The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount by Gershom Gorenberg

Author:Gershom Gorenberg [Gorenberg, Gershom]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2001-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

SIX CONSTRUCTION WORKERS OF THE LORD

—D. H. LAWRENCE, “The Old Idea of Sacrifice”

The old idea of sacrifice was this: that blood of the lower life must be shed for the feeding and strengthening of the handsome, fuller life.

AYOUNG MAN CARRIES A YOUNGER GOAT. He cradles it in his arms—a small, brown, gently bleating, long-faced beast. The goat’s got no idea what’s coming.

We’re standing on a hilltop behind Abu Tor, a Jerusalem neighborhood where artsy couples with comfortable cash flows have moved into sixty-year-old stone houses with arched windows and have redone the insides with lofts and oak bookshelves. The blood-red anemones of spring are sprinkled between weeds and broken hunks of concrete dumped here by a gentrifier’s contractor. Look out through the solar panels on the roofs, and on the next hilltop northward the big sunrise-gold Dome shimmers over the Old City wall. A flock of children, the girls in flowered dresses, the boys wearing baggy corduroy pants and checked shirts and wide skullcaps, skims over the weeds and rocks, oblivious to the cameramen shouldering raven-black cameras and the soundmen with boom mikes next to the strange metal structure that looks like a rust-colored water heater on legs and is actually a custom-built oven for roasting an animal sacrifice.

Besides journalists, there are a couple of dozen adults and as many children. It’s noonish; the holiday of Passover begins at sunset; and nearly everyone in the country, especially anyone religious, is in the fine-tuned panic that comes before the annual clan feast. To be here you have to believe that when you sit tonight in your living room with once-a-year silver on the table and recite the story of how the Israelites left slavery for freedom, the festival is a broken imitation of what it should be because the blood of your family’s lamb or kid wasn’t dashed on the altar today.

The goat is on the ground with its legs tied. Yehudah Etzion and another man hold it down. A few children run off, yelling, “I don’t want to see.” Others push to get a good view. The slaughterer has a two-foot-long knife; he recites a blessing and makes a quick motion and the goat gives one dark low bleat. “May it be Your will that we will one day be privileged to slaughter it in its place, in the sanctuary, next to the altar,” Etzion pronounces.

The goat’s blood gathers in a burgundy puddle. The slaughterer slits its belly from the gonads up to its head. Boys lean over him, watching. One says, “Dad, is he still alive?” A girl, much smaller, has a quicker grasp. “It’s not nice, Mommy,” she says.

Off to one side stands Gershon Salomon, silver-haired, face shaved glass-smooth except for his full mustache. His hand rests on his cane, reminder of the injury he suffered decades ago in a skirmish with Syrian forces. Salomon, leader of the Temple Mount Faithful, the man best known for publicly demanding that the Muslims be thrown out of the sacred site, isn’t looking at the goat.

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