A Texas Jew who saw the High Priest’s crown in Amarillo in 2005 answers Dr. Michael Brown and the Book of Hebrews from the Tanach, and sets that night beside the altar that is finished in Jerusalem.

Then and Now

In 2005, at the Mayim-Hayim Center in Amarillo, Texas, Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute brought the tzitz of the High Priest. It had just been completed in Israel. We were the first to see it on this side of the ocean. I have never forgotten the weight of that gold, or the words cut into it: Kodesh laHashem, Holy to the Lord (Exodus 28:36).

We have given thousands of dollars over the years to the Temple Institute and to others who do that work. It was never a hobby. It was dear to my soul, and it was an honor to be involved in it as a Jew.

On September 5, 2016, I learned something that made that night in Amarillo feel less like a visitor’s story and more like a family story. My family is descended from a Cohen line. The crown I had looked at in Texas was not a costume. It was the plate that Aaron’s sons were commanded to wear when they stood before Hashem.

Jesus The HighPriest

I am writing this for the reader who has been told, week after week, on podcasts and in books still sitting on shelves, that the Levitical priesthood was replaced by Jesus, by the Church, or by a later book. I used to be that reader. Michael Brown’s books were in my library when I was a Messianic Jew. I read them, felt confused, and blamed my own mind. He was the scholar. I was not.

Today I know why those books never settled. They were leading where they led. They were leading away from the Hebrew Bible. Daniel, the friend of Hashem, said a power would think to change the times and the law (Daniel 7:25). I am not asking you to take my wound as proof. I am asking you to open the Tanach and read the verses Brown has to step around.

What Dr. Brown actually claims

On August 10, 2026, Dr. Michael Brown took a caller’s question on The Line of Fire in an episode titled “Does Ezekiel’s Temple Create Problems for Christians?” The caller, Terry, asked the plain question. Ezekiel 40–48 describes a future Temple, a priesthood, festivals, and offerings, including a sin offering. What does a believer do with that if the cross has already ended sacrifice?

Brown’s answer, in the framing of that episode, is the standard Christian resolution. Ezekiel 40–48 is a problem text for traditional Jews and for Christians. Believers explain the offerings after the cross so that they do not undo the claim that Jesus offered one sacrifice for sins forever. The center of the system is not the altar Ezekiel measured.

The center is the literal return of Jesus and his eternal reign. The millennial kingdom, in Brown’s telling, is how a Christian can still honor the prophets’ earthly promises without letting those promises govern the doctrine. Detail fights about the end are secondary to holding that return and that reign.[1]

That is the claim. Restated without ornament: the Hebrew prophet’s future altar, future sons of Zadok, and future sin offering cannot mean what they say, because a later book says there is no more sin offering.

Rico Cortes, teaching from the Book of Hebrews, makes the same move from the other door. He ties the death of the High Priest in the cities of refuge (Numbers 35) to Yeshua as the High Priest of Hebrews, whose death releases the guilty.

In his framing, Hebrews contrasts the earthly priesthood with a heavenly ministry, and Yeshua enters a heavenly sanctuary with his own blood. The earthly service, on this reading, is the shadow. The latter book is the substance.[2]

Cortes and Brown, both men, are serious. Both are readable. Both require the reader to let a book outside the Tanach take precedence over the Tanach.

What the Hebrew Bible states

The Torah does not speak of the priesthood of Aaron as a lease.

“And you shall anoint them, as you anointed their father, that they may minister to Me as priests; and their anointing shall be for them an everlasting priesthood throughout their generations.” (Exodus 40:15)

Everlasting. Throughout their generations. Not until a man from Judah dies outside the camp.

After the sin of Baal Peor, Hashem gives Pinchas a covenant:

“And he shall have it, and his seed after him, the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was zealous for his God.” (Numbers 25:13)

Jeremiah, writing when the First Temple was about to fall, does not cancel Levi. He binds Levi to the same oath that binds David.

