On the second day of Rosh Hashanah 5787, September 13, 2026, Jews stood on the eastern side of the Temple Mount and did what the Mishnah says was done when the Temple stood. They prayed facing the place of the House. They opened a service that ran nearly four hours. And they sounded the shofar together with the silver trumpets, the chatzotzerot, the instruments Numbers 10 commands the priests to make.[1][2]

Rabbi Josh Wander, who was there, told Israel365 News that police admitted worshippers in groups of about thirty and, unlike prior years, kept adding groups instead of rushing each one off the Mount.

Organizers counted about 220 in the organized service, the ceiling police then allowed on the site at one time. Across the morning and the day, counts ranged from a few hundred to about six hundred ascents.[1][3] Yishai Fleisher, spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron, described a service of nearly four hours and called it a liberated prayer.

Israel Police later confirmed that those who sounded the shofar were removed and that administrative proceedings were opened. Hebrew reports put the detentions at ten: eight connected to the shofar and trumpets, two for prostrating where police forbade it.[2][4]

That is not the number some retellings have used. I have heard the holiday described as if a hundred Jews were arrested for the lulav and etrog. The record I can verify is smaller and, in its way, sharper. On Rosh Hashanah, about ten were detained after the blasts were allowed to finish.

On Sukkot, Honenu reported that a 23-year-old man was taken to the Kishle station for carrying the Four Species onto the Mount.[5] The Jerusalem Post, writing on Shmini Atzeret, reported that sets of lulav and etrog were brought up quietly and passed from hand to hand, and that more than 1,100 Jews ascended on the first day of Hol HaMoed.[6] The scandal is not a round number.

The scandal is that in the Jewish state, on the mountain the Torah names, a Jew can still be treated as a suspect for holding the species the Mishnah says were carried there.

Mishnah Sukkah 4:4 records that when the first day of Sukkot fell on Shabbat, “they would bring their lulavim to the Temple Mount.” This year the calendar did the same thing. The first day of Sukkot fell on Shabbat. The old page and the new morning met.

The voice above the Wall

Sukkot added a second witness. In an October 1, 2026 conversation on the channel Parsha Inspired, Rabbi Wander described standing on the Mughrabi bridge at sunrise, above the women’s section of the Western Wall, while thousands below had fallen silent for the priestly blessing.[7] Then a blast came from above the plaza.

The crowd did not know its source. Wander reached for the old word: bat kol, the daughter of a voice, the voice from heaven that the sages said remained after prophecy in its fuller form had ceased.[8]

I will not dress a bridge and a shofar in more miracle than the witnesses claimed. A bat kol in the sources is not theater. It is a voice that falls, often to confirm what the court or the people already tremble to say. What matters for this essay is the plain sequence. Silence at the Kotel.

A sound from above the worshippers. Jews on the Mount with lulav in a week when the Torah’s obligation to take the species, outside the Temple, is only the first day, and on the Mount itself is spoken of as binding through the festival.[7] Wander’s point was halakhic before it was dramatic. The Mount changes the weight of the commandment.

Isaiah already wrote the soundtrack. “And it shall be on that day, that a great shofar shall be blown, and those lost in the land of Assyria and those cast out in the land of Egypt shall come, and they shall bow to the Lord on the holy mountain in Jerusalem” (Isaiah 27:13). The Temple Institute has quoted that verse over footage of the shofar on the Mount for a reason. The horn is not a slogan. It is the prophet’s instrument for the scattered.

What my grandfather’s line remembers

I write this as Hazan Gavriel ben David, Archie Lee Hunnicutt Jr., from Amarillo, for Beit HaShoavah. My mother’s father was Luz Ramirez Diaz, of a Nuevo León line that carried hidden Shabbat, a cleaned house before Friday night, and a name the Inquisition did not succeed in erasing. My uncle’s Big Y-700 test at FamilyTreeDNA returned the subclade J-FT235823, nested in the Cohen Modal Haplotype discussion under the older J-Z18271 cluster, with FamilyTreeDNA dating the branch from its parent around 550 BCE, late First Temple into early Second Temple Judea.[9]

The 1997 and 1998 papers in Nature showed that many men with an oral Cohen tradition share a distinctive Y-chromosome signature. A badge on a dashboard is not a court decree that every carrier is a son of Aaron. It is a statistical witness that this line sits inside the priestly cluster the genetics literature has discussed for a generation. On the other side of the family, the Halevi-Lucero memory carries a Levite story.

