Chabad is nothing if not well-organized. Each year, they release a set of uniform lesson plans to literally hundreds of tiny synagogues, learning groups, and D.I.Y. rabbis, covering holidays, the Jewish life cycle, texts, and other little nuggets of information…basically, it’s like Hebrew School for adults. Or, really, anyone who shows up.
As part of their curriculum for Tisha b’Av and the Three Weeks, a period of time which marks the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Chabad put together some learning about the Temple.
This is not sitting well with some people, according to the Jerusalem Post.
“We view this as a serious and drastic move toward the fruition of extremist organizations to establish a temple in place of al-Aksa Mosque,” said a spokesman for the Islamic Movement (I don’t know if this is a name for a specific organization, or a wider platform, like “the Conservative Movement”). “This represents a real danger to al-Aksa.”
So, uh, they must be learning about how the al-Aksa mosque was, some might say unjustly, constructed on the site of the Temple, and how now, just as unjustly, Jews are only permitted by the Waqf authorities to ascend the Temple Mount a few days a year….right?
Well, no. The JPost article goes on to explain:
The courses, which are being attended by “tens of thousands” of young students, include a “virtual tour” of the Temple Mount and explanations of daily Temple life, as well as the job of the kohanim (priests), [Chabad spokesman Menachem] Brod said.
In contrast to members of the modern Orthodox Zionist rabbinical leadership, Chabad hassidim [sic] do not even ascend the Temple Mount, he said.
Oh, yeah. Knowledge is dangerous.