“For thus says the Lord: David shall never lack a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; neither shall the priests, the Levites, lack a man before Me to offer burnt-offerings, and to burn meal-offerings, and to do sacrifice continually… If you can break My covenant with the day and My covenant with the night… then may also My covenant be broken with David My servant… and with the Levites the priests, My ministers.” (Jeremiah 33:17–21)

No Commentary

Read that without a commentary from another religion. The end of the Levitical altar is, in Jeremiah’s mouth, as impossible as the end of day and night. A doctrine that ends the altar has to call this verse a metaphor, or a phrase, or a promise already kept in a man who never offered a korban on that altar. That is not a reading of Jeremiah. That is a rescue of a later creed.

Ezekiel is not vague, and Brown admits the problem. The Book of Ezekiel 43:18–27 gives the offerings of the future altar, including the sin offering. Ezekiel 44:15–16 does not hand the inner service to a priest from Judah, or to every believer, or to a heavenly order that retires Aaron.

“But the priests, the Levites, the sons of Zadok, that kept the charge of My sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from Me, they shall come near to Me to minister unto Me… they shall enter into My sanctuary, and they shall come near to My table, to minister unto Me, and they shall keep My charge.”

Malachi, last of the Twelve, does not see the sons of Levi dismissed. He sees them purified.

“And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, and they shall offer unto the Lord offerings in righteousness. Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the Lord, as in the days of old, and as in former years.” (Malachi 3:3–4)

The Days Of Old

“As in the days of old” is an animal offering in Jerusalem, not a memorial invented to protect Hebrews 10. Zechariah 14:16–21 has the nations going up to Jerusalem to keep Sukkot, and every pot in Jerusalem and Judah is holy to the Lord of hosts. Isaiah 2:2–3 has the nations streaming to the House of the God of Jacob so that Torah goes out from Zion.

Isaiah 56:6–7 has the foreigner who joins himself to Hashem, whose offerings and sacrifices are accepted on Hashem’s altar, “for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” That is the verse. The altar is still there. The people come to it. They do not replace it.

Psalm 110:4, “You are a priest forever after the manner of Melchizedek,” is the verse Hebrews uses to change the law. In the Tanach, Melchizedek is the king of Salem who blesses Avraham (Genesis 14). He is not a warrant to void Exodus 40, Numbers 25, or Jeremiah 33.

A king can be called a priest in the sense of drawing near. David’s sons are called priests in 2 Samuel 8:18 in that older sense. None of that moves the mizbeach out of Aaron’s sons’ hands. The Torah already fixed who stands at that altar. “The priesthood being changed, of necessity there is also a change of the law” is a sentence in Hebrews.

It is not a sentence in the Hebrew Bible. To accept it, the reader must agree that Hashem changed the thing He swore would stand as long as day and night.

What Daniel Says

Daniel 7:25 says the arrogant power “shall think to change the times and the law.” I am not asking a court to stamp that verse with a church’s name. I am describing what I witnessed in my own reading life. The Sabbath was moved. The festivals were renamed. The altar was declared finished.

The priest was relocated to a tribe Moses never named for that work. The book that did this was not the Tanach. When I stopped letting that book judge the Tanach, Brown’s conclusions no longer looked like scholarship I was too slow to follow. They looked like a system that cannot survive a straight reading of Ezekiel 44 and Jeremiah 33.

Judgment and reward are already in the Hebrew Bible. They do not need a returning Jesus to invent them. “The soul that sins, it shall die… the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him” (Ezekiel 18:20). Daniel 12:2 speaks of those who sleep in the dust awaking, some to everlasting life and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence.

Malachi 3:16–18 says that Hashem writes a book of remembrance for those who fear Him and again discerns between the righteous and the wicked. The day Hashem acts is His day. The anointed king of David’s house is part of that hope. He is not a license to retire the priests, Jeremiah said, would not lack a man.

