Was it not the great Radbaz who paskened that the Dome of the Rock stands on Makom HaMikdash? Could it be that the Jewish consensus regarding the Temple Mount is off? Could it be that the Arabs, ever lying, are right when they say that the Jewish Temples did not stand on the Temple Mount?
The questions are painful, but must be posed. Below is an interesting warning from the Rambam's letter to the community of Marseille. The Rambam addresses astrology, but I submit that the same logic applies to those who hold that Tradition and Psak trump the Truth. It is much harder to assess the truth than to assume it. However, the former is the task of every generation, as Rabbi Eliezer Ashkenazi put it: "all the generations who have entered the covenant, are duty bound to examine the secrets of the Torah and to straighten out our faith concerning it by accepting the truth from whomever says it." And now the Rambam:
Thus you ought to know that fools have composed thousands of books of nothingness and emptiness. Any number of men, great in years but not in wisdom, wasted all their days in studying these books and imagined that these follies are science. They came to think of themselves as wise men because they knew that science. The thing about which most of the world errs, or all of it—save for a few individuals, “the remnant of whom the Lord shall call” (Joel 3:5)—is that thing of which I am apprising you. The great sickness and the “grievous evil” (Eccles. 5:12, 15) consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true—and all the more so if the books are old. And since many individuals have busied themselves with those books and have engaged in discussions concerning them, the rash fellow’s mind at once leaps to the conclusion that these are words of wisdom, and he says to himself: “Has the pen of the scribes written in vain” (Jer. 8:8), and have they vainly engaged in these things? This is why our kingdom was lost and our Temple was destroyed...
