According to Maimonides, the Torah commands
us to build the Third Temple.

History

There are disagreements in the sages’ commentaries on important dates that we shall refer to in our biblical discussion. For purposes of uniformity, the Shechinah Third Temple, Inc. will follow the historical perspectives outlined by Mesorah Publications (Brooklyn, New York) in their treatises on the Hebrew Bible. Also, we feel that one cannot adequately comprehend the history of the Third Temple without an abbreviated discussion of our view of God’s role in the development of the world. It seems essential to us to do this, so that the reader can understand what we believe to be God’s plan for mankind. For more detailed thoughts and an explanation of the Ten Commandments, the reader is referred to our President’s spiritual memoir, Divinely Inspired: Spiritual Awakening of a Soul.

God is the Seed of Our Universe and Earth

According to a biblical commentator, “Without Einstein, we would not understand the world. However, without God, there would be no world.” We believe that 14 to 15 billion years ago, God “jumpstarted” our universe in preparation for the creation of our planetary system and the earth and sun and moon and stars, in order that the human race would ultimately evolve. Physicists refer to this scientifically unexplained beginning of time as the Big Bang Theory of the Universe. The first evidence for our planet earth appears approximately 4.5 billion years ago and the first microbial life forms show up in the fossil records some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. Sir Francis Crick, the co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, proposed that our genetic molecules, which must have been present in these first microorganisms, were brought to earth by aliens from another planet. Our suggestion is that this scientific miracle was once again the handiwork of God, Who this time “jumpstarted” Evolution.

The Torah, which comprises the first Five Books of the Hebrew Bible or the Five Books of Moses, is likened to a fig because all parts of a fig are edible and delicious. Solomon made this analogy when he said, “He who guards the fig tree will reap its fruits.” We read the Torah each year in synagogues throughout the world to reap its fruits. The Torah begins with the story of Creation. Although it is generally accepted that Moses penned the Torah, he nor anyone else was around at the time of the very beginnings of the universe. God was the only one, perhaps with His angels, and it is God who tells Moses about Creation some 14 billion years later when Moses is summoned to the top of Mount Sinai. The very first day of the Creation story symbolizes the Big Bang when all was dark, a kind of primeval darkness. It was on Day One that God brought light into the world but this light, although it may have come from the sun, was a different kind of light, a primeval light, perhaps a blue light. We speak about this light as the Supernal Light and it is different from the ordinary white rays of sunlight, because God did not set the sun and the moon and the stars in the sky until the Fourth Day. As is written in the Book of Ezekiel, this Supernal Light is destined once again to be present when the Third Temple is built during the Messianic era.

It is interesting that we are all driven by time. Even the sun and the moon have their daily cycles and are limited by time. God is not. The Hebrew Bible speaks to God’s immortality. God transcends time, “He was, He is and He will be.” Although God chose to be hidden from view of the Jewish People about 2500 years ago when the First Temple was destroyed, some of us catch snippets of His Shechinah and we experience His miracles. God was around long before our universe and is with us today. In the Messianic Age of the Third Temple, He will come out of the shadows and once again openly reveal Himself among us, as He did when He delivered the Ten Commandments to 600,000 plus Israelites standing at the foot of Mount Sinai. Do the Seven Days of Creation have any meaning? Yes, but not necessarily in terms of time as we know it. Even if we go back to the time of Adam where it was implied that each day could represent a thousand years, seven thousand years do not equate with 14 billion. Adam lived almost a thousand years after God told him that his life was over that day in the Garden of Eden, because he committed sin with Eve by eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

We believe that God described the Creation to Moses to instruct, teach and guide us and pique our intellect, imagination and curiosity and maybe even our faith. Moreover, He chose the Seven Days to give us a sense of time. The Seven Days had nothing to do with the age of the universe or earth. He was the One who gave us the term “day” which everyone in the world uses. He set the order of nature around us in some kind of evolutionary sequence. He even gave each of us a holy day in the week, which became the weekend, where we have the opportunity to enjoy, relax, and renew our bodies and brain, which he designed. His design is sophisticated and complex, so that we scientists would always be challenged with an infinite number of experiments leading to new and amazing discoveries. Because He is the Master Scientist, then it follows that there are scientific explanations to His Creation of humans and nature. Moreover, He shows us the world but He doesn’t show us the future. Bacteria are not mentioned in the Seven Days, because the Science of Bacteriology would take another five-thousand years before it was discovered [recall that He did not show the Hebrew prophets cars or sophisticated weapons because these came long after their deaths]. He was not going to spoil our fun. And we know that God has secrets that He has not shared. The Supernal Light of the First Day of Creation will become evident once again in Messianic times, but what is this light? And who is the Messiah and when will he come?

If we knew everything there was to know, how would we ever advance civilization with all of our technology, or is that what we are doing? What would be left for future generations? He has given us so much. He has given us life, our world, and our universe. I don’t think He wants anything from us except recognition that we have faith that He exists as our One and only true God. Hey, what’s wrong with that? We all need to be recognized, because our human qualities are modeled after His, if you believe as I do, that we are made in His image.

