Levites Returning To The Temple Mount As They Did In Chanukah

KaYamim HaHeim KaZman HaZeh

Like in those days, so in our time.

The Temple Mount was the center of the Chanukah story just as it remains our center in the Land today. And that is because it unites the two miracles of Chanukah. And the initiative I mention below proves that. 

The first miracle is military victory achieving political autonomy. We went through years of oppression and religious intolerance that ended in mass pogroms for failure to comply with the Syrian-Greek religious code. And so we celebrate the victory of ‘the few against the many.’ 

In many ways we parallel that today with our modern state of Israel. Our state was meant to put an end to our persecution and grant us freedom to live out our identity in peace. Yet despite our autonomy, vile terror attacks like the one we saw yesterday in Bondi Beach, Australia remind us that we are not finished yet. That terror attack left the Australian Jewish communities questioning their safety, it left Israelis questioning the reach of their own state and it left the whole world in shock. 

It begs the question: What are we missing?

That is the place of that second miracle of Channuka, the oil for the Menorah. The Maccabees did not stop at autonomy. They carried on to the holy place of Judaism. ‘Afterwards they came to the Holy of Your Sanctuary, and they cleaned Your halls, and they purified your Temple, and then they lit the candles in the courtyard of Your Holyness,’ goes the ancient prayer of Channuka. They rededicated the entire Temple Mount as per the vision of Judaism. They saw it as their very identity; the reason for why all those evils befell them in the first place. 

Today we have achieved autonomy with no Holy Temple Mount. The Temple Mount may physically reside within Israeli sovereign borders, it may even legally belong under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Police, but we are far from our complete Chanukah miracle. 

But our Chanukah story teaches us that we can rectify. Instead of conceding to simply cry over its destruction we can do as Judah Maccabee did and move to fix it. 

And I find it so fitting that some of the first sparks of light coming from the place of our Temple come from the Levites. Leviim are those Jews who continue their family heritage as part of the Levitical tribe. This tribe has always been tasked with the Temple service. Part of this service is the choral service accompanying the various rites done in the Temple in Jerusalem. Recently a Kehila community of these Levites has come together to train and sing where their Biblical ancestors once had. 

One of these Levites hails from Bondi Beach and dedicated a Chanukah song prayer on the Temple Mount in memory of those murdered during the attack. Like in those days, so in our time. 

And we would like to invite all those of Levitical descent to join our community and to work on future projects bringing the light of the Temple to the world.

Let us hope to see an end to the suffering and the building of the Temple in Jerusalem to be a ‘House of Prayer for all the nations.’