[Avodah] Har Habayit

[Daniel Israel]

On Thu, 07 Jun 2007 01:43:59 -0600 Yisrael Medad 
<yisrael.medad at gmail.com> wrote:
>The main opposition from a Halachic point of view is the 
possibility of
>karet in entering certain areas within the present-day compound.  
If
>karet is the threat, RYA said, and we shouldn't do anything to 
>investigate, to review the literature, discuss with arceologists, 
etc., 
>according to this approach, then what are we do about getting 
married?  
>There are so many karet issues, down to a mustard-colored drop of 
blood 
>(or not as the case may be), that this should put us off from 
getting 
>entangled in the possibility of violating a lo ta'aseh which 
carries 
>the karet weight of punishment not to mention other issues which 
>marriage presents troubles for.  But no one says 'don't get into 
any 
>doubt'.  But with Har Habayit, they all do say that.

Three responses.

1) With TM we have a continuous mesorah on how to handle these 
issues.  WRT Har Habayis we do not.

2) The investigation he is talking about all involves non-halachic 
sources.  There does not appear to be any way to figure out the 
metzius of the various parts of Har Habayis from looking at our 
mesorah, one has to use non-halachic sources like archeology.  
True, in TM we sometimes rely on doctors, but we have clear 
halachic sources to tell us what we can and cannot rely on doctors 
for.  I don't think we have any clear mesorah to tell us what we 
can rely on archeologists for.

3) If marriage would cease, so would the Jewish people.  Perhaps if 
the issue at hand was geulah shleimah and rebuilding the Bh"M, one 
might argue that this is the same as marriage, because in either 
case we are talking about stopping klal Yisrael from fulfilling 
it's ultimate purpose.  But in that case we would have a Sanhedrin 
and a Moshiach to help answer the questions.  Here we are talking 
about walking around up there and davening.  Not even korbonos 
according to almost everyone.

--
Daniel M. Israel
dmi1 at cornell.edu