Temple Mount: No Wedding by Correspondence

By Moshe Feiglin

“But for the place that Hashem your G-d will choose, of all your tribes, to put His Name there, and you shall seek out His Divine Presence and you shall come to there.” (Deuteronomy 12:5)

Time and again our Torah portion reminds us about the place of the Holy Temple, the place that G-d chose: The Temple Mount. “You shall seek out His Divine Presence,” says the Torah, “and you shall come to there.” We are obligated to ascend to the Temple Mount. For there is no such thing as a wedding by correspondence.

“I will be for you for a G-d and you shall be for me a Nation,” – from the Mount. From the place where everything connects: The Nation’s body and its divine soul; the physical and the metaphysical. The Mount is the source of life; it is there that Israel becomes a living Nation: The Nation of Israel, truly alive and fulfilling its universal destiny.

Until the Six Day War in 1967, when the Mount was captive in foreign hands, the loving couple – G-d and the Nation of Israel – was forced to make due with long-distance correspondence. We had to suffice ourselves with prayer and anticipation. We drew fortitude and safeguarded our identity from the Mount and our expectation to return to it. And then, we miraculously returned to our Land. But from the moment that our Father returned the Mount to our hands and we continue to write letters from afar instead of uniting with Him, we are essentially declaring that we are not interested in a wedding and establishing a family. We have forgotten our destiny and have fallen in love with letter-writing.

“He who controls the Mount controls the entire Land,” wrote the famous poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg. The Temple Mount is like the heart in the body. When we abandoned it to the Hamas, we abandoned ourselves to the terror organization. The spiritual foundation for the solution to Gaza is on the Temple Mount.