The Sealed Gate of Jerusalem Is Moving! Is This a Sign of Christ’s Return?

The man who laid the last stone was not told why.  He was a bricklayer.   He probably didn’t even know how to read.  And that morning in Jerusalem, in the year 1541, he was given a simple and well- paid job.  To board up a door, not to knock it down, not to tear it out, but to board it up, to close it with stones and mortar until there was not even a crack left for the air to pass through.

  And he did it skillfully, placing the stones one by one, fitting them together, filling them in, smoothing the surface.  A job well done, the kind that lasts for centuries.  And when he laid the last stone, when he closed the last hole and stepped back to look at his work, that man had no idea what he had just done.

  I didn’t know I had sealed the most heavily guarded door in the history of the world.  He did not know that the stone wall he had just built would still be exactly the same 500 years later, when airplanes and satellites and telephones existed and all the empires he knew had fallen. And above all, he didn’t know why they had sent it to him.

  And that’s the question I want you to keep in mind for the next hour.  Because? Because a sultan doesn’t order a door to be boarded up on a whim.  The man who gave that order was Suleiman, who was called the magnificent.  And he wasn’t an eccentric or a paranoid person.  He was probably the most powerful man on the planet at that time.

  Their armies had Europe terrified.  It controlled trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.  He could build cities and he could erase them.  And that man, with all that power, dedicated time, money, and bricklayers to closing a door.  A door that didn’t bother anyone, a door that didn’t lead to any strategic position, a door that wasn’t even used much.

  Because?  And this is where this story stops being a tourist guide fact and becomes something else , because taping up the door didn’t seem like enough to him.  He did something else.  And what he did next is the part that keeps me up at night, and it’s the part that almost nobody talks about, and it’s the reason why I ‘m recording this.

  He ordered a cemetery to be built  right in front, attached to the wall, on the other side of the stone that his mason had just placed, a Muslim cemetery with its graves at the foot of that walled-up door.  And now I want you to ask yourself, what kind of fear does a man have? What kind of fear does the most powerful emperor in the known world have that he doesn’t trust a stone wall and needs to put dead bodies in front of it? Let’s put it in context because you have to see it to understand it.

  Jerusalem has many gates.  The old city is surrounded by a wall, and in that wall there are entrances through which people enter and exit every day.  The Jaffa Gate, the Damascus Gate, the Zion Gate, normal gates with traffic, with tourists, with vendors, with children running.  And there is one that is not on the eastern wall, on the east side, and it is the only gate in the entire wall that does not open.

  [music] In Hebrew they call it the gate of mercy.  In Arabic, it’s also called the Gate of Mercy.  In Spanish we know it as the golden gate.  And if you go to Jerusalem and look for it, you’ll find it without any problem, because it’s unmistakable.  Two elegant, clearly ancient stone arches, which were once a monumental entrance, and filled in, filled with ashlars of a different color.

  It’s obvious, it’s perfectly clear that that was a door and that someone blocked it up.  There is no pretense.  The scar is visible and at his feet in front of him between the wall and the ravine.  The tombs.  A Muslim cemetery with its white gravestones lined up, occupying the land just in front of the gate.  And now look up because the important thing about that door is not just that it’s boarded up, it’s where it’s facing.

In front of her lies a valley, the Kidron Valley.  And on the other side of the valley, opposite, less than 1 kilometer away, rises a hill.  The Mount of Olives.  The golden gate faces directly towards the Mount of Olives.  They look at each other face to face with the valley in between.

  And this is not poetry, it’s geography.  It’s a fact you can verify on any map, in any aerial photograph, or by standing on the site if you ever go there.  The only boarded-up gate in Jerusalem.   He is looking directly at the Mount of Olives.  And this is where I have to bring a book into the conversation, because in the book of Zechariah there is a phrase that says that the feet of the Lord will rest on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem, to the east, to the east.

  And in the eastern wall there is a door and that door is boarded up and in front of it there is a cemetery.  And now we’re going to talk about the prophecy that explains everything.  Because up to this point I’ve only given you facts, and facts without context don’t mean much.  I want to take you there because if you ever go to Jerusalem, I want you to know exactly what you’re seeing.