I have written the longer record on beithashoavah.org. I mention it here for one reason. The mountain in the headlines is not an abstraction to a family that still has a priestly marker and a grandfather buried in the story of hidden Israel. The Cohen did not serve in a metaphor. He served in a house in Jerusalem.

The lie, and the census

My daughter told me I am evil. She said she hates me because I hold that the Bible is true, and that her hatred of me as a Jew outruns her love for her father. She said she is not against Jews, only against Zionists. Jerusalem’s own name in the prophets is Zion.

She said God did not give the land to the Jews. She asked about the Nakba. She pointed at destruction in Gaza and at children, and she said Zionists are killing them. She said I get my news from evil people, and that she knows more about Israel than I do.

She and her husband have not read the Bible. He is proud of knowing more than people who have. My brother has not spoken to me since I buried our mother, on April 6, 2026, with a Jewish service. For nearly a year a brother-in-law in our house said the same sentences. I was not hateful. I brought sources. He said the sources were the wrong ones.

This is not only my kitchen. It is the argument now running through American families, campuses, and churches. So the answer has to be public, sourced, and calm.

Can a person have an opinion without having studied the subject? Yes. Everyone has opinions. An opinion is not knowledge. If you have never opened the book that both of you claim to be arguing about, you do not know what the book says.

You know what a feed said the book says. Jeremiah warned against learning the way of the nations and against a tree cut from the forest, decked with silver and gold (Jeremiah 10:2–5). I read that chapter to a child who was eight.

She is the one who once said Christmas was wrong. She now keeps the tree and tells her father that the Jews stole the land. The reversal is the point. A generation can inherit a verse and then be trained to hate the people the verse is about.

Here are the counts, not the slogans.

Gaza’s population was about 245,000 in 1950 and about 2.1 million by 2023, according to the long demographic series drawn from census and international estimates.[10] The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics later reported a wartime drop on the order of 10 percent by the end of 2025, which it attributed to deaths, missing persons, fewer births, and people leaving the Strip.[11]

That wartime loss is real, and it should not be waved away. It is also not a seventy-five-year genocide. A people subjected to genocide does not grow eightfold in two generations. The word is being used as a moral weapon, not as a description. Urban destruction in a war Hamas began on October 7, 2023, by massacre, rape, and hostage-taking, and then fought from tunnels under neighborhoods, is not the same fact as a plan to erase a population.

Casualty totals published by Hamas-run institutions have been repeatedly revised and are not an independent forensic census. A father may grieve dead children without signing a lie about who started the war and what the word genocide requires.

Now the other census, the one my daughter has not been shown. In 1948 roughly 851,000 Jews lived in Arab countries. By 2023 that number was under 4,000.[12] Iraq had about 135,000 Jews in 1948 and a handful now. Yemen and Aden about 63,000, then effectively none. Libya 38,000, then zero. Egypt about 75,000, then about a hundred.

This was expulsion, flight, frozen property, and state violence after the partition vote, remembered in Israel on November 30. The places where Jews lived for centuries are empty of Jews. Gaza is not empty of Palestinians.

The sentence “Jews commit genocide” is being shouted in the one country that absorbed the expelled Jews, while the countries that emptied themselves of Jews are rarely asked to explain the silence.

The Nakba, as it is taught on American timelines, begins in 1948 and stops. It does not begin with the Arab rejection of partition, the invasion by five armies, and the statements of Arab leaders about throwing the Jews into the sea. It does not include the Jewish Nakba of the same years.

Benny Morris’s archival history puts the Palestinian refugee figure of 1948 at roughly 700,000, and he argues in print with other historians about how to characterize the flight and the expulsions.[13] Serious history is allowed to hold both: Arab suffering in 1948, and a war the Arab side launched to prevent a Jewish state. A slogan cannot hold both. A person who has never read the record cannot referee it.