Why did God begin the Torah with the story of Creation? For all the above reasons and to establish His goodness to humankind. The story teaches us about our universe but it also tells the story of Adam. Why create Adam less than six-thousand years ago when Evolution was ongoing for 3.5 billion years, and humans as we know them were in our world thousands of years before Adam. Again, turning to Divinely Inspired: By 8000 B.C.E. (before the Common Era) in Mesopotamia, which was 70 percent in Iran and 30 percent in Iraq, humans had learned to plant seeds and to gather the grain that grew from the seeds. This was the beginning of the Neolithic or Stone Age. Better and more polished weapons were produced, pottery was developed, and farming and the herding of animals became the livelihood of the day. The result was a population explosion, because food became secure and could be stored. It was during this period, 3760 B.C.E., that God created Adam. The hunter-gatherers disappeared and gave way to communities of villages, and civilizations began to develop. Agriculture from the Iranian highlands spread to two areas in particular, the Tigris and Euphrates locale just to the south and to the valley of the Nile in Egypt. All of this was in full force around 4000 B.C.E., as Neolithic villages flourished. As methods for farming continued to improve with increases in productivity, new areas were colonized and high population densities in towns and cities sprang up. The first civilizations in the world were very much present by 3500 to 3000 B.C.E. in modern Iraq and in Egypt, just after Adam and Eve, and were followed by new urban centers in India, China and later America.

Simply stated, God announced Himself for the first time to the human race in 3760 B.C.E. with the creation of Adam and Eve. Why now? My guess would be that this was an opportune time with the population increase taking place in developing and congested cities. No one can presume to second guess the Almighty. However, it makes sense that this was the time for God to appear, since humanity would now be in close proximity to each other and we all know what history has shown us about humanity’s inhumanity. Even when humans were living as marauding bands on the savanna, it was their natural violent instinct that led them to clash with each other. Now with urban crowding brought on by the advent of civilization, a public announcement of a Higher Power was in order.

From Adam to Noah

God gave us free will, and Adam and Eve used their free will to commit sin. Surely, there was sin before Adam and Eve since Evolution was ongoing. The story of the Garden of Eden helps us to metaphorically understand that at one point in time, sin was something dangled in front of us (the serpent in the Garden of Eden who enticed Eve), but once committed, it became a part of the human race. Sin was now inside of us, so that we are no longer able to blame external sources for our actions. It is not ‘them’ or ‘it’ which is responsible for our desires or choices, but it is ‘we’ in whom the accountability resides. In Christianity, the transgressions of Adam and Eve are referred to as the Original Sin. It is this Sin, representative of all the sins of humankind, that Jesus died for on the Cross. In Judaism, we admit to this sin. However, we believe that sin can be conquered in one’s lifetime, through repentance, good deeds (mitzvoth) and changing our course to follow a more spiritual path. In Judaism, one is accountable for inflicting hurts both against God and upon one’s fellow human beings.

The sages teach that the act of sin diminishes the sinner. It makes him into a lesser human being. It engenders him with an indifference for evil, a tolerance for evil, an appetite for evil and eventually a distaste for God. In Koheles 7:29, Solomon writes, “God created man upright but he sought many intrigues.” With His granting of free will to humans, God could not guarantee that humans would be good or believe in Him. During the period of Adam from 3760 B.C.E. until the time of Noah’s Ark and the Flood in 2104 B.C.E., humans exercised their free will to commit robbery, adultery, and murder. This happened despite the glaring fact that early biblical man knew of God. God realized that the social structure of His designed world was in trouble and ordered Noah, a righteous man, to build the Ark. God then caused a great Flood to drown everyone, except for Noah and his family and the animals to be saved, in a localized part of the world. This could not have been the entire world, since there were pockets of mankind developing via Evolution in other parts of the world at that time. Evolution was ongoing because God had initiated it.

After the Flood, God tells Noah that He will never again destroy all of mankind, but He does subsequently destroy some humans with the passage of time. Does this mean that God has an evil streak if He later killed the inhabitants of Sodom, the idol worshipping Canaanites, or the first born of the Egyptians during the Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt? The answer is an emphatic “No”, because either none of these humans recognized God or would grow up to believe in a transcendental God. All of them were idol worshippers and had no sense of morality. Even if they knew right from wrong, it was their nature to choose bad over good.

Psalm 145:9 states, “God is good to all and His love extends over all His works.” Idol worship is not part of God’s works. The Creation established God’s sovereignty over the world. It is well to ponder that not only do we have free will, but also God has free will to act when He feels that there is a threat to His world and His plan for mankind. God does have a lifetime of patience for man’s transgressions and iniquities and gives us every opportunity to change. In a sense, the human race is a scientific experiment. God’s plan has always been for us to walk together into the Messianic Age. This was the message advocated by God through Moses, His prophets, and later Jesus during the beginnings of Christianity in 30 B.C.E. Humans were to live in harmony with each other and be as one with nature and their environment.

The Patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

Noah had three sons, Japheth, Ham and Shem. Judaism follows Shem but all three sons gave rise to descendants who in turn gave rise to the peoples of the world. In fact, the descendants of Shem, like those of Ham and Japheth, will according to the Torah give rise to 70 nations who will wage war on the Jewish people at the End of Days. With the birth of Abraham in 1802 B.C.E., God takes His first step to reassert Himself in the world. Even after the Flood, humankind spirals downward, and prior to Abraham, the world consists essentially of idol worshippers. This was true also for Abraham’s family. Although in these earlier biblical times, people knew of the God of Adam (Adam was not a Jew), they began to worship what God had given them – the stars, moon, sun, oceans, etc. Soon they only worshipped God’s gifts to the world and forgot about God Himself. As time passed, all sorts of idols were made into gods so that people hoped to receive blessings from the gods for a good birth, victory in war, a bountiful harvest, a happy life and a tranquil journey of everlasting immortality in death. While these gods of wood and stone flourished, the One true God was either forgotten or pushed into the background. It was Abraham’s mission to bring back the recognition of God into the world. It was Abraham who is considered the Father of the Jewish People, and, of course, also the Muslims. Abraham was called an “Ivri” because he came from across the river (Tigris or Euphrates) and spoke Hebrew. It was also Abraham who gave God his love, loyalty and dedication. Because of God-given free will, God could not fashion any of this for Himself, even from Abraham, His most devoted servant.

Noteworthy, it was also in Abraham’s lifetime in 1714 B.C.E. that the incident of the Tower of Babel occurred. A group of idol worshipping people had banded together to build a ladder to the sky with the intention of mocking God. God dispersed the people into 70 nations who now spoke 70 new languages. The people could not communicate with each other and became the Generation of the Dispersion. Abraham who was God’s bright star during this period actually came from idol worshipping Kasdem in Mesopotamia. It is amazing that the Hebrew Bible is absolutely truthful about the history of the Jewish People, for as one commentator puts it, such origins hardly strengthen the Jewish claims of right and title to a national homeland. Nonetheless, this is the way it is written and recorded, as the scriptures clearly indicate that God promised the Land of Israel to Abraham and his descendants.

Abraham would have his first son Ishmael, through Hagar, the maidservant of His wife Sarah. From Ishmael God promised would come a mighty nation. However, the Islamic Nation did not evolve until the birth of the prophet Muhammad almost twenty-five hundred years later. When Abraham is 100 and Sarah is 90, a son Isaac is born to them. It was through Isaac, not Ishmael, whom the heritage and Land of the Jewish people was destined to pass. At age 137, Abraham is given his final test known as the Akeidah trial. Isaac is 37 years old when Abraham binds him and is prepared to slit his throat. This of course does not happen as God steps in at the last moment and a ram caught in the nearby thicket is sacrificed in Isaac’s place. Abraham’s loyalty is unshakable but so is Isaac’s, and in a sense, the Akeidah was a trial for both father and son. It is this “sacrificial site” where Jewish tradition states that both the First and Second Temples were built. It is on this same holy site where the sages state that the Third Temple must be constructed in Messianic times.

The third Patriarch of the Jewish People, Jacob, is born in 1642 B.C.E. from Rebecca when Isaac is sixty years of age. All three Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, are told by God that He will give the Land (Israel) to them and their descendants (the Jewish People). Jacob has perhaps the most difficult task of all. He must father the Twelve Tribes of Israel who will become the Jewish Nation. Jacob has four wives, Leah, Bilhah, Zilpah and Rachel who give birth to Reuben, Levi, Simeon, Judah, Zebulun and Issachar (from Leah); Dan and Naphtali (from Bilhah); Gad and Asher (from Zilpah) and; Joseph and Benjamin (from Rachel). Giving birth is an amazing feat for any woman, but these four special women were giving birth to an entire nation. Jacob is 91 when Joseph is born in 1551 B.C.E. There are many stories in the Torah about Joseph and his brothers and it is Joseph, as Viceroy to the Pharaoh in Egypt, who ensures the survival of the Jewish People. At the time of the Exodus, the Tribe of Levi is taken by God to be priests and out of the Levites come the high priests known as the kohanim. Moses’ brother, Aaron, is the very first kohen. Joseph is rewarded for his service to God, as his sons, Ephraim and Menasseh, replace their father and the Tribe of Levi to form a new composite of the Twelve Tribes. Jacob dies in 1495 B.C.E. and the Twelve Tribes wind up in Egypt. After a time, a new Pharaoh becomes ruler of Egypt, and the Hebrews are perceived to be a threat to the Egyptians and become enslaved. Because Joseph provoked jealousy among his brothers as he was Jacob’s favorite (Jacob’s wife Rachel was Jacob’s true love), it was Judah who is selected by God to give rise to the Davidic kingdom, and in the future to king Messiah. At the time of the Babylonian exile a thousand years later, only the Tribe of Judah (actually Judah and Benjamin) was left in the Holy Land and it was then that the Hebrews were called Jews, after Judah.

Relevant to the mission of the Shechinah Third Temple, Inc., each tribe of Israel was a separate and unique entity and each member within the tribes had a role in the national destiny of Israel. Similarly, today we need all Jews to become spiritually whole and to participate in our fundraising campaign so that the Third Temple and the Messianic Age will come, if it be God’s Will, before its appointed time. In biblical times, the First and Second Temples stood in the territories assigned to both the Tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The Third Temple is destined to stand in its own space independent of any of the Twelve Tribes, so that all Jews can feel equal in being a part of the Temple’s holiness.

