Will the Third Temple Survive its 75th Year?
The First Temple lasted about 400 years, the Second Temple held for 600 years, and the Third Temple—if modern Israel may assume that name—is dangerously close to kicking the bucket at 75 years. Only this time there is no Assyria to whisk ancient Israelites into oblivion, no Babylon to herd Judeans into exile, and no Rome to extinguish Jewish sovereignty for two millennia. Today—much as Iran would have liked to be our latter-day vanquisher—the Jewish state is demolishing itself from within.
The build-up began, perhaps, when Menachem Begin won by a landslide in 1977 by riding the hostility of Mizrahi “Second Israel” against the largely Ashkenazi “First Israel.” During the four following decades Israel’s fragile web of coexistences was politicized and crudely mishandled. Since the late 2000s, feeding on the outgrowth of commercial news channels and...
