Coronavirus has now claimed the lives of more than 3,200 people, and infected more than 94,000 people worldwide. Experts are still trying to decipher the virus, known as COVID-19, but one rabbi in Jerusalem believes he has the answer.
Rabbi Aryeh Lipo, a religious studies teacher, believes God is punishing humanity with the coronavirus until a Third Temple is built in the Holy Land.
There were two Holy Temples of Jerusalem which were key places of worship and built on the Temple Mount, but they were destroyed firstly by the Babylonians and the by the Romans.
Rabbi Lipo now believes a Third Temple needs to be built to help restore the Jewish faith and stop the spread of COVID-19.
The rabbi quoted the Prophet Isaiah who compared the Temple Mount to a crown.
Isaiah 2:2 reads: “In the days to come, The Mount of Hashem‘s House Shall stand firm above the mountains And tower above the hills; And all the nations Shall gaze on it with joy.”
Hashem is a name given to God.
Rabbi Lippo is quoted by Breaking Israel News as saying: “And ‘corona’ means, in every language, a crown.
“The disease has come to remind us that the true crown of the world is missing. What will stop the coronavirus was taught to us by King David.”
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“But there is one place in Israel, the only place in the world, that it is actually forbidden, against the law, to put tefillin on a Jewish head. This is on the crown of all the mountains; Jerusalem.
“We are assured that returning the crown of tefillin to the Temple Mount will remove the crown of suffering, the coronavirus, from the world.”
Some experts believe coronavirus could be with us for good.
Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, told Business Insider: “This is going to be with us for some time – it’s endemic in human populations and not going to go away without a vaccine. It may decrease in transmission frequency so that you’ll be able to have time to get a vaccine scaled up by the next appearance of it.”