What the prophets said the end would look like

Zechariah does not describe a world that loves Jerusalem at the end. He describes the opposite.

“Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of staggering to all the surrounding peoples… On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it will grievously hurt themselves. And all the nations of the earth will gather against it” (Zechariah 12:2–3).

Not some nations. All the nations. The controversy is not a border dispute that a better headline will solve. The controversy is the city. Joel says the nations will be brought down because they scattered Israel and divided the land (Joel 3:2).

Ezekiel 36 and 37 put the return to the land before the war of Ezekiel 38. The bones live. The people are gathered. Then the alliance comes down on the mountains of Israel. Psalm 83 names a confederacy whose stated aim is that the name of Israel be remembered no more.

Isaiah 54 asks the barren one to enlarge her tent, because the children of the desolate will outnumber the children of the married. That is demography as prophecy, and it has already embarrassed every empire that announced the end of the Jews.

None of this requires me to baptize a government, a party, or every policy in Gaza. Covenant is not a blank check. The prophets indicted Israel more harshly than any foreign press. It does require me to refuse the inversion in which the people the book calls beloved are recast as the unique evil of the age, and the land sworn to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is recast as theft.

Genesis 15, Genesis 17, and Deuteronomy 30 are not ambiguous on the point. The land is a grant. Exile is a sentence. Return is a promise. “Even if your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you” (Deuteronomy 30:4). A Cohen line that surfaces in Texas after Spain, Mexico, and the Inquisition is a small footnote to that verse. It is still a footnote in the right book.

Is America next?

The honest answer is that Zechariah does not name the United States. He names all the nations that lift Jerusalem as a stone. A country can join that lifting without a formal declaration of war. It can do it in newsrooms, in faculty lounges, and at kitchen tables, by teaching the children of Jews that their fathers are evil and that Zion is a slur.

The second video many of us have passed around, on the claims that travel as settled fact about this war, is useful only if the viewer then opens a primary source.[14] A clip is not a study. Neither is my essay, if you stop here. The test is the same one I gave my daughter. Read the text. Then read the census. Then decide whether the feed or the document is lying.

How a father answers

I do not have a technique that guarantees a child will return. I have a practice. I do not trade the covenant for peace in the house. I do not call a lie a second narrative in order to keep a seat at the table. I also do not hate the child who has been captured by the lie.

The Western Wall rabbi, speaking to the Sukkot crowd that numbered in the tens of thousands for the priestly blessing, asked that baseless hatred be removed and that the sukkah of peace be spread over the people.[15] That prayer is not only for politicians. It is for fathers whose daughters have said they will not bring the grandchildren into a Jewish home.

Strength, for a Jew in this hour, is not the agreement of his family. It is the word that outlasts the headline. The shofar on the Mount does not need my daughter’s permission. The lulav in a hand on Sukkot does not become a weapon because a studio said so. Zion is not a faction. Zion is the city the nations were told they would oppose, and the mountain to which the scattered were told they would bow.

If you have never read the book, you may still have an opinion. You may not call it knowledge. And if the opinion requires that the Jews disappear from the only plot of ground where the prophets said they would be gathered, while every other plot of ground has already made them disappear, the opinion is not a moral insight. It is the old war, wearing a new graphic.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

