Ritual Bath Discovered Near the Western Wall

A ritual bath, or mikveh, has been uncovered only 20 meters from the Western Wall. This mikveh must have served the many pilgrims who came to Jerusalem and purified themselves before ascending to the Temple Mount.

According to the IAA:

In his book The War of the Jews, Josephus Flavius writes there was a government administrative center that was situated at the foot of the Temple. Among the buildings he points out in this region were the council house and the “Xistus”- the ashlar bureau. According to the Talmud it was in this bureau that the Sanhedrin – the Jewish high court at the time of the Second Temple – would convene. It may be that the superb structure the Israel Antiquities Authority is presently uncovering belonged to one of these two buildings.

This discovery is only the beginning of the excavation of this structure and chances are there are more surprises to come.

Shana Tova from the IAA

The Israel Antiquities Authority has posted an online presentation of holiday symbols from antiquity. Included are menorahs, lulavs, pomegranates and the Temple. The artifacts span the period from King David through the Byzantine period.

Click here to view the presentation.

Portrait of Alexander the Great

According to the University of Haifa:

A rare and surprising archaeological discovery at Tel Dor: A gemstone engraved with the portrait of Alexander the Great was uncovered during excavations by an archaeological team directed by Dr. Ayelet Gilboa of the University of Haifa and Dr. Ilan Sharon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Despite its miniature dimensions – the stone is less than a centimeter high and its width is less than half a centimeter – the engraver was able to depict the bust of Alexander on the gem without omitting any of the ruler’s characteristics” notes Dr. Gilboa, Chair of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Haifa. “The emperor is portrayed as young and forceful, with a strong chin, straight nose and long curly hair held in place by a diadem.”

Amazingly, archaeologists have been digging at Tel Dor for 30 years! Dor was a major port city until Caesarea replaced it during the Roman period. Alexander the Great passed through Dor on his way from Tyre to Egypt in 332 BCE.

Long-Lost Relatives Find Each Other Through Yad Vashem

An amazing story of a family’s reunification is being told on the Yad Vashem website. A woman doing research for her son’s bar mitzvah project found a picture of her great-grandfather on the Yad Vashem website. Since neither she nor anyone in her family had uploaded this picture she set out to find out who did and found a whole family of cousins living in Israel.

An excerpt from the article:

“Cynthia Wroclowaski, Outreach Manager of Yad Vashem’s Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project, arranged a special visit for the family to Yad Vashem. On August 31, 2009, the two families had an emotional reunion at Yad Vashem that included a moving memorial ceremony in the Synagogue. The family recited the names of relatives murdered in the Shoah, celebrated the new ones they had found, and marked the occasion of Matthew’s Bar Mitzvah in the city of Jerusalem.”

Why I Moved to Israel (7)

Guest post by Caralee Mahlab Harwood

As a little girl and a young woman, I dreamed of getting married in Jerusalem. Never thought how this would come about as I was growing up in Sharon, MA and San Jose, CA. My dad had moved to Israel in 1950 from Iraq/Iran, and my mom had come to Israel for the year in 1962 to help the young State. They met, married and moved to America. I grew up on stories of their wedding in the not yet finished synagogue at the Givat Ram Campus of the Hebrew University, the cantor showing up after sundown, so their Hebrew anniversary date didn’t correspond to their intended wedding date,  the food rationing and everyone bringing their eggs so the festive wedding meal could be prepared. I just thought that one is supposed to get married in Jerusalem.

I came to Israel for the year to learn Torah after teaching high school math for the year at YULA. I was in the process of becoming an observant Jew. (The hand of HaShem in my becoming observant and making aliyah is another story, only partly.) I didn’t know where the Israel year experience was going to lead me. But, before leaving for the year, I asked my parents if I wanted to make aliyah would they come, too. I was an only child, and I didn’t want to be 10,000 miles away for the rest of their lives. They gave me a great gift, and said yes.

