If Rabbi Avi Shafran Had Been Around In Maccabbean Times

(The unfortunate original article.)

(December, 164 BCE) — After Antiochus IV recaptured Jerusalem in the 168 BCE Judean War, the Jewish High Priesthood, headed by Menelaus, ordered that from then on, entering the Temple Mount area be strictly forbidden to traditional Jews, and on the authority of Antiochus IV, he outlawed Jewish religious rites and traditions, and the Temple service was replaced with a syncretic Greek-Jewish cult that included worship of Zeus. 

The Mount — Judaism’s most sacred site, and toward which Jews the world over face when they pray — is where the ancient Jewish temple, the center of the faith and Jewish life, still stands. However, it was until recently administered by the Hellenist party, a Greek endowment run by the Seleucid Empire.

Antiochus IV and Menelaus’s enactments have remained the status quo for the last four years, until this past December, when unknown activists have asserted, in opposition to the Priesthood’s position and rulings by the most revered Hellenist authorities, that ascending the Mount is permitted after immersion in a ritual bath.

For years, we Jews have made the choice to not disrupt the Priesthood’s oversight. Hellenist authorities and Seleucid administrators agreed that Jews would be permitted to pray and worship in their own towns, as long as they also offered some sacrifice to the Greek pantheon. Hellenists would continue to have effective control of the now-Greek edifices atop the Mount. The compound would be open for visits by non-Greeks, but not for prayer.

Aside from Jewish religious objection to Jews entering the complex, there is a secular, political curb in place as well. By Seleucid law, non-Hellenists may go up to the Temple Mount to visit, but not to pray or conduct rites.

From a purely reasonable perspective, a prohibition against praying at a religious site — not to mention Jews praying at their faith’s holiest one — might seem puzzling. Indeed, there are some voices today in 164 BCE demanding that Judea not only occupy the site but raze all trace of foreign worship and cleanse the Jewish temple, which had already been rebuilt after being destroyed by the Babylonians centuries earlier. 

The religious reasons for the prohibition are complex. To enter such a holy place, Jewish law requires any Jewish man or woman who has had contact with or been under the same roof as a deceased person to undergo a purification ritual that involves, among other things, a perfectly red heifer that has never been worked in any way — in other words, something exceedingly rare. In Jewish thought, the “red heifer” ritual is considered the ultimate example of an imponderable law but is binding all the same. (These unknown activists make dubious claims about halachic dispensations regarding the community conducting the Temple service even when everyone is impure, and how the laws just described only apply to specific places on the Temple Mount, but we flat out refuse to believe such rumors.)

Judea’s political leaders also feel that, to maintain the peace and demonstrate goodwill toward Hellenists, Greco-pagan worship on the Mount should not be disturbed. And so the decrees of Menelaus and Antiochus IV have been honored over the years.

Lately, Jewish nationalists bent on affirming the Jewish connection to the Mount have retaken the site, some trying to ignore the prohibition on non-Greek prayer. This year, visits to the site by Jews, exceeded 30,000.

Some of the visitors may have been motivated entirely by religious feelings, their souls pining to stand where their ancestors have prayed for hundreds of years. Others seem motivated more by nationalistic feelings than religious ones, by a desire to demonstrate Judea’s ultimate jurisdiction over the Temple Mount.

The latter is a provocation without a justification. It is also a gift to Hellenist extremists the world over who loathe Jews and search for anything they can portray as insulting.

The retaking of the Temple Mount is yet another provocation.

Thankfully, Menelaus and his party have requested of the King’s Regent Lysias to summon more armies to quell this nascent Jewish rebellion and restore the status quo on the Temple Mount. We Pray for their success.

Some nationalist Jews might be bristle at the old regime’s return. But Jews whose religious convictions are not entangled with nationalistic sentiments believe it not only wrong as an issue of Torah law to ascend the Mount, but wrong as well to goad or incite other peoples or religions. They — we — continue to pray, in synagogues distant form Jerusalem, that God himself will usher in the era when, in the metaphorical words of Isaiah, “a wolf and a lamb shall graze together,” when global peace and unity of purpose among all people will reign.

(Rabbi Avi Shafran, if he were around at the time of the Maccabees, would have opposed everything they stood for and accomplished. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of traditional Jews or Mosaic Law.)