Opinion | Know the Mountain | Israel today

For one moment of sanity and common sense, last week the Knesset Education Committee chaired by MK Sharan Hashakel shed light on the most fundamental absence in the ongoing controversy over the Temple Mount issue: the ignorance and disconnection of most of us, and especially our children, history and basic acquaintance with him. Who twisted in their answers in front of the committee members revealed a sad reality: the Temple Mount as a subject is almost completely absent from the material taught in our schools.

It is doubtful how many of them know that the holiday of Hanukkah, which we will celebrate next week, was born there - in that place beyond the Western Wall. It is doubtful how many of them will make the link between lighting the Hanukkah candles and the mountain where the Hasmoneans lit the temple lamp 2,200 years ago. Most of them, like quite a few adults, including our foreign minister, mistakenly believe that the Western Wall, and not the Temple Mount, is the holiest place for the Jewish people. But the education system of the Jewish state, the one that incorporated the seven-branched lamp in the symbol, gives up studying and touring its students at the site where the lamp was located.

In the week that the false blood libel "Al-Aqsa in Danger" gave birth to another horrific and deadly attack on the mountain gates, the general public continues to flee from the Temple Mount consciousness.

We invest infinite energy in the occupation and news clarification of issues related to the mountain: the lack of magnetometers at the entrance gates, which he easily crossed, while armed, the murderer of Elijah Kay, or the issue of Jewish prayer on the mountain (Minister of Religions Matan Kahana said only this week) The house ").

We shrink in pain in the face of the ongoing attack by Muslims on ancient coffins, which tell the Jewish story of the mountain, and we tear our hair out as the Palestinians - who have turned the status quo on the Temple Mount and built three more mosques there - manage to deceive the whole world. Cw.

But the alphabet - to instill in the children of Israel the most basic knowledge about such a central place in the Jewish psyche and in the history of their people;

To instill in them the consciousness and knowledge of the Temple Mount - the State of Israel refrains from doing so.

Platonic sovereignty

This repression was not born out of nowhere. The Israeli flag was removed from the mountain by Moshe Dayan during the Six Day War, and the people of Israel were "removed" from it to the Western Wall, even before he could ascend it. The rabbis joined Dayan because they halakhically forbade Jews from entering the mountain, but ignored the magnitude of the hour. They spoke high and high about the sovereignty lost there, but did not understand that Jewish sovereignty on the mountain without an actual presence there, is a kind of Platonic sovereignty.

This existential alliance between religion and state has survived for about three decades. She consciously kept the Jews away from the mountain. It established the Western Wall as the sole thing, and almost made the "substitute" - which also has sanctity - the original; The "retrospective" to "to begin with". It also gave Muslims the misconception that the few Jews who come to the mountain, come there as "visitors", as if they were foreign tourists.

But in the last two decades a great miracle has taken place: Shofar is not yet a "reader on the Temple Mount," as the poet Naomi Shemer puts it, but many hearts have been opened and tens of thousands of Jews are finally realizing the "Hersh sheep" that Dayan left them - a visit to the mountain (as opposed to prayer). And visit him. But the widening circles are still confined mainly to the national-religious public, whose hundreds of rabbis have changed their halakhic approach.

This is a historic miss, just like the miss of the education system. After all, the Temple Mount is not the domain of the religious alone. The general Jewish public in Israel continues to refer to the mountain as an ancient and impressive book that surprisingly landed on it as a late Bar Mitzvah gift, in the 19th year of the state: we leafed through it for a few minutes, closed it and placed it on a high shelf in the bookcase. The hand touches him.

From time to time we dust it off, proudly pointing out, as if we were a book collector, that the rare and ancient book, this "name of the thing," is in our possession. The problem is that most of us have never opened the pages of this book, which we put on our heads of joy. Most of us have never visited a mountain.

There is nothing as strong as the power of habit, and the Western Wall, whose honor is in place, has become a habit.

Mostly.

There a screen went down, and beyond it - nothing.

The education system is also 'accustomed' and 'accustomed' to this.

How embarrassing it was to hear in the Education Committee from the commander of the David area, Lt. Col. Nati Gur, that in the two years he has been in office, not a single application from a school requesting to coordinate a tour of the mountain has been received in his office.

The mistake of the Rebbe of Kotzk

Sharan Hashakel and the Education Committee, who for the first time since the Six-Day War - unbelievably - this week called on the government to include the Temple Mount as a compulsory subject in the curriculum, have finally realized that something fundamental needs to change. Even committee members Emily Moati (Labor Party) and Moshe (Kinley) Tor-Paz (Yesh Atid), who are far removed from the mountain's loyalists, internalized that when it comes to historical knowledge and the history of the place - the Temple Mount story should be a cross-camp story. In the controversy, concerning the mountain - one can continue to argue. Over the years, this has been the case with personalities who are no longer with us, such as Rabbi Yehuda Amital (leader of the Dimension Zionist Party), Mapam leader Yaakov Hazan and the liberator of the Temple Mount Mota Gur, as well as Justices Moshe Landau and Benjamin Halevi, who refused to turn their backs on Mt. And to his history.

The Rebbe of Kotzk is said to have once beaten a sinner in tears before his followers. He told them how arrogance had taken over him, and as a ten-year-old boy - after his family home caught fire and all her property was lost - he comforted his tearful mother and assured her that when he grew up he would write a new genealogy, starting with him, instead of consuming fire. Too many of us treat the Temple Mount as the way little Menachem Mendel (later the Rebbe of Kotzk) treated his family's genealogy, and believe that the Temple Mount can be skipped and the Jewish people's genealogy rewritten without it.

Roots hikes in Morocco and Poland are good and beautiful, but the real roots tour is on the Temple Mount.

A tour of consciousness, study and study, with maps and history books, without signs and demonstrations, accompanied by archaeologists, historians, rabbis, academics, and commanders and educators who will lead the children of Israel to remember and remember where the genealogy of the Jewish people lies in Jerusalem.

Only after they know this, will they be able to decide how to drive the mountain, and whether and what will be done or not done on it.

First of all - let them know. 

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