The Exodus and the Ten Commandments

The Exodus out of Egypt of the Hebrew slaves (600,000 plus) takes place in 1312 B.C.E. and the 210 years spent in Egypt becomes a prerequisite for the formation of the Jewish Nation. Egypt was completely idol worshipping at this time in biblical history. The Hebrew Bible is not found in the accounts of other nations, so that it is not unexpected that the Egyptian textbooks do not acknowledge that the Exodus took place. However, archaeological discoveries have verified this historical time period. God chooses Moses from the Tribe of Levi to lead the Jewish people out of Egypt. It is interesting that the tides of history are changed by God bringing about a myriad or happening, so that great things can come about spiritually through men and women who find themselves in difficult straits. Moses was one of these individuals whom God chose at a dramatic point in Jewish history. It also seems like God intended it this way, in order to show the imperfections of mankind. The Torah is an open book of the trials and tribulations of man, and acknowledges man’s merits right alongside his faults. God’s purpose was not only to free the Jews but also to teach them to learn from their experiences, and to appreciate the difficult times in life. This teaching is described in the Tenth Commandment.

The most spiritual question one could ask during the Exodus was, whether the Hebrew slaves would be content to solely be free men and women when they came out of Egypt or would they rise to great spiritual heights with the acceptance of God’s Ten Commandments and His Torah? When Moses told the Israelites they would receive God’s Torah, the Israelites responded in Exodus 24:7, “All that Hashem [God] says we will do.” They said this and meant their words under spiritually heightened feelings, as they were overcome with the joy of being free. However, they could not sustain their words or feelings with spiritual actions and they lapsed and built the Golden Calf. The sages speak about the ‘pintele yid’, the Jew whose soul still needs to be awakened, the Jew whose Jewish ness is sometimes dormant yet this hidden spark within him cannot be extinguished. It was at the Revelation at Sinai, where God delivered the Ten Commandments to 600, 000 plus Israelites, that God gave it His best shot to get His message across to mankind. Mankind at the time consisted of idol worshippers and Israelites who had lived in Egypt and learned the ways of idol worshippers. The Israelites got the message. They just didn’t follow through. Beginning with the Golden Calf, which became the eternal Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement), and over the next thousand years, the Israelites lapsed in and out of being idol worshippers and conducted themselves immorally against everything the Ten Commandments stood for. The result was the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the warnings by the Hebrew prophets of a terrible time at the End of Days. It was with the Ten Commandments and with Joshua’s (Moses’ disciple) conquering of most (but not all) of the Canaanite nations in Israel that God evened the playing field. For the very first time, good had the chance to stand equally alongside evil. The Jews were “chosen” not because they were better than anyone else but because they were given the opportunity to bring spirituality to the rest of the world through the teachings of God’s Torah. From Exodus 19:5-6, “You shall be unto Me a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy nation.” To their credit, the Israelites did honor God in the Sinai Desert with the building of the Tabernacle (Mishkan is the Hebrew word for Tabernacle). The Tabernacle housed the Ark of the Covenant (Tablets of the Ten Commandments) and other Holy relics. Most important, the Shechinah was present in the Tabernacle, as it had been in the Tents of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). In Exodus 25:8, God tells Moses, “They shall make me a Sanctuary and I shall dwell among them.”

Remarkably, it was in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert, not in Israel proper, where the Torah was established. It was given to Moses during His forty nights and forty days listening, learning and conversing with God on top of Mount Sinai. Not only were the story of Creation and God’s Laws and Commandments told to Moses but also Moses was given the Oral Torah, which was passed down by word of mouth for centuries and ultimately was incorporated into the Jewish religion. The Oral Torah was written down in the Mishnah and further interpreted in other Hebrew holy texts, especially the Talmud. It is noteworthy that while all other nations of the world first developed a geographical state and then enacted a social contract, Israel first received the Torah and then proceeded to occupy the Land. Therefore, the Torah was not created as a response to the social needs of a political state. Rather, the political state was created to serve as the arena for the observance of God’s Commandments. The acquisition of the Land of Israel was thus the prerequisite for the fulfillment of Torah and not the reverse. Originally, the Jews were nomads and it may be that a Land with established cities was the only way that God’s spirituality could be spread and communicated to the world. The nomadic life might not have lent itself to spreading and maintaining the gospel of God to large numbers of people, perhaps analogous to today’s world where it may take the great majority of the human race to follow in the footsteps of the Creator before God will bring us peacefully and joyfully into the Messianic Age.

From Moses and Joshua to Kings David and Solomon

The Ten Commandments were given by God and Moses to the Hebrews in 1312 B.C.E. Moses smashed the first set of Tablets (referred to today as the Broken Tablets) because he is enraged when he saw that the Israelites had forged a Golden Calf, synonymous with idol worship and immorality. A year and half later, Moses presents the Jews with the second set of Tablets of the Ten Commandments on the tenth day of the month of Tishrei in the Hebrew calendar. God had forgiven the Golden calf, but as we stated earlier, the Golden Calf had become the eternal Yom Kippur. Because of their idol worship, the Hebrew slaves were condemned to wonder for 40 years in the Sinai desert until the generations of the Golden Calf had either died off or had been withered by old age. Moses too, because of not obeying God in a fit of anger against the Hebrews, was forbidden to cross the Jordan River into a ‘land of milk and honey’, which would one day become the modern State of Israel. In our humble opinion, God may also not have wished Moses to do so, because in Judaism, there is no cult or hero worship and no intermediaries between humans and God. To this day, we do not know the burial site of Moses, our greatest prophet.

