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From: wkp@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.religion.jewish
Subject: Re: Re: Re: the location of the Temple Mount
Message-ID: <36098@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 6-Jan-86 22:45:31 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.36098
Posted: Mon Jan  6 22:45:31 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Jan-86 19:55:16 EST
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Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 33


Anyone who believes that he can face the Temple Mount by living
in New Jersey ought to try praying for common sense.    

Actually, our friends the Muslims worried about this in the tenth
century quite a bit since they need to face Mecca five times a
day.  From their exhaustive calculations (which they themselves
knew to be somewhat bogus) they invented many elements of planar
and spherical trigonometry, and provided many important astronomical
observations.

The problem was this:  from every point on the earth one can measure
one's latitude and longitude from the stars (e.g., the North Star
is within one minute of true north).  Knowing the latitude and
longitude of the Temple Mount (or, in the Muslim case--l'havdil--the qibla)
within some degree of tolerance, one can construct a great circle from
one's own position which may (if everything is perfect) PASS THROUGH
the Temple Mount, but one's own line of sight is directed out into space,
and not toward any place on earth.

So, even if the earth were a perfect sphere, the concept of "facing"
another point on the sphere is somewhat meaningless.  But even defining
"facing" to be "aligning one's line of sight along the great circle
joining the two points" is unacceptable, since the earth is more
correctly an oblate spheriod, and the definition of a "great circle"
becomes ambiguous.

In short, I believe that only Jews living in Eretz Yisrael, or at least
in Jerusalem, can truly "face" the Temple Mount.  Exiled Jews will always
end up staring out into space.
--

bill peter                                     ihnp4!lanl!wkp