While at Nishmat that first year, we had a class on Eretz Yisrael and lots of classes whose content included the mitzvah of living in Eretz Yisrael. Suffice it to say I ran as far away from these classes as possible. Somehow I found myself organizing the Tu B’Shvat Seder for the Shabbaton in Shalavim. As I was leading the Seder with my friends, I was spouting the ideology of the interconnection and dependency between the Land of Israel, the People of Israel and the Torah of Israel. It was a moment of revelation. I knew which path I wanted to take within the People of Israel.  I knew I wanted to make aliyah, though I had to make sure I was doing it for me because I had just started dating this American guy who wanted to make aliyah. Who knew if he would still be around a year later after I had already made aliyah? Fifteen amazing years later with four scrumptious daughters, we’re building our family in the heart of the Land of Israel amongst our people. By the way, I had that beautiful wedding under the Jerusalem sky.

Evidence of the Temples

Stephen Rosenberg, in an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post, speaks out against Arab propaganda which claims that there was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. He points to the Arch of Titus, which depicts the menorah being carried away from Jerusalem, as an important source for the existence of the Second Temple.

Further evidence of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in antiquity was recently discovered near the Old City Zion Gate. The inscribed stone vessel is proof of maintenance of temple purity. Because stone cannot become impure, stone vessels were popular during the Second Temple period.

And, as mentioned before on this blog, the Muslim Supreme Council used to advertise the Temple Mount as the place where Solomon’s temple once stood! In addition, the Arab name for Jerusalem, Al-Quds, is an abbreviation of Madinat Bayt al-Maqdis, the city of the temple.

Rosenberg is correct when he writes that “nothing could be clearer” than the existence of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

Tisha B’Av, A Day of Mourning

During the Israelite’s sojourn in the desert, Moses sent spies to the Land of Israel so that they could report on the situation there and give the Israelites the opportunity to form a strategy for the conquest of the land. Twelve spies were sent to Israel and ten of them reported that the people living in the land were too strong and their cities fortified well and that the Israelites would be destroyed as soon as they attempted to enter the land. The people believed the ten spies and cried.

The Talmud (Taanit 30b) recounts that this event took place on the ninth of Av and that God declared that since the Israelites cried for nothing, the ninth of Av would become a day of crying for all history. The ninth of Av (which falls out on Thursday, July 30 this year) was the day of the destruction of the First and Second Temples and is a day of mourning and fasting until today.

According to the Book of Numbers, the punishment for the sin of the spies was that the Israelites were forced to wander in the desert for 40 years before entering the Land of Israel. Forty years and the destruction of two temples is a pretty harsh punishment. Why did this sin in particular warrant such a harsh punishment?

Rashi explains that the punishment for the sin of the spies was a cumulative punishment which also included the punishment for the sin of the Golden Calf. In order to understand the punishment, it is first necessary to understand the sin. The sin of the spies seems to have been problematic in two ways. First, the Israelites demonstrated a lack of faith in God’s promise to give them the Land of Israel. Secondly, they did not show love for the Land of Israel, instead looking for ways to criticize it. (In today’s world, people who leave the Diaspora to come to Israel to live must take a big leap of faith and have an ingrained love of the country. Things haven’t changed much.) The sin of the Golden Calf showed a lack of understanding of the proper way to worship God — directly and not through any physical manifestation.

So what do these two sins have in common? Both of them show the lack of understanding of the role of the physical in the lives of Jews. The creation of the Golden Calf was an attempt to bring the physical into a place where it did not belong. The sin of the spies was a misunderstanding of the role of a physical place (Israel) in Jewish life. Life in the desert, centered entirely around spirituality, is not in fact the ideal. Life in Israel, with all its physical and material challenges, is.

Why is that?