It is Joshua, Moses’ disciple, who leads the Hebrews into the Land in 1277 B.C.E. The Tabernacle is carried by the Levites across the Jordan and is erected at the biblical city of Gilgal. There are wars to be fought against the Canaanite nations, but with God fighting beside the Hebrews (figuratively speaking), all wars are won with miracles and virtually no loss of life. It is interesting to point out that we believe that Joshua did alter the forces of nature and miraculously made the sun stand still at Gibeon, but he could not have altered the forces of nature without God providing the spiritual force. Whether you believe this or not is a matter of faith. In 1257 B.C.E., the Tabernacle is moved to Shiloh where it is to remain for three-hundred and sixty-nine years. In 888 B.C.E., the Philistines destroy Shiloh and capture the Holy Ark and move it within their borders to Philistine cities. For most of this three-hundred and sixty-nine year period in Jewish history, the Hebrews were led by judges, starting with Joshua, until they asked for a king to lead them. The judges ruled but it was a chaotic period of essentially self rule and people followed their own ways and their own morals. The first king was Saul but he was removed through death in battle. Under explicit instructions from God, Saul had disobeyed and failed to kill an Amelekite king and his family whose descendants would later come back to haunt the Jewish people in the form of Haman during the miracle of Purim. Ultimately, the Amelekite king is killed by the prophet Samuel but the king’s wife escapes to later give descendants who would give birth to Haman. Moreover, there is yet a prophesy that Amalek will be destroyed finally at the End of Days. Perhaps, it is a descendant of Amalek who will lead the 70 nations against Israel at Judgment Day. When the Jews came out of Egypt at the time of the Exodus, the Amelekites showed no mercy and attacked them, showing no fear of the Hebrew God. It is interesting to note that one of the grandsons of Esau (Jacob’s older twin brother to whom Isaac’s blessing was to be given but was “stolen” by Jacob and Rebecca, or was spiritually destined by God for Jacob as the sages interpret), was Amalek. Esau had married four wives, all from idol worshipping nations and it was destiny to give rise to Amalek.

When the Jews crossed over the Jordan, there was to be an assignment in the Land that was agreed to by each of the Twelve Tribes in the Sinai Desert. The location and areas granted were not equal and Jerusalem was to lie partly in the allocated territories of both the Tribes of Judah and Benjamin. David became king in 876 B.C.E., but was only initially accepted by his own tribe, the Tribe of Judah. After seven years of conflict, David was finally anointed king over all Twelve Tribes. In 867 B.C.E., king David recaptured the Holy Ark from the Philistines and moves the Tabernacle to Jerusalem. The Ark was safeguarded in the house of Oved Edom the Giti for three months prior to its movement to Jerusalem. Tradition has it that king David, the most revered king of all the Jewish kings, searches and is led by God to the holy site where the Akeidah trial of Abraham and Isaac took place almost eight-hundred years earlier in time. David builds an altar to God and when a heavenly fire descends upon the altar, David realizes that he has been led to the site of the Akeida and the future Holy Temple (Bais Hamikdash in Hebrew). David finds the site on the thrashing floor of Aravnathe the Jebusite (Canaanites who controlled Jerusalem before king David captured the city) and purchases the site in a legal transaction. This was one of three deeds recorded in the Hebrew Bible. The other two were Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are buried) and Joseph’s purchase of the land around the biblical city of Shechem which is today the site of Joseph’s tomb in the Palestinian town of Nablus). Today, we refer to Jerusalem as the City of David or City of Zion. Tradition has it that Shem called the place ‘Yoreh’ and Abraham named it ‘Shalem’ and that God Himself synthesized both names to call the city Yerushalayem. A city of peace (Hebrew translation for Jerusalem), Jerusalem has been anything but peaceful over thousands of years. However, it will become a true city of peace in Messianic days and God will once again dwell there among the Jews and all peoples. In Messianic days, Jerusalem will be rebuilt to the south of is present location and will have an additional name, Hashem-is-there or G-d-is-there.

David had a burning desire to build God a Temple but king David was not destined, although his songs shall be sung by the Levites and played on an eight-stringed shemonis (harp) in the time of the Third Temple. David could plan for the First Temple and acquire materials for its physical structure, as we will be doing now for the Third Temple, but God forbade him to build it. The sages say that David lost this opportunity because he was too much of a military man and that the Temple was always meant to symbolize peace. It’s possible he was forbidden because of his transgression of allowing the death of Bathsheba’s husband in battle, so he could marry the woman he was bedazzled by. Still there is a saying that if king David built the Temple, then it would last forever and the Jewish People were not ready spiritually at that point in time. David was a king’s king and prevented the people from straying. All that he cared about was his people and He guided them in Torah. He was a great king but died at the age of seventy leaving his throne to his son Solomon from Bathsheba. Solomon was still a young boy when he was made king of the Jews in 836 B.C.E. It was Solomon’s destiny to build God’s First Temple and he began work on the Temple in 832 B.C.E. Eight years later, the First Temple was magnificently completed and it remained standing 410 years from its inception. Solomon’s wisdom in his day was not surpassed during his seventy year of life, and destiny has it that another with Solomon’s wisdom, king Messiah, will appear at the End of Days. The First Temple contained the Ark with the Ten Commandments and the Holy relics of the Tabernacle.

