A New Oleh Makes Aliyah

Natan Gesher, among the newest olim in the Holy Land, has made yet another Aliyah.

We went up the 8th of Av, erev Tisha B'Av (9th of Av). That night, after hearing Eicha (the Book of Lamentations) we heard the following letter by Rabbi Shlomo Goren, read by Nadia Matar of Women in Green:

A few weeks [after the liberation of the Temple Mount in the Six-Day Miracle -E.haL.], on Tisha B'Av 1967, 1,897 years after the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbi Goren, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, with several dozen other Jews, entered the Temple Mount plaza, where Jews -according to halacha-were permitted to be. They brought with them a shofar (ram's horn) and a Torah Ark with a Torah scroll, and they conducted the afternoon prayer service. This afternoon prayer service on the Temple Mount aroused a public storm in Israel and abroad. The media launched unbridled agitation against Rabbi Goren's initiative to renew Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, and his request to conduct a mass prayer service on the Sabbath following Tisha B'Av was categorically rejected. The government told Rabbi Goren in no uncertain terms: If Jewish worshipers were to ascend the Temple Mount, they would be evacuated by security forces.

In response to this terrible decree, Rabbi Goren wrote a letter to the Ministerial Committee for the Safeguarding of the Holy Places. His words could have been written today, almost forty years after we liberated the place of our Temple, while, to our shame, the Temple Mount is still closed to Jewish prayer. The following are a few passages from his letter:

"Honored Ministers! Your decision by which you forbid me, as an individual, and the Jews as a whole, from praying on the Temple Mount shocked me to the depths of my soul. It follows from your decision that the only place in the world in which an express and specific ban has been placed on the Jew, as a Jew, to pray, is Mount Moriah, the mount of the Lord to which all of Israel's prayers are directed, the location of the nation's Holy of Holies. [...]

"From the destruction of the Second Temple until three hundred years ago, the prayers of Jews on the Temple Mount did not cease. [...] The uniqueness of the Kotel (Western Wall) as a place of prayer is a historical innovation, and is not more than three hundred years old. It began after the decrees and limitations placed by the Muslim rulers on the Jews, and the abrogation of the 'synagogue' [...] that had existed for centuries on the Temple Mount. [...] In no manner or form is the Western Wall entitled to be a substitute for the mount of the Lord. The prayers at the Wall symbolize the exile of the people and its expulsion from the Temple Mount, while our prayers on the Temple Mount represent the return of the people to its land and the place of its Temple.

"Who could conceive that Israel's security forces would be compelled to obstruct Jews from praying before the Lord, when the Temple Mount is under the government of Israel? And is this our situation now, after our dazzling victory? Did we await this, that the government of Israel would discriminate between Jew and Muslim, and place guards lest, Heaven forbid, Jewish prayer would be uttered on the Temple Mount, about which the Prophets prophesied, 'For My House shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples' [Isaiah 56:7]?"

"Jewish history shall not forgive us for this. My request," Rabbi Goren ends his letter, "is to open wide the gates of the Temple Mount to all Jews and for everyone in the world. Save the Holy of Holies of the nation, do not hand over the Temple Mount to those who defile it. Signed in grief, in hope, and in blessing, Shlomo Goren, General, Chief Rabbi of Israel."

Luckily we brought a Shofar; and it was blown - echoing through Jerusalem's surrounding hills, calling out to the Creator to bring it all about in the best possible way.

And that is exactly the way it is coming about.