Perhaps it is heretical, and perhaps an artifact of my own ignorance and misunderstanding…
G-D allowed the First Temple to be destroyed.
A Second Temple was built, but destroyed a relatively short time later. G-d did nothing to stop this.
After that (if I remember the sequence correctly), first a Pagan Roman temple was built on the ruins, then Christians tore down that temple and built on the ruins, then the Muslims tore down that and built Al Aqsa on the rubble.
I’m beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, G-d does not want the Temple to be rebuilt? Because not only was the Second Temple allowed to be desecrated in a very horrific manner, but the whole build-crush-rebuild thing smells of overkill.
Or is it just me and this idea has never been proposed in Jewish thought?
Not officially, but I’m sure plenty of Jews have thought “So this Temple… is it going to be Orthodox, Conservative or Reform?”
Personally, as a Jew I’m not that crazy about the concept of a Third Temple. We’ve evolved a lot as a religion in the past 2000 years or so, and attempting to restore the old forms of worship would be, IMHO, a huge step backwards.
The idea reminds me of the the rabbis in Auschwitz who put God on trial and found him guilty of basically shitting the cosmic bed for allowing the holocaust to happen. After they found him guilty, they said evening prayers.
In other words, God’s motivations in allowing or not allowing something to happen aren’t super relevant to our day-to-day as Jews.
As a reconstructionist Jew, I agree wholeheartedly with this. Letting the religion evolve is kind of our whole bag.
As a Schroedinger Jew, I look at the whole Bible/history thing and it occurs to me that the G-D of the Jews changes His mind from time to time as to how things should be. For awhile the Jews wandered around with no fixed home. Then they settle in one place and centralized on the Temple. Then, after the destruction of the Second Temple, it was back to wandering around again. Should they restore the centralized Olde Thyme Religion or go further back to the Really Olde Thyme Religion of pre-Temple days?
They are explicit that once the Temple was chosen things change, and that now everyone does what’s right in their own eyes because you haven’t come to the land that God chose, but once you are settled in the land then you can only do it in the place that God chose for it.