The days of glory had returned to the Jews for the Shechinah was once again in evidence in the Temple, for all to intensely feel, with its eternal flame burning inside the Sanctuary and a holy cloud over the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies guarded the Ark of the Covenant and the Shechinah rested on two figures of God’s cherub angels, which faced each other in conjugal devotion. The cherub is symbolic of angelic chastity. Within the Sanctuary stood the sacred Table on which the holy Showbread remained fresh for each weekly period and a Menorah of gold was close by Moses’ original copper altar. There was also the Urim V’Tumim which was a parchment bearing the Holy Name of God that was inserted into the breastplate worn by the Kohen Gadol (high priest).When the high priest required Divine instruction, certain letters of the names of the Twelve Tribes would light up spelling the prophetic message.

The First and Second Temples

After Solomon, all went downhill. The Ten Northern Tribes separated from the Tribes of Judah and Benjamin and a long line of inept kings in both Israel (the Northern Tribes) and Judah (the southern Tribes of Judah and Benjamin) followed. Many of these kings worshipped the Golden Calf and a variety of idols and those who did try either failed to guide the Jews on the spiritual path or were killed or died. In lieu of the failures of the kings, God sent Hebrew prophets to try and bring the people back to Him. But without leaders and with the people immersed in everything against which the Ten Commandments stood for, it became hopeless. First the Northern Tribes were attacked and killed by the Assyrians with those Jews still alive being exiled from the Land (The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and the beginning of the Diaspora). It was only through a Divine miracle that the Tribes of Judah and Benjamin survived Assyrian assaults on Jerusalem. Then with the passage of time with adultery and immorality, murder, and idol worship blatantly continuing also in Judah, Jerusalem and the First Temple were destroyed approximately one-hundred and thirty years later in 422 B.C.E. by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. Prior to the destruction, the Shechinah had departed on the wings of the cherubim and God returned to being the God of Heaven, and was no longer the God of Heaven and Earth which He had become in Abraham’s time. For centuries, God had overlooked their transgressions and granted the Jews time to repent, because they enjoyed the protection merited by the greatness of their three Patriarchs. But now, even this was lost although God’s Covenant with the Patriarchs remained binding. God had warned the Jews through the prophet Amos 3:2, “You alone did I know among the nations of the earth; therefore, I shall hold you to account for all your iniquities.”

Those who did survive the siege of the First Temple either fled and died in Egypt, among them the prophet Jeremiah, or the remaining Jews were exiled to Babylon to serve Nebuchadnezzar. Some like Daniel and the prophet Ezekiel (Yechezkel in Hebrew), were taken even before the destruction of Jerusalem. It was Ezekiel whom God brings to His mountain to show a mystical vision (Merkavah for chariot in Hebrew) of the Third Temple. It is also to Ezekiel, whom God visits years earlier on the banks of the River Kevar during the exile in Babylon that an earlier vision is granted. When Ezekiel is instructed to inspire the exiled Jews to make plans for the building of a Second Temple though a Third Temple was still to be built in the future, Ezekiel suggests timidly to God that why not wait until the Jews are allowed to return from Babylon to the Land before planning of the Temple is initiated. God answers Ezekiel by telling him in no uncertain terms that His Temple should not have to wait and that the exiled will be granted mitzvoth (kindness, perhaps Resurrection in Messianic days) if they begin to study and make preparations and draw up plans for the Second Temple. We, the Shechinah Third Temple, Inc., pose the same question to you. Why should God wait any longer for the planning of His Third Temple to begin? Please help our cause and give generously from your heart.

During the Babylonian exile, we learn of the story of Queen Esther, Mordechai and Haman and the miracle of Purim. It is Queen Esther who marries the Persian king Aseuerhaus, who along with the Medes, destroys the Babylonians. Their son, Darius, becomes king and it is Darius who gives his permission for the rebuilding of the Second Temple. There was an acceptance of Torah with the miracle of Purim which signaled that the official building of the Second Temple could commence. Led by Nechemiah (perhaps identical to Zerubabel) and Ezra (perhaps the prophet Malachi) and the one-hundred and twenty Men of the Great Assembly (including the last three Jewish prophets - Zecharia, Chaggai and Malachi), the Second Temple is built in 350 B.C.E. To this day, the whereabouts of the Holy relics and the Ten Commandments from the First Temple and Tabernacle are not known. Whether they were destroyed or hidden before the destruction of the First Temple is also not known. The small number of Jews that did return from seventy years of the Babylonian exile were aware that the Shechinah would not be present in the Second Temple. They were told about the future Third Temple but were not given the instructions to build such a Temple. Nevertheless, the Men of the Great Assembly found the exact site of the First Temple in a Jerusalem of rubble and they built the Second Temple to honor their Creator. One suggestion of how they achieved this was that they saw Isaac’s ashes on the site. Of course, this is a metaphor because the ram caught in the thicket was sacrificed in place of Isaac at the Akeidah. Yet the spiritual effect of the deed remained imprinted on the top of Mount Moriah, and God showed them the holy site.

