The Sanhedrin’s written ruling is dated 6 Menachem Av.

Hold that date for a moment before anything else. Three days before Tisha B’Av. Inside the nine days when we do not build, do not celebrate, do not so much as launder a garment, because we are sitting in the ruins of the thing the court has now ruled must be rebuilt. In those exact days a reconstituted Sanhedrin convened for several hours, passed two resolutions, and asked that the Holy One remove and erase every obstacle so that we may build the Beit HaMikdash.

I want to be careful here, because the impulse is not contemptible. It is the opposite. It takes a certain kind of broken heart to sit in the Nine Days and refuse to sit quietly. Anyone who has said v’techezenah eineinu and meant it knows the feeling that produced this document.

Shinar was also built by people who wanted to be closer to Heaven. That is the part of the story we skip.

The Nine Days are not an accident of scheduling. They are the tradition’s answer to exactly this question. We were told why the House fell and we were told what rebuilds it, and neither answer has ever involved a filing.

What the Ruling Actually Says

Let me state the court’s position fairly, because the weakest version of this critique attacks a decree that was not issued.

The operative formula is careful: “And just as the court below has ruled, so we ask that the court above rule the same, and so may it stand.” That is not a command. The verb is ask. Anyone who characterizes this ruling as ordering God around is misreading the Hebrew and should stop.

And yet. Look at the structure the request is bolted onto. The asking happens only after the ruling happens, and the asking is that Heaven ratify what the court has already determined below. The court is not petitioning as a supplicant. It is petitioning as a lower court transmitting a decision upward with the expectation of affirmation. The premise is that a beit din’s psak has standing in that jurisdiction. A binding ruling ordinarily attaches to someone who must now obey it. This one is addressed upward. That alone should tell us we have left the normal world of halakhah.

That premise is the whole matter. Everything else is detail.

It Is Not in Heaven Means What It Says

“It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up for us to heaven and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?'”

That verse is not consolation. It is a jurisdictional statement. The Torah came down and it stayed down, and it was placed in the mouth and in the heart precisely so that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)