Rabbi Tovia Singer has said for years what the Talmud already said about the Writings. In Megillah 3a, the tradition holds that Yonatan ben Uzziel sought to reveal the Targum of the Ketuvim, but a voice from heaven stopped him because the time of the end is sealed within them. Prophecy is not only in the headlines of the Later Prophets. It is in the writings. Ezra is one of those books. Christians treat it as an archive. It is a pattern.

The altar is what Ezra built first

Ezra 3 is the pattern, and it is not subtle.

The exiles came back to a burned house and a frightened city. They did not wait for marble. In the seventh month, they gathered as one man to Jerusalem (Ezra 3:1). Yeshua ben Yozadak the priest and Zerubbabel built the altar on its bases, “for fear was upon them because of the peoples of the lands,” and they offered burnt offerings morning and evening (Ezra 3:2–3).

They kept Sukkot “as it is written,” and offered the daily burnt offerings “by number, according to the ordinance” (Ezra 3:4). Then the verse that should end the argument that a building must come before an offering:

“From the first day of the seventh month began they to offer burnt-offerings unto the Lord; but the foundation of the temple of the Lord was not yet laid.” (Ezra 3:6)

The Altar

The altar was the beginning of the rebuilding. The House came after. Rabbi Tovia Singer has pressed this in public, including in his Sukkot 2026 conversation with Rabbi Aron Sokol. His words: “We have an altar that’s ready to go. The altar is built. It’s here.

It’s ready to go on the Temple Mount. You technically do not need a Temple in order for an altar to be placed there and sacrifices to be offered.”[3] He pointed at Ezra 3 and at the older halakhah. Mishnah Eduyot 8:6 records Rabbi Yehoshua: “I have heard that they offer sacrifices even though there is no House.”

Maimonides rules that the sanctity of the Temple Mount remains (Hilchot Beit HaBechirah 6:16). Three prophets, the Talmud says, returned with the exiles and confirmed the altar, its place, and the possibility of bringing offerings (Zevachim 62a).

The Temple Institute completed a kosher altar in late 2014 and inaugurated it on the seventh night of Hanukkah, December 22, 2014. It follows Maimonides on the smaller lawful size. The outer frame is brick, fired to take the fire. The fill is stone; no iron has touched it, because the Torah forbids a tool of iron on the altar (Deuteronomy 27:5; Exodus 20:22). It can be taken apart and carried. It has been ready for more than a decade.[4]

The Tzit and The High Priest

Set the two dates side by side. In 2005, in Amarillo, a rabbi from Jerusalem set the High Priest’s gold plate before Jews and friends who had paid for the work. In 2014, and still today, the altar the plate belongs to is finished in Jerusalem, awaiting the decision to carry it up.

The priestly garments have been prepared. The silver trumpets have been prepared. The building stone, Singer said, is not yet in hand. Ezra did not have the building stone either. He had the altar, the fear, and the seventh month.

The Christian View

Christians looking at that same altar often say the opposite of what Ezra says. A popular end-times reading, the kind gathered under titles about a third temple the antichrist will desecrate, treats the finished altar as a stage prop for a villain.[5] The Hebrew pattern is not that.

The Hebrew pattern is exiles, afraid, building the altar first, on the place, in the seventh month, before one foundation stone of the House is laid. The villain reading needs Daniel 9 and 2 Thessalonians to rename the altar. The Tanach already named it. It is the place where Adam’s earth was taken, where Avraham bound Yitzchak, and where David bought the threshing floor. Fear of the peoples of the lands is in Ezra 3:3. They built it anyway.

Ezekiel 34 to 37, from 1948 to this morning

I learned the modern map of these chapters from Rabbi Tovia Singer. He does not treat 1948 as a mood. He treats it as the condition the prophets set. None of the later sentences can happen if Israel is not in the land.

