities in 1967...

...It is also why Jews who seek the restoration of the temple for the fulfillment of Jewish messianic aspirations, and Christians who seek it to hasten the second coming, find common ground in the search, so far fruitless, for a completely red cow...

...The next day—a Friday, the Muslim holy day as well as the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year— Arabs on the Temple Mount hurled rocks down at Jews praying before the Western Wall...

...But the events of recent months have illustrated exactly how tangential they are to the fate of Israelis and Palestinians...

...The extremists also enthusiastically back Right-wing Israeli politicians who, far from pious themselves, play up to them to win votes...

...Nevertheless, they were the first to be excised from the prayer book by nascent Reform Judaism in the early 19th century...

...And these politicians have no qualms either about accepting the support of Christians praying for the conversion of the Jews...

...The Muslims, already in physical control of the Temple Mount, are portrayed as defenders of the status quo...

...Stories about red cows and Christian calculations of the millennium make both picturesque and scary reading...

...In this, Gorenberg follows the well-worn path of other liberal Israeli writers for whom, quite understandably, the memory of Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Muslims in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the trauma of Yigal Amir's murder of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, and the frustrations of Benjamin Netanyahu's stiff-necked resistance to moving the peace process forward, prove that extremist Israelis are the primary obstacle to peace...

...Whether the religious extremists prosper or disappear, peace will only come when the Muslim world faces up to the permanence of the State of Israel...

...Dispensational premillennialist Protestants also eagerly anticipate the rebuilding of the temple...

...Funds from American Christians have gone to Jewish extremist cells that have plotted, to date unsuccessfully, to blow up the mosques...

...it never really went through the modernization process that reshaped European attitudes over the last 500 years...

...More precisely, he blames Jewish messianists for seeking ways to replace the two mosques with the Third Temple...

...charges Protestant fundamentalists of the dispensational premillennial variety with aiding and abetting these Jews in order to precipitate the second coming of Christ...

...it changed the tense of the prayers from future to past so as to transform the hope for a new temple into a mere recollection of the previous one...