I’ve listened to Muslim sheikhs explain how verses in the Koran foretell Israel’s destruction, and to American evangelical ministers who insist on their deep love for Israel and nevertheless eagerly await apocalyptic battles on Israel’s soil so terrible that the dry river beds will, they predict, fill with rivers of blood. I also came to realize that the center of my story had to be the Temple Mount. What happens at that one spot, more than anywhere else, quickens expectations of the End in three religions. And at that spot, the danger of provoking catastrophe is greatest. [...]
Melody, the cow that could have brought God’s kingdom on earth, or set the entire Middle East ablaze, or both, depending on who you ask, has her head stuck between the gray bars of the cowshed and is munching hay and corncobs. [...]
Melody’s birth in August 1996 seemed to defy nature: Her mother was a black and white Holstein. In fact, [Gilad Jubi, dairyman of the Kfar Hasidim agricultural school] says he’d had trouble breeding the dairy cow, and finally imported semen, from Switzerland, he thinks, from a red breed of beef cattle. But “red” cows are normally splotched. An entirely crimson one is extraordinary: The Mishneh Torah, Moses Maimonides twelfth-century code of Jewish law, records that just nine cows in history have fit the Book of Numbers’ requirements for sacrificing as a “red heifer.” Yet the rare offering was essential to maintaining worship in the Temple in Jerusalem. The tenth cow, Maimonides asserts, will arrive in the time of the messiah. That’s when Jewish tradition foresees the Third Temple being built on the Temple Mount. [...]
Finding a red heifer is one precondition to building the Temple. Another, it’s generally assumed, is removing the Dome of the Rock from the Temple Mount. [...]
The next day, a newspaper broke the story. [Adir Zik, an announcer on the settlers pirate radio station known for his fiery rhetoric] spoke about the red heifer on his radio show. The madness about Melody had begun. [...] Press photographers arrived. The rabbi, sans calf, appeared on national TV. The Boston Globe’s man did a story, and other American correspondents followed. … A CNN crew made a pilgrimage to the red heifer, as did crews from ABC and CBS, and from Japan, Holland, France.
If much of the world’s media reported on Melody in a bemused tone, as a story about the strange things people believe, not everyone saw the cow as a joke. On the opinion page of the influential Israeli daily Ha’aretz, columnist David Landau argued that the security services should see the red heifer as a “four-legged bomb” potentially more dangerous than any terrorist. Landau… understood the expectations of building the Temple that the cow could inspire among Jewish religious nationalists, and its potential for inciting war with the Muslim world. “A bullet in the head,” he wrote, “is, according to the best traditions, the solution of security services in such cases…”
Too shrill? As Landau alluded, the nameless agents of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security force, caught off guard by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, had underestimated the power of faith in the past. At Kfar Hasidim, Melody was moved from the cowshed to “solitary confinement” in the school’s petting zoo, where she could be kept slightly safer from the visitors arriving daily. A dog was posted to guard her. It couldn’t guard against sprouting white hairs. [Which Melody did, disqualifying her and saving her from being turned into cow toast.]
Unquestionably, the reactions to Melody seem bizarre. But there are three very solid reasons for the fears and hopes she engendered: the past, the present, and most of all the future.
Numbers 19 is one of the most opaque sections in scripture. A red heifer, “faultless, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came a yoke,” is to be slaughtered, and its body burned entirely to ash. Paradoxically, this sacrifice must be performed outside the Temple, yet the heifer’s ash becomes the key to the sanctuary: It alone can cleanse a man or woman tainted by contact with human death.
For, says the biblical text, anyone who touches a corpse, or bone, or grave, anyone who even enters the same room as a dead body, is rendered impure, and must not enter the Temple. Yet proximity to death is an unavoidable part of life, and sacrifice was how Israelites served God. So to free a person of impurity, says Numbers, mix the heifer’s cinder with water, and sprinkle the mixture on him. As Jewish tradition read those verses, the heifer really had to be faultless. Two white hairs would disqualify it. The rarest possible beast was essential to purify a priest who’d attended his own father’s burial, or to allow any Israelite who’d been in the presence of a corpse to share in the sacrificial cult. [...]
The last ashes of the last red heifer ran out sometime after the Romans razed the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70. Every Jew became impure by reason of presumed contact with death which, practically speaking, didn’t matter much because there was no sanctuary to enter and sacrifice had ceased being the center of Judaism. The tenth heifer logically belonged to the imagined time of the messiah because a rebuilt temple also did.
Except that today, the absent ashes of the red heifer have a new function. They are a crucial factor in the political and strategic balance of the Middle East.
Over nineteen hundred years have passed since the Temple’s destruction, but its location – give or take a few crucial meters – is still a hard physical reality. [...] In principle, Temple Mount remains the most sacred site in Judaism. [...]
But the Mount itself isn’t in ruins. As Al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, it is the third-holiest site in Islam. [...] A glance at the Mount testifies that any effort to build the Temple where it once stood – the one place where Jewish tradition says it can be built again – would mean removing shrines sacred to hundreds of millions of Muslims, from Morocco to Indonesia. An attempt to dedicate even a piece of the enclosure to Jewish prayer would mean slicing that piece out of the Islamic precincts.
On June 7, 1967, the third day of the Six-Day War, Israeli troops took East Jerusalem, bringing the Temple Mount under Jewish rule for the first time in almost 2,000 years. Israel’s leaders decided to leave the Mount, Al-Haram al-Sharif, in Muslim hands. The decision kept the ingredients for holy war apart, just barely. [...]
Yet a separation made by the civil government would not have worked without a hand from Jewish religious authorities. From the Six-Day War on, Israel’s leading rabbis have overwhelmingly ruled that Jews should not enter the gates of the Mount. One of the most commonly cited reasons … is that under religious law, every Jew is presumed to have had contact with the dead. For lack of a red heifer’s ashes, there is simply nothing to be done about it: no way for Jews to purify themselves to enter the sacred square, no way for Judaism to reclaim the Mount, no way to rebuild the Temple. Government officials and military leaders could only regard the requirement for the missing heifer as a stroke of sheer good fortune preventing conflict over the Mount. [...]
In 1984, the Shin Bet stumbled onto the Jewish settler underground’s plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock. One of the group’s leaders explained that among the “spiritual difficulties” that kept them from carrying out the attack was that it is forbidden to enter the Temple Mount because of impurity caused by contact with the dead – that is, they lacked the ash of a red heifer. In a verdict in the case, one judge wrote that if the plan had been carried out, it would have “exposed the State of Israel and the entire Jewish people to a new Holocaust.”
The danger hasn’t gone away: The Temple Mount is potentially a detonator of full-scale war, and a few people trying to rush the End could set it off. [Gorenberg]
I thought the whole thing was absurd and these people surely must be crazy! I was assured that this was "serious business". Lo and behold, a short time later, after checking the cow with a magnifying glass, they unfortunately (or fortunately) found one single white hair and the Jews still didn't have a red heifer. 