The Men of the Great Assembly prayed together to God for the Jews to be exorcised of their belief in idols and God is said to have granted their wish. The disappearance of idol worship also necessitated the disappearance of the prophets, as prophesy without idol worship would have destroyed free will as one would know the exact truth about the future. Free will dictates that there is room to doubt the truth but there could be no doubt of the ‘absolute’ truth, spoken by God’s prophets. Yet, the words of the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekeil, Hoshea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Habbakuk, Zephania, Chaggai, Zecharia, and Malachi) concerning the Third Temple and the Messianic Age went unheeded but were documented and written down by Zecharia, Chaggai, and Malachi. It was Ezra who is said to have chosen which Books (including the apocalyptic Book of Daniel) would be canonized and become part of the Hebrew Bible. During the period prior to the Second Temple, the Jews were smitten with gentile women and had turned to idol worship to legitimize their sexual drives. When righteous people tried to stop their idol worship, the sinful Jews murdered them. This certainly was not loving your fellow as yourself and helped drive the Shechinah from the First Temple. During the period of the Second Temple, Jews still did not love and respect one another. Moreover, the high priests defiled the holiness of the Temple. The result of course was dishonoring God with their arrogance and contamination, so much so that God’s vision of the Third Temple to Ezekiel includes a statement by God about the high priests’ poor holy record. Only the family (out of twenty-four families) of the high priest, Tzadok, who served in the First Temple would be allowed to serve in the Third Temple.

Without the Shechinah, the Second Temple, even when modified by Herod the Great, was doomed to destruction. It too fell in 70 C. E. (Common Era or as is sometimes written, 70 A.D.) to Titus and his Roman legions. This date also marked the beginning of the religion of Judaism, as the loss of prophesy and the high priests made way for the rabbinical leadership to come and a flourishing of the Oral Torah. Curiously, this is also the exact date recorded for the beginnings of Christianity. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews were once again exiled from their land, this time to the four corners of the earth for a period of nineteen-hundred years. It was the first time in history that the Jews could be divorced from the Land that God had granted them through the Covenant with the Patriarchs. Yet, history has proven that Judaism cannot be destroyed by any ideology, even if the Jews were exiled from their Land to countries where they were killed or made to live within the horrific treatment of man’s inhumanity to man. The redemption of the Jews in Messianic times is closely linked with the redemption of all humanity, as well as with the destruction of evil and tyranny. Israel became a State in 1948 and Jerusalem was retaken by the Jews in the 1967 Six Day War. One of us, Jerry Pollock, who was studying for his Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel during this period, was on a bus trip the day after the Six Day War. “I remember walking in Jerusalem and being guided to this tiny backyard of an Arab home where evidence of a beautiful stone wall was before my eyes. This was the Wailing or Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the only remaining sacred vestige of God’s Temples. I had seen it when barely any of the Wall was showing, compared to its present excavation where all of it now stands in all its majesty for the Jewish People to come and pray, or just observe. My body is chilled remembering this wonder.”

The Third Temple

In one of the biblical books published by Mesorah, a commentator writes: The purpose of the Temple is to serve as a channel through which external spiritual forces can filter down to the world from heaven serving as a source of sacred inspiration to all mankind. The Temple creates an intimacy between man and God such that man can inwardly strive towards his Creator.

The Merkavah vision of the Third Temple that God shows Ezekiel is different from that of the Second Temple which is in turn different from the First Temple. The sages state that this is permissible, because it was back in the Sinai Desert that God set a precedent to allow flexibility with the ultimate structure of the Temples. In Exodus, 25:9, God states, “In accordance with all that I show you.”, which suggests that it is God’s prerogative if He wishes to alter His Temple. Although the Rambam (Rabbi Maimonides) believed that the Temple would be built by human hands, probably that of the Messiah or even before the Messiah comes, Rashi felt that the Temple would miraculously descend from heaven. As far as can be determined from scriptures, the command to build the Third Temple seems binding, as it was for the Tabernacle and First and Second Temples. Ezekiel’s directions for the Third Temple were said to be hidden from those (in Babylon during the exile) who would build the Second Temple, because the latter was never destined to be permanent. Rambam states that the description of the Third Temple in the Book of Exekiel is by no means clear or unambiguous. However, all will be clarified by Elijah the Prophet at the End of Days. Elijah had been taken to heaven before his death and will precede the Messiah.

