A VIRTUAL TEMPLE? Israeli "cybernetics expert" Yitzhaq Hayutman has a new solution for peace on the Temple Mount:

All sides acknowledge that tensions on the hill have the potential to start a war, but Hayutman believes he has found a way to resolve the intractable conflict. "What most people see is that if the Muslims are here, surely there is no temple," Hayutman says. "They do not understand that technology has given us the tools to realize the prophecy right now."

He has two big ideas, two ways to engineer the apocalypse. The first: a hovering holographic temple. Hayutman wants to set up an array of high-powered, water-cooled lasers and fire them into a transparent cube suspended beneath a blimp. The ephemeral, flickering image, he says, would fulfill an ancient, widely revered Jewish prophecy that the temple will descend from the heavens as a manifestation of light. Hayutman hopes to finance the project with some of the proceeds from a $20 million patent-infringement suit he and his partners have filed against Palm.

The rest of that money would be poured into Hayutman's second idea for jump-starting the end-times: a virtual temple within a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The goal is for thousands of people to join in its construction on the Web. Hayutman even wants to display progress reports in the floating hologram as a kind of apocalyptic scoreboard.

Whether it's a hologram or a cyberstructure, Hayutman believes that a techno temple does away with the need for a physical building. Under his scheme, Jews and Christians would get a biblically accurate temple without razing the Dome of the Rock. A description of his plans is on the floppy disk in his pocket, which he says he will give to me when we leave the Mount.

This obviously belongs in the "you couldn't make this up" file, but unlike many entries it doesn't seem actively harmful. It's not going to satisfy those with extreme views on either side, though.

This solution isn't entirely novel. The Qumran sectarians, at least some of whom rejected the second temple because they thought the priesthood was corrupt, seem to have adopted the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice because it tied angelic worship in the heavenly temple to a liturgy on earth which, presumably, the sectarians could and did practice and which gave them a "virtual" experience. Mr. Hayutman just has better technology.