The End of Days

Bid the players make haste.

-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III

The crowd overflows the rectangular prayer area next to the Western Wall, filling the wide plaza behind, tens of thousands of men and women holding the hands of small children, and more keep pouring through the metal detectors at the entrance. The men grasp long palm fronds, making the plaza look as if an oasis grove had uprooted itself from the desert and come on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It's the autumn festival of Sukkot, and the fronds are for waving in celebration of God's life-giving.

Four guys with scruffy late-adolescent beards sit below the ramp that leads to Mughrabi Gate, waiting for Gershon Salomon. Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, is one of several times of year when Salomon marches up the ramp with his Temple Mount Faithful, demands to enter the sacred precincts, and calls for replacing the Islamic shrines with the Third Temple. Standard turnout is around two dozen--aging ultranationalists alongside a few activists left over from Meir Kahane's Kach movement and some teens from the fringe of religious Zionism. The myriads of Jews, to Salomon's outraged incomprehension, prefer to make pilgrimage to the Wall.

Though the Temple movement has grown, Jewish support for Salomon has faded. The extreme nationalism of soil, myth and messianism no longer grabs Israeli secularists. Though Salomon now wears the skullcap of a religious Jew, he's still perceived in the Temple movement as a secularist, and "Orthodox Jews don't want to join an organization led by a person who's not religious," as one ex-ally says. When one of Salomon's grey-haired followers stands at the Wall plaza, shouting through a bullhorn at holiday worshippers to take the Mount from the Muslims, ultra-Orthodox men gather around to argue theology. "Until the messiah comes, it's forbidden to go up there," roars a yeshivah student. "You're standing in the messiah's way," Salomon's man yells. "You think this is redemption? Redemption is when you and I overcome our evil impulses."

Continued on page 2: »