When the Shechinah left the First Temple, It never left the Jewish People. Although God now operated in a hidden fashion, His Shechinah was present even during the exile on the banks of the River Kevar during the darkest night of the Babylonian exile. Back then, Ezekiel’s mystical vision of the Merkavavh was seen to hover over the exiled Jews in silent testimony that the nation still retained the protection of God. This vision was one of Ezekeil’s two previous encounters, and the third encounter was upon Ezekiel now as he was being prepped to be shown a sneak preview of the Third Temple. Nineteen years earlier, God had awaited Ezekiel in the First Temple’s Courtyard. God had shown Ezekiel the dreadful defilement of the First Temple’s sanctity and then Ezekiel saw the Shechinah being lifted out of Jerusalem on the wings of the cherubim. During the Third Temple vision, Ezekiel sees the Shechinah, accompanied by God’s Supernal Light, return and enter the future Third Temple. Immediately after, Ezekiel sees the darkness lifting from the earth with the coming of God.

The beginning of the Shechinah withdrawal from the First Temple occurred when the Judean king, Uzziah (Uzziahu), was stricken with leprosy and forced to relinquish his throne. Uzziah had entered the Sanctuary of the Temple with the intention of burning incense before God which can only be done by a kohen priest. The moment he considered defying the high priest who advised him not to go through with this, he was stricken with leprosy by God. Simultaneously, a terrible earthquake shook the land causing the portals of the First Temple to tremble. The Shechinah then began to withdraw and would give way to the culmination of the destruction of the Temple when the Babylonians finally broke through. King Uzziah was the last straw, symbolic of a corrupt nation of morally and spiritually bankrupt corrupt kings that had been like cockroaches infesting the Land for centuries. The Torah forbids the holding of both kohen gadol (high priest) and king by one person. Kohens are disqualified as functioning as monarchs (Genesis 41:10) and the Hebrew Bible states that the two roles must function separately (Jeremiah 33:24, Zecharia 4:14). Ezekeil himself was a kohen.

Ezekiel is told by God to write down the instructions for the Babylonian exiles, so that they can construct a three-dimensional model of the Third Temple. We attempt this here on our website for Ezekiel’s vision of the Third Temple.

According to the Book of Yechezkel (Ezekiel), animal sacrifices will once again be part of the Third Temple, as they were in the First and Second Temples. From the biblical text, it is not clear whether these sacrifices will be a permanent function of the Temple or only exist during the six month inaugural period between the Jewish Festivals of Purim through Sukkoth. At the appropriate time, all will be clarified by Elijah the Prophet when he returns at the End of Days. The original importance of the sacrifice was to show man’s dedication and love for his Creator. That is, it was not the animal sacrifice per se but the intent of the one who offers the sacrifice that was important. In a larger sense, sacrifices were a way of giving back to God in return for the bounty that God always provided Israel. The Jews would not have food from their Land if it was not God’s Will, and giving a portion of one’s food through sacrifice was good for the soul and was a mitzvah. The honor came to God by choosing the best of one’s flock. Incense was also burned in the Sanctuary of the Temple. The incense was meant to pay homage to the Divine Presence after it descended into the First Temple and will be offered again in the Third Temple.

Today, we sometimes say that “it’s not quantity, it’s quality”, although a generous measure of sacrificial food (meat or flour) was offered back in biblical times, whatever the people could afford, out of respect and reverence for God’s majesty. The sacrifices had to be made holy and were called the Terumah for HASHEM. If sacrifices were to be replaced in Messianic times, perhaps our actions of visiting the Third Temple at least three times a year on the Jewish Festivals of Pesach (Passover), Shavuous, and Sukkoth would be recognized as devotion and honor in our Creator’s eyes.

In Numbers 35:2, we read, “an open space.” The Temple Mount area on which the Temples of Israel stood were to have an open space for beautification. Compared to the Temple Mount of the Second Temple, the Temple Mount of the Third Temple was to be 36 times larger. When one calculates this area based upon measurements from the Book of Ezekiel, the Temple Mount in Messianic times will be almost a mile from east to west and north to south. The Third Temple itself will occupy less than 0.1 mile on each rectangular side or about one-tenth of the area of the Temple Mount. In actuality, the whole area will be located on the property of the Nassi or Prince Messiah who will be granted an area of land equivalent to each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Lying south of the Temple Mount will be an area of equal size to be used as property for the Levites. In biblical days, there were Levite cities scattered throughout Israel. In the modern world, a lot of Jews can claim their Levite or kohanim heritage even though the rest of us are known as Israelites of unknown origin. In Messianic times, we will once again know our Tribe.

South of the Levite area will be the rebuilt city of Jerusalem with an additional name, Hashem-is there or God-is-there. The new city of Jerusalem will have inhabitants from all Twelve Tribes. In the days of the Third Temple, it is written that we will know God’s Name. In Isaiah 52:6, “Therefore My people shall know My name.” We shall not know God’s Name before Messianic days because Exodus 3:15 states, “This is My Name forever and this is My memorial for all generations.” According to the Talmud, the word ‘forever’ is spelled the same way as ‘to be hidden.’ Orthodox Jews, when they speak God’s ineffable Name use the name HASHEM (meaning The Name). Back in biblical days, both Abraham and Moses would pray and say the Hebrew word Adonai when God’s Name was to be pronounced. When Jews read the Hebrew Bible today, we follow Abraham and Moses’ lead. God’s ineffable Name is given by four Hebrew consonants read from right to left. In Messianic days, we shall be able to pronounce and honor God’s Name.