Ezekiel 34 indicts the shepherds and promises that Hashem Himself will seek the flock. “I will bring them out from the peoples, and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land” (Ezekiel 34:13). Ezekiel 36 speaks to the mountains of Israel: you shall shoot forth branches and yield fruit to My people Israel, for they are at hand to come (Ezekiel 36:8).

The cities will be inhabited. The ruins will be rebuilt. Ezekiel 37 is the valley of dry bones, then the two sticks, Yehudah and Yosef, in one hand. Ezekiel 38 and 39 set a war in the latter years, when Israel has been brought back and is dwelling in the land.

The order is the order. The people return. The land responds. The army exists because a people brought back into a land of enemies does not survive without one. Then the altar. Then the House. A sermon that starts with a replaced priesthood has to skip the order.

1948

In 1948, the Jewish population of the new state was about 806,000.[6] On the eve of Independence Day 2025, the Central Bureau of Statistics put the population at nearly 10.1 million, about twelve times the 1948 figure, with roughly 45 percent of the world’s Jews living in Israel.[7] About 3.5 million people have immigrated since 1948. That is Ezekiel 34:13 in a census table.

The Land

The land was the subject of the skeptics’ argument for centuries. Mark Twain’s 1867 picture of a bare country is the “before.” KKL-JNF has planted on the order of 250 million trees; Israel is one of the few countries that ended the twentieth century with more trees than it had in 1900.[8] Ezekiel 36:8 did not say the mountains would host a conference.

It said they would branch and bear fruit for the people who were about to come. Wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olive oil, and honey are the seven species of Deuteronomy 8:8. They are in the ground again. The last harvest of the year is still the olive.

The Date Palm

In January 2005, the same year the tzitz came to Amarillo, Dr. Elaine Solowey planted date seeds recovered from Masada. One germinated in March 2005. They named it Methuselah. Radiocarbon dating placed the seed at around two thousand years old. It is the oldest cultivated seed known to have grown, and it stands at Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava.[9]

A date palm does not prove a doctrine. It does embarrass the claim that the land was finished. Ezekiel said the mountains would yield their fruit to My people Israel. A tree from Herod’s fortress put out a leaf in the year we first saw the crown.

Israel has had an army since the state was named. The prophets do not blush at that. Ezekiel 37’s living army and Zechariah’s Jerusalem are not a disarmed parable. A people gathered from the nations, in this land, with enemies on the ridges, is the setting Ezekiel 38 assumes. “After many days you shall be mustered… against the mountains of Israel” only works if there are mountains of Israel with Israel on them.

Singer’s point about the secular state is the same point. The prophets did not require the returnees to arrive already wearing tefillin. Ezra’s generation came back mixed, married out, and afraid. Nehemiah had to teach the day. The state was the vessel of the return. The altar is the next verse, not a contradiction of the verse.

Lev echad, and the boys who are hungry

Ezra 3:1 says they gathered “as one man.” Singer’s way of saying the end-condition is lev echad, one heart, the heart of that seventh month. The Targum tradition held the Writings back because the end is in them. Ezra is where you watch the end begin: one heart, the altar, then the House.

What is happening among Israeli youth is not a church growth seminar. It is Amos 8:11 in the streets. “Not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”

After October 7, 2023, the shift was visible enough for secular papers to name it. On November 22, 2025, the Jerusalem Post described a “great Jewish awakening”: synagogues in Tel Aviv filling with young people, teenagers at Selichot, Shabbat attendance rising without social coercion. Reichman University research, cited there, found 37 percent of Israelis aged 15 to 18 turning to religion for healing, strength, and belonging.[10]

On November 13, 2025, Israel365 reported Thursday nights in Tel Aviv, once the night out before Shabbat, with teenagers in synagogue, phones down, some boys putting on tzitzit after Gaza, parents being led by children to a Friday table.[11]

The Teens

On September 21, 2025, more than 3,500 teens from 70 places filled Binyanei HaUma in Jerusalem for a Selichot night, featuring a concert and a midnight Selichot broadcast from the Kotel. The former Rishon LeZion led them in the Shema.[12] The 2025 Selichot season in Jerusalem put Adon Olam on the stage. Dudu Fisher’s symphonic Selichot program listed Adon Olam in the set, beside the older prayers.

