The Temple Mount This Morning: Tisha B'Av 2026

The house was quiet when I woke the children. My four older boys came down the stairs one by one, and my eldest daughter took her place with us as we loaded into the nine-passenger van in the early light. The roads to Jerusalem were nearly empty. No rush of traffic, no noise. It fit the day.

It is Tisha B'Av, and we are fasting. None of us were hungry yet, but hunger was coming, and we knew it. No food, no water. A heaviness rode with us in the van, the kind of heaviness that belongs to this day above all days, when both the First and Second Temples were destroyed. To set our hearts in the right place, we turned on the audiobook of G.A. Henty's For The Temple and listened to the chapter on the fall of Jerusalem as we climbed toward the city. Hearing the siege described while the Judean hills rolled past our windows, it was hard not to feel that we were driving into the story itself.

We parked at the Mamilla Mall and walked the half mile through the Jaffa Gate and down through the Old City toward the Western Wall. It was around eight o'clock, still early enough that the morning shadows lay long across the stone paths and the air held the last of its coolness before the summer heat took over. The streets were not busy, but they were not empty either. A steady trickle of people moved toward the Wall, and others were already returning from the Temple Mount. Some were visibly sorrowful. Every Jewish person we passed was either barefoot or wearing canvas and rubber, no leather on their feet, a traditional sign of mourning. Everyone was plainclothed. Today is not a day for finery.

At the entrance to the Temple Mount, the outer line was short, but once we passed through security we found a couple hundred people packed inside, waiting to ascend. Just past the checkpoint, two American Jews spotted us and kindly offered, "If you guys are tourists, you can go on past the Jewish group."

I smiled and explained. We are not Jewish, but we are not tourists either. We are Christian Zionists and lovers of Israel, and we have been going up to the Mount for fifteen years. We always ascend with the Jewish group, on purpose. We want to walk the same route they walk, sanctifying the ground as they do, and we want to pray together with them. For the rebuilding of the Temple. For peace in Jerusalem and in the world. For Mount Moriah to become what God always intended it to be, a house of prayer for all nations.

Their eyes widened. So we talked about where we came from, and about the last ten years living here in the land. About HaYovel and the more than three thousand volunteers who have come from over thirty nations to serve Israel's farmers. About Israel Lighthouse, the educational ministry we have launched to teach Christians the biblical case for standing with Israel, to give believers what they need to answer the Tucker Carlson-style theologies creeping into even conservative Christian circles. They were genuinely moved. "Thank you for what you're doing," they said, and I could tell they meant it.

And then, still standing in that crowded waiting area, something happened that stitched us into the day even deeper. Familiar faces. There in the press of people, I got a quick handshake and smile from my friend Eli from Shilo, whose wife shapes the pottery vessels being prepared for the day the Temple is rebuilt. As is the mourning custom of Tisha B’Av, he didn’t say the usual “shalom,” which would imply that we were whole on a day where we acknowledge our one massive deficit. Moments earlier we had been mistaken for tourists. Now we were exchanging nods and handshakes with people who know exactly who we are. They know we get it. They know that we too ache to see God's house standing on this mountain again. In a sea of strangers, those few faces reminded us that we were not visitors passing through someone else's story, and in our own special way, we belong here.

Then we made our way up the narrow wooden ramp, four or five feet wide, toward the Hallel Gate. And there on that rampway I felt the strange double heartbeat of this day. Some around us were quietly mourning, heads bowed, mouths moving in lament for the house we lost. Others were singing songs about the Temple being rebuilt. Sobriety and exuberance, side by side on the same boards. Grief for what was destroyed, and irrepressible joy that the Jewish people are home, that the land is blooming again, that we can even stand in this line at all. Everyone fasting, everyone subdued in body, and yet some of the young men could not keep their feet still. They danced anyway.

That clash of emotions only intensified on the Mount itself. We walked the ancient circuit, and when we came around to the eastern side, facing the place of God's house, everyone went down. We bowed with our faces to the ground. Then the Shacharit prayers began, the morning prayers rising over the courtyard on the very hill where the Levitical choirs once led a nation in worship.

As we prayed, Knesset Member Itamar Ben Gvir arrived and joined in, and there was something significant about praying the morning prayers on the Temple Mount alongside a member of Israel's government on the day of mourning for the Temple. But the moment that undid me came in the middle of those prayers, when a kohen lifted his hands and prayed the Aaronic blessing over us all. The same words that once rolled off priestly lips in the Temple courts, spoken again by a son of Aaron, on the mountain itself, over Jews and Gentiles standing shoulder to shoulder. “Yeverechecha Adonai v’yishmerecha - The Lord bless you and keep you.” For a few seconds the centuries folded up like a scroll, and we were standing inside a picture of exactly what this place is meant to be.

And then, further along the circuit, I saw him. Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, one of the paratroopers who came through the gates in 1967 and returned the Old City and the Temple Mount to Jewish hands, and one of the earliest pioneers of Temple Mount awareness in our generation. To stand on the Mount with him, on Tisha B'Av, was an honor I will not forget. At one point, everyone gathered close around him. He lifted his hands over us and blessed us, praying that we would all merit to see the Temple rebuilt, the exiles returned, and the nations streaming up after them, so that this place would truly become a house of prayer for all nations. It was a powerful moment, and it landed powerfully on every heart standing there.

We walked on and paused at the spot on the western side that stands closest to where the Temple itself stood, and I gathered the children for a picture. Then, about fifty yards from the exit gate, we did what we always do. We turned to face the place of the Temple and walked backward toward the gate, refusing to turn our backs on the holiness of that ground. This is the place where the cloud of glory once descended so thick that the priests could not even stand to minister. Doing that small physical act, walking backward with your eyes fixed on the site, presses the reality into your soul. This is not a museum. This is the place.

Walking backward off that mountain spurred a question within me: what are we missing? I believe we truly have no idea. To have God's tangible presence dwelling on the earth, in a literal, physical, overwhelming way, would impact us more than we could ever dream. We have never known it, so we cannot properly grieve it. But today, at least, we try. Today we mourn with Israel for the day God's house was broken down.

Even our Messiah shows us what this mourning is for. When Yeshua drove the money changers out of the Temple courts, he was clearing the Court of the Gentiles, the very space where the nations were meant to come and pray. "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations," he declared, and his disciples remembered the words, "Zeal for Your house has consumed me." And in Zechariah 8, God says of Zion, "I am zealous for her with great zeal." Fervently, burningly zealous for this specific place on the earth.

That is my prayer coming down from the Mount today, with a dry mouth and a full heart. That Christians everywhere would gain God's heart for this geographical location and for what it is destined to become. That we would learn to mourn what was lost and labor toward what is promised. That we would look forward with clear vision, and work forward with zealous passion, until Mount Moriah is what the prophets saw and Yeshua proclaimed.

A house of prayer for all nations. May we merit to see it in our days!