The role of the Jewish people in the world is to sanctify the physical. This is accomplished by living in Israel — a physical place — and making it holy by keeping the Torah. It is also accomplished by engaging with the outside world, professionally and culturally, while still leading a life committed to the Torah. A person who immerses himself completely in spirituality while ignoring the outside world is not reaching his full potential. The Torah is called a Living Torah , because Torah should pervade every part of life.

Holiness of a physical place is an important value in Judaism. Israel is considered to be the holiest country, with Jerusalem as its holiest city. The Temple Mount is holier than Jerusalem, then the Temple itself, and then the holiest place of all — the Holy of Holies, considered to be the gateway to heaven.

Settlement in the Land of Israel, either in the time of Joshua or today, is important because the Torah can be kept in full only in the holiest land. Even in a desert (literal or figurative) one cannot reach the spiritual height reachable in the Land of Israel.

The Temple in Jerusalem is the ultimate place where the physical is infused with the spiritual. Much has been written about how to reconcile the idea of animal sacrifice with modern mores. However, it is clear that the sacrifices are a way of taking the most mundane physical item and imbuing it with spirituality so that it becomes an act of prayer.

Before the destruction of the Temples, the Jews lost touch with the meaning of the Temple. Prior to the destruction of the First Temple, the Jews sinned by allowing their physical side to take over and ignoring the spiritual altogether. They sinned by engaging in idol worship, murder and illicit sexual relations. The Second Temple was destroyed because of baseless hate. The story of Kamza and Bar-Kamza recounted in the Talmud (Gittin 55) is a story where the attempt to be more religious than the next guy caused great harm to a person’s feelings. The Talmud relates that this incident set off a train of events which eventually led to the destruction of the Temple.

Punishment is often about more than teaching somebody a lesson. Sometimes it is an expression of reality. The Israelites in the desert demonstrated their lack of readiness to take on life in the real world just yet. Although Israel became a nation during the exodus from Egypt, it had not understood how to live a life which combines the physical and the spiritual and imbues the physical with spirituality. It took 40 years of wandering in the desert to reach that point.

So too, when the Jews living in Israel forgot this important value they were no longer deserving of the existence of the Temple. Since they had abandoned the Temple and its core value it was destroyed. The challenge of Jews in today’s world is to try to bring back that important value, by bringing holiness into every aspect of daily life.

City of David: The Movie

Israel Antiquities Authority has posted a video about the City of David excavations guided and narrated by Prof. Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron. Did you know the City of David has been under excavation for 150 years? Reich and Shukron stand in the shafts and channels and explain what they were used for in ancient times. The quality is great and the narration is concise yet complete.

Is Peace Possible in the Middle East?

Khaled Abu Toameh is an Arab journalist working for the Jerusalem Post. During the Gaza War he gave a fascinating talk about the way the Palestinian political system works. Last week he spoke to journalists in Toronto.

From National Post:

He believes the so-called “peace process,” begun with the Oslo Accords of 1993, has been a tragic failure and holds little promise of success. Over 16 years, the peace process has brought war — and plenty of it. It has disillusioned both Arabs and Jews — Arabs because they haven’t acquired the independence and honest self-government they wanted, Jews because security has become more elusive than it was two decades ago. Even so, the United States and others believe the virtue of the peace process is self-evident.

The solution? According to Abu Toameh:

Israel should simply wait until the Palestinians stop killing each other and create a credible political entity that can make a deal. Peace will then become possible.

Does Israel Need the Diaspora?

According to Michael Oren:

Israel needs the political and economic support of American Jewry, and American Jewry increasingly needs the spiritual infusion of the Jewish state. … In recent years, we have found that a 10-day visit to the state of Israel by American Jewish youth does more for Jewish identity than seven years in Hebrew school. In fact, seven years in Hebrew school, as one poll shows, does some damage to Jewish identity.

If all of American Jewry picked up and moved to Israel tomorrow, would Israel still need a strong Jewish lobby in the American government? Is it really true that American Jews are more useful to Israel in the US than they would be in Israel? Do you agree or disagree with Michael Oren?