[13] The line the boys sing is the line the siddur has always ended with: Adonai melech, Adonai malach, Adonai yimloch le’olam va’ed. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King forever and ever. That is not a youth-group chorus written last spring. It is the creed of the Tanach, in the mouths of teenagers.

Set the same ages beside American headlines, without gloating. The CDC’s 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that about one in three U.S. high school students have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.

Among boys, 24 percent reported that sadness, 11 percent had seriously considered suicide, and 5 percent had attempted it.[14] KFF’s review of CDC data counted 1,478 suicide deaths among adolescents ages 12 to 17 in 2024, down from a 2018 peak and still higher than a decade earlier, with the deaths concentrated among boys and more than four in ten involving a firearm.[15]

These are not the same countries, and a statistic is not a soul. The contrast the prophets would notice is still there. One group of boys, 12 to 23, is running toward Shabbat, tefillin, and Adonai melech. The other is being tallied for despair. Amos did not say every nation would hunger the same way. He said the hunger for the word would come. In Israel, it is showing up as children pulling parents to the candles.

A word to the reader holding Brown or Hebrews

I am not writing to take books off your shelf. Brown’s books have been on my shelf for years. I am writing to tell you what the Hebrew text does when it is allowed to finish its own sentences.

Dr. Brown

Brown’s claim is that Ezekiel’s future sin offering and Zadokite priesthood create a problem that the return of Jesus and the Book of Hebrews must solve. The Tanach does not state that problem. It states an everlasting priesthood (Exodus 40:15), a covenant with Levi as firm as day and night (Jeremiah 33:20–21), a future altar with sin offerings and the sons of Zadok at the table (Ezekiel 43–44), and Levites refined until their offering is pleasant as in former years (Malachi 3:3–4).

Rico Cortes

Cortes’s claim is that Hebrews presents the earthly High Priest as a shadow of a heavenly one, whose death ends the system. The Torah already explained the death of the High Priest in Numbers 35. It frees the manslayer from the city of refuge. It does not free Israel from the altar, nor does it move the plate on the High Priest’s forehead onto another tribe.

The timeline in front of you is the timeline in the text. Israel is in the land. The people have multiplied. The mountains have put out branches. A date seed from the Roman siege has grown. The state that brought them home has an army. The crown has been made. I saw it in Amarillo in 2005. The altar has been made. It has been ready since Hanukkah 2014. The boys are singing the King’s line. Ezra gathered as one man in the seventh month and offered before the foundation was laid.

If the Book of Hebrews is right, Jeremiah 33 is wrong. Both cannot be the word of the God who does not break a covenant with the day. I lived the confusion long enough. The way out was not a smarter Christian scholar. The way out was the Hebrew Bible, read in its own order, with the altar still in the sentence.