  You leave the old city, skirt the wall on the outside, on the east side, and the land begins to slope down, because you are looking out over the valley and to your right, above you have the wall.  It is a huge wall, made of large limestone blocks from Jerusalem.  That golden stone that at certain times of the day, when the sun shines on it from the side, lights up and seems to emit its own light.

  And on that wall, you suddenly see the two arches.  They are unmistakable, elegant, with a decoration that the rest of the sections do not have .  You can tell that it was something, that it was an important entrance, one of those used for special occasions, and they are filled with stones of a different color, of a different size, fitted in a different way.

  It’s visible, it’s perfectly visible.  It’s not a discreet restoration, it’s a cover-up, it’s a scar.  And at the foot of the wall, in the strip of land between the wall and the ravine, the rectangular white tombs with Arabic inscriptions, placed there in a row, looking upwards, towards the gate.  And there is grass among them, and there are some trees and there is silence, because in that area there are no shops or tourists buying things.

  It’s a quiet place.  And if you turn around , if you turn around and look across the valley, there is the Mount of Olives rising up, covered with gravestones, tens of thousands of them, covering the whole hillside in a slope of tombs that goes up and up to the top, and on the top olive trees and a few church towers.

And you’re in the middle.  You are standing in a ravine with a boarded-up door on one side and a mountain of dead bodies on the other.  And all of this, absolutely everything, is placed this way for a reason.  Every stone, every tomb, every wall, everything is there by people who believed that something was going to happen at that exact point on the planet.

  And they’ve been believing it for 2000 years and it hasn’t happened, and they’re still there, and they’re still burying people on that hillside.  Today, this year, there are new burials, people who in 2026 continue to choose that place to be close by just in case.  And now I want to take you to another scene because this story has a beginning and we haven’t told it yet.

  It doesn’t begin with Suleiman, it begins 15 years earlier with a man coming down a hill riding a donkey.  Let’s look at it carefully, because there are details you’ve missed your whole life.  That man comes from the Mount of Olives, he comes down the hillside. Ahead of him, on the other side of the valley, is the wall of Jerusalem, and he is going towards the eastern gate.

  Now, the question that almost no one asks. Why does “donkey” sound like humility, and why is it always said that way?  a humble king, a modest Messiah, who does not enter on horseback like a general, but on a pack animal.  And it’s true, but it’s only half the truth.  The other half is that in the book of Zechariah, written centuries earlier, there is a phrase that says that the king will come to Jerusalem, righteous and a savior, humble, and riding on a donkey.

On a donkey.  And that man comes down from the Mount of Olives on a donkey [music] and enters by the eastern gate. That’s not humility, that’s a statement. That’s a man performing, point by point, a script written centuries ago, and doing it in front of a crowd that knows that script by heart, because they have heard it in the synagogue all their lives.

   That’s why people are going crazy, that’s why they’re throwing branches on the ground, that’s why they’re shouting, [music] they’re not greeting a nice teacher who happens to be passing by.   They are watching someone do exactly what was written.  What would the Messiah do with the right animal? via the correct route and through the correct door.

  And the temple authorities understand this perfectly, which is why they get nervous.  That’s why everything happened so fast that same week, because it wasn’t a parade, it was a protest. And now he returns to Ezekiel.  The Lord, the God of Israel, has entered through it, therefore it will remain closed.  And years later, an Ottoman sultan who would never have accepted a single word of that interpretation, closed it with stone and with dead bodies.

Ezekiel, a prophet of exile, a man writing from Babylon, deported with his city destroyed and his temple razed, in the sixth century BC , 2,500 years before Suleiman was born.  And in chapter 44 of his book, Ezekiel describes a vision. He sees a temple, a restored temple, a future one, that does not yet exist.

  And a guide takes him through that temple, showing him the rooms, the courtyards, the measurements, and takes him to a door, the sanctuary door that faces east, and that door is closed.  And Ezekiel asks, and the answer he receives is what has kept that stone in place for 25 centuries.  They tell him that the door will remain closed, that it will not be opened, that no man will enter through it.

  And they give him the reason, because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered through it , that is why it will be closed.  Now I want you to breathe and think about it slowly, because it has more layers than it seems.  It doesn’t say, “Close it, it doesn’t say seal that door.”  It states that it will be closed in the future as a statement, not as an order.

  And he says the reason, ” Something has happened there, something so