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Footnotes

1. Yehuda Dov, “Historic Rosh Hashanah Prayer On Temple Mount: 220 Jews Gather, Blow Shofar Despite Police Ban,” VINnews, September 16, 2026. Arnon Segal is cited on shofars and silver trumpets sounded together at Musaf, a backup blower outside the eastern side, eight detentions after the blowing, and at least two more for prostration. The service is described as four hours, with 220 present at one time.
2. “Jewish worshippers pray, sound shofar on Temple Mount on Rosh Hashanah,” JNS, September 15, 2026. Israel Police statement: those who sounded shofars “were removed from the site, and administrative proceedings were initiated.” HaKol HaYehudi is cited for eight detentions linked to shofar and trumpet and at least two for prostration, and for prayer booklets prepared by Yeshivat Har HaBayit.
3. Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, “For the first time in thousands of years, the shofar sounds on the Temple Mount,” Israel365 News, September 15, 2026. Rabbi Josh Wander on groups of thirty, three completed rounds of shofar with silver trumpets, and police allowing the rounds to finish before brief detention. Yishai Fleisher’s count of 300 to 400 that morning and a service of nearly four hours, via JNS.
4. “Shofar and Silver Trumpets Sound on Temple Mount on Rosh Hashanah,” The Jewish Edition, September 14, 2026. About 600 ascents reported for the day; instruments brought without prior approval; police allowed blasts to finish, then confiscated instruments. Wander is quoted: “We snuck them up, but the police allowed us to finish blowing once we started.”
5. David Israel, “Jewish man carrying the Four Species of Sukkot arrested on Temple Mount,” World Israel News / TPS, September 29, 2026. A 23-year-old detained after entering with etrog, lulav, hadas, and aravah; Honenu called the arrest unjustified.
6. Michael Freund, “Shmini Atzeret haftarah: The Temple Mount is no longer silent,” The Jerusalem Post, October 2, 2026. More than 1,100 Jewish ascents on the first day of Hol HaMoed; approved prayer sheets earlier in 2026; a limited August trial for prayer books; Four Species passed hand to hand despite restrictions. Mishnah Sukkah 4:4.
7. Parsha Inspired, “Something UNBELIEVABLE Just Happened on Temple Mount,” YouTube, October 1, 2026, https://youtu.be/ZBo0oxHUmXo. Rabbi Josh Wander’s eyewitness account of the sunrise ascent, the sound from the Mughrabi bridge above the Western Wall plaza, the bat kol comparison, and lulav and etrog on the Mount through Sukkot.
8. “Bat Kol,” Jewish Encyclopedia. The bat kol as a heavenly voice, distinct from full prophecy, often introduced in rabbinic sources by the formula that a voice fell from heaven.
9. Gavriel ben David (Archie Lee Hunnicutt Jr.), “The Double Priestly Flame: J-FT235823 Cohen DNA,” Beit HaShoavah, April 2026, https://beithashoavah.org/2026/04/the-double-priestly-flame-j-ft235823-cohen-dna-crypto-jewish-survival-from-550-bce-judea-to-the-ranches-of-amarillo-texas/. Uncle’s Big Y-700; J-FT235823; Cohen Modal Haplotype discussion; FamilyTreeDNA branching estimate around 550 BCE. See also Michael F. Hammer et al., “Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests,” Nature 385 (1997): 32; and the follow-up Cohen modal haplotype literature of 1998. A shared priestly signature is a population finding, not a personal proof of Aaronic descent.
10. Gaza Strip population series, U.S. Census Bureau International Database and compiled historical table: about 245,375 in 1950 and about 2,098,389 in 2023. Wikimedia Commons, “Data:Gaza strip population history.tab,” citing the Census Bureau IDB.
11. Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reporting, as summarized in Hanover Institute, “Do Palestinians Have a Continuous Presence in the Land of Palestine?” August 12, 2026: Gaza estimated near 2.13 million at the end of 2025, a decline the bureau put at about 10.6 percent from pre-war estimates, attributed to war deaths, missing persons, reduced births, and out-migration. Use the bureau’s own wartime revision beside the long growth series, not instead of it.
12. Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population, 2021,” in American Jewish Year Book 2023, as tabulated by the Jewish Virtual Library, “Jewish Populations in the Arab World”: about 851,000 Jews in Arab countries in 1948 and under 4,000 by 2023. Israel marks November 30 as the day of departure and expulsion; see also Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs country figures cited by The Jerusalem Post, November 30, 2025.
13. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004), archival estimate of roughly 700,000 refugees in the 1948 war. The characterization of that flight remains disputed among historians; the existence of a simultaneous Jewish exodus from Arab countries does not.
14. For the media-claim video referenced in this essay, see https://youtu.be/oNH9PRSSqPc. Treat it as a prompt to check primary reporting, not as a substitute for it.
15. Western Wall Heritage Foundation Sukkot priestly blessing, September 28, 2026: more than 50,000 attendees reported; the rabbi of the Wall asked that baseless hatred be removed and the sukkah of peace spread over the people. Virtual Jerusalem / Jerusalem Post reporting, September 29, 2026.