Hazan Gavriel ben David
Amarillo, Texas
Beit HaShoavah

Footnotes

1. Dr. Michael Brown, “Does Ezekiel’s Temple Create Problems for Christians?,” The Line of Fire, YouTube, August 10, 2026, https://youtu.be/XGyMCrdDXf0. Episode description: Brown answers Terry on sin offerings in Ezekiel’s future temple, how believers explain sacrifices after the cross, and why he treats the literal return and reign of Jesus, and the millennial kingdom, as the way to hold the prophets’ earthly promises.
2. Rico Cortes, “Yeshua the High Priest: How the Cities of Refuge Reveal His Ransom,” YouTube, July 28, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/live/LuB0sBEmkrs. See also his related teachings contrasting earthly priestly service with the heavenly ministry argued in Hebrews: https://youtu.be/Gr5PiKduqQc and https://youtu.be/xnlOVvX6bxk.
3. Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, “Rabbi Tovia Singer: ‘The Altar Is Ready’ for the Ezra 3 Prophecy,” Israel365 News, October 4, 2026, https://israel365news.com/421611/rabbi-tovia-singer-the-altar-is-ready-for-the-ezra-3-prophecy/. Interview with Rabbi Aron Sokol, Parsha Inspired, during Sukkot.
4. Ahuva Balofsky, “Jewish Temple Altar Rebuilt, Ready for Use,” Israel365 News / Breaking Israel News, March 9, 2015, https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/32009/altar-jewish-holy-temple-rebuilt-jewish-world/. Completion late 2014; public inauguration at the menorah lighting, December 22, 2014. Measurements follow Maimonides; fill stones untouched by metal; frame can be disassembled.
5. For the Christian reading that places the finished altar inside an antichrist third-temple plot, see the line of commentary sampled at https://youtu.be/rWI9ibDZcfc and the republication “For The Third And Final Temple (Which Antichrist Will Desecrate), The Jewish Altar Has Been Rebuilt And Is Ready To Begin Service,” TheWatchTowers.org, drawing on the 2015 Matzav Haruach report.
6. “Israel turns 68 with 8.5 million people, 10 times more than in 1948,” Times of Israel, May 9, 2016, citing the Central Bureau of Statistics: population about 806,000 in 1948.
7. “Israel’s population tops 10 million for 1st time, on eve of 77th Independence Day,” Times of Israel, April 29, 2025. CBS: nearly 10.1 million, about twelve times the 1948 population; about 45 percent of world Jewry in Israel; about 3.5 million immigrants since 1948.
8. Jewish National Fund, “The Story of Israel’s Tree Planting,” JNF.org; KKL-JNF forestry figures, 2025 update. JNF reports more than 250 million trees planted since 1901. Israel is among the few countries with more trees at the end of the twentieth century than at the beginning.
9. Sarah Sallon and colleagues, Science (2008); “Palm tree grown from 2,000-year-old date stone,” The Guardian, June 12, 2008; “An update on Methuselah, Israel’s palm tree from a 2,000-year-old seed,” Jerusalem Post, November 28, 2021. Seeds from the Yadin-Netzer excavation at Masada; planted January 2005; germination March 2005; tree at Kibbutz Ketura.
10. Jamie Geller, “Welcoming Israelis are experiencing spiritual awakening,” Jerusalem Post, November 22, 2025, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-874631. Cites Reichman University: 37 percent of Israelis ages 15–18 turning to religion.
11. Elie Mischel, “‘A Generation of Thirsty Souls’: Inside Tel Aviv’s Unexpected Spiritual Awakening,” Israel365 News, November 13, 2025, https://israel365news.com/413959/a-generation-of-thirsty-souls-inside-tel-avivs-unexpected-spiritual-awakening/.
12. “3,500 CTeens Uplifted at Annual Selichos Event,” Anash.org, September 21, 2025, https://anash.org/3500-cteens-uplifted-at-annual-selichos-event/.
13. “Selichot 2025: Jerusalem’s Must-See Mega Concerts,” JFeed, September 9, 2025, https://www.jfeed.com/music/selichot-concerts-jerusalem-2025. Dudu Fisher’s “Shaking the Heavens,” Yavne, September 28, 2025, setlist including Adon Olam.
14. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Survey, “Mental Health and Suicide Risks,” 2025 findings, https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/youth-health-in-focus/mental-health.html. About one in three students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness; male students: 24 percent persistent sadness, 11 percent seriously considered suicide, 5 percent attempted.
15. Nirmita Panchal, “5 Key Facts on Adolescent Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders,” KFF, May 11, 2026, analysis of CDC WONDER 2014–2024, https://www.kff.org/mental-health/5-key-facts-on-adolescent-mental-health-and-substance-use-disorders/. Adolescents ages 12–17: 1,478 suicide deaths in 2024; more than 17,000 in the decade; more than four in ten involved a firearm; deaths higher among males.

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