Find favor, Lord our God, in your people Israel and their prayer.

Restore the service to your most holy house and accept in love and favor the fire offerings of Israel and their prayer.

May the service of your people Israel always find favor with you.

So reads the Amidah, a part of Jewish liturgy that observant Jews recite three times each day,

and on Shabbat and special occasions four times.

That means that in a normal week, just on the basis of

these lines, traditionally observant Jews beseech God that the temple and its services be restored

in Jerusalem no less than 19 times, almost a thousand times a year. A Jew petitions God for the

restoration of the temple in Jerusalem. From 1948 to 1967, the Temple Mount, and indeed all of the old city of Jerusalem, were controlled

by Jordan, and Jews were prohibited from worshiping there.

In 1967, as Israel's military forces reunited Jerusalem, Motagur, the brigade commander who led

the assault on the city, could be heard

radioing back to headquarters, Hal Hibayyid Be Yadainu. The temple mount is in our hands. At that moment,

rabbinic, political, and military decisions needed to be made about what to do with Judaism's

holiest place, the central geographical focus of Jewish prayer,

the very location that Jews around the world for millennia had dreamed to recover.

Well, today, in the Jewish state, Israeli regulations insist that the temple mount is off

limits for Jewish prayer. Why does Israel discriminate against its own Jewish citizens in this way? Why,

despite official prohibitions, are more and more Jews venturing onto the Temple Mount to pray? Why

does the Temple Mount remain such a fixture in the religious imagination of the Jewish people?

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest this week is the rabbi and historian,

the Bariland University professor Jeffrey Wolfe. Together, we traverse an enormous amount of ground,

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