Q&A: The Western Wall of the Temple Is Never Destroyed
The Western Wall of the Temple Is Never Destroyed
Question
It is written in the midrash: “Behold, he stands behind our wall” — behind the western wall of the Temple. Why? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, swore to it that it would never be destroyed” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 2:9).
A. Where did our sages know this from? After all, after the destruction of the Temple, prophecy was taken from the sages.
B. The western wall of the Temple was in fact destroyed, and it is not standing today on the Temple Mount.
Thank you
Answer
First of all, I have no idea. Second, as far as I know, the western wall is indeed still standing.
As for your actual question, I assume this midrash was said after the destruction, so the survival of the wall was already a fact by then. In my estimation, the risk in saying that it would continue to stand in the future is not all that far-reaching.
Natan means that this is not the wall of the Temple courtyard, but rather the western wall of the entire Temple Mount — of the whole enclosure that surrounded the Temple. That’s a well-known claim of deniers.
I didn’t really understand the difficulty. “Temple” is a general name for the entire Temple Mount, and “the western wall” means the outer western wall of the Temple Mount. The sages in the midrash were referring to that too…
That argument begs the question: first the person presenting it assumes that the wall they were talking about must be a wall of the Temple building itself, and then attacks that claim. (In English, by the way, there’s actually a precise term for this that I haven’t encountered in Hebrew: literalism fallacy.)