Jews

12. Do the Jews want to rebuild the temple?

Yes, the Jews want to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem (which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.) and restore the sacrificial system of the law. A Jewish prayer which is recited daily by the Jews in the synagogue says: ‘Accept, O Lord our God, thy people Israel and their prayer; restore the service to the inner sanctuary of thy house; receive in love and favor both the offerings of Israel and their prayer; and may the worship of thy people Israel be ever acceptable unto thee. And let our eyes behold thy return in mercy to Zion. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who restores thy divine presence unto Zion’ (the seventeenth Benediction of the Amidah)

From time to time, it is rumoured that there are some rabbis who practice the techniques of the sacrificial ritual so that their knowledge may not be lost.

When I say that the Jews want to rebuild the temple I refer to the Orthodox Jews, that is, those who are devoted to the Torah because most of the non-Orthodox Jews do not have this desire. For instance, the Reformed and the Liberal Jews have taken away from their prayer books all those references to the rebuilding of the temple and to the restoration of the sacrifices.

Among the Orthodox Jews there are some extremists who are ready to blow up the two Arab mosques (among which the more famous is the Dome of the Rock, which has a golden cupola) which occupy the place where the temple was in ancient times. They have already tried to blow them up; in 1984 the Jewish Underground, a group of terrorists which is formed of some activists of the Gush Emunim (‘Block of the Faithful’), a political-religious movement which belongs to the Orthodox Judaism, planned to blow up the mosques which are on the temple Mount but the terrorists were arrested and thus the mosques remained in their place. The Supreme Arab Council after the arrest of those terrorists gave this warning: ‘Had the explosions succeeded, all the Arab nations would have immediately made a holy war against Israel.’ That’s exactly what those terrorists desired, for through that act they wanted to provoke a planetary war, the decisive war of the last days, which all the Muslim countries and many other countries would have fought against Israel, however that war would have hastened the coming of the Messiah. Those terrorists declared these things during the trial that followed their arrest.

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