Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] When the Jews were in the desert, they were told by God to build a Mishkan, which was their portable temple.
[00:00:11] And for 40 years, while Jews were wandering through the desert, they had this portable temple with them.
[00:00:19] Now they are arriving to the land of Israel, and they still have this portable temple with them.
[00:00:25] And this portable temple was used by them for about 400 years.
[00:00:32] And then when Jews come to the land of Israel, they have this temple in several places. But most of the years, it was in the city of Shiloh, or in Anglicized pronunciation, it's Shiloh, the city of Shiloh, which was the capital of Israel before the times of King David.
[00:00:52] Then King David builds Jerusalem and his son, King Solomon, builds the first temple.
[00:01:00] And the first temple is standing again for about 400 years, close to five.
[00:01:08] And it is destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.
[00:01:15] And Jews were taken captive into Babylonia, where they were in exile for 70 years.
[00:01:23] But while they were in exile there, Babylonia was captured by the Persians.
[00:01:28] So Jews, even though their original captors were Babylonians, now Jews were living in Persia.
[00:01:37] And as it was predicted, after 70 years of living in that area, the Persian king, Darius Dario in Hebrew is allowing Jews to rebuild the temple.
[00:01:51] And Jews are coming back to Israel to rebuild the temple under the auspices of two great sages, Ezra and Nehemia.
[00:01:59] It wasn't going so smoothly. They had some issues from some local population. Because while jews were for 70 years somewhere else, the local population there, Samaritans started feeling quite at home and started believing that they are the rightful owners of this land. So when Jews came back, they were not welcomed very nicely. And Samaritans were trying to sabotage the construction of the Temple, but Jews were still able to do it. And Jews built our second temple.
[00:02:32] And the second temple was standing for about 500 years.
[00:02:36] And then it was destroyed by the Romans towards the end of the era of the second Temple. This is when the Romans already conquered the land of Israel. And this is when you had the story of Hanukkah take place and the story of Bethar.
[00:02:57] And then the Temple was destroyed by the Romans.
[00:03:02] And the Romans made sure not only to destroy the temple, but they also plowed the land where the Temple was.
[00:03:11] They wanted to make sure there's going to be nothing left of it, and they wanted to destroy every last piece of it.
[00:03:18] But a rabbi approached them and said, well, if you will destroy every last piece of the Temple, that nobody will know what you've destroyed. Nobody will be able to appreciate what was here before. And this is why they left one wall standing, which is now known as the Western Wall.
[00:03:36] And Romans at that time also expelled Jews from the land of Israel.
[00:03:42] But what they understood land of Israel was only the area of Jerusalem, central Israel of today.
[00:03:48] Jews have continuously always been living in northern Israel. When my daughters were in a seminary in Tzfat, which is in the north, they visited a family that has been living in their house for past 2000 plus years.
[00:04:05] Their family never moved out of there.
[00:04:07] The building is still there. So in the north of Israel, Jews have always lived, but in the area of Jerusalem. This is when Romans did not allow Jews to live for a while. And the Romans also were the ones who renamed the land of Israel to Palestine. And the reason why they did that was because they knew that Plishtim, which is Hebrew for Palestine. Palestinians who back then were living in the Gaza Strip area, they were an African tribe.
[00:04:41] They were not Semites. They were, they were Africans, you see, they were not Semites. That's why they were anti Semites.
[00:04:49] These Palestinians were always causing trouble for the Jews.
[00:04:53] They were always attacking them and pestering them and trying to cause them all kind of.
[00:05:00] So just to demoralize Jews, the Romans have renamed land of Israel to Palestine. Just to imply that these Palestinians who have been always enemies of the Jews, have now conquered this territory. In the meantime, those Palestinians have been already gone long, long time ago.
[00:05:19] The people who are called Palestinians today are Arabs. They are Semites, just like us Jews. By no stretch of imagination one can possibly claim that they are the descendants of those Palestinians.
[00:05:32] But this is what happened after the second Temple was destroyed.
[00:05:36] And now we are waiting for Mashiach Messiah to come and to rebuild the third Temple.
[00:05:43] And it says that the third Temple is already going to be everlasting. It will never be destroyed.
[00:05:49] And by the way, when Temple was destroyed, the Jewish sages were able to hide its vessels in tunnels under the Temple Mount.
[00:06:00] When King Solomon Shlomo Hamelech built the temple, he also built tunnels under it. Because God told him that one day temple will be destroyed. And he built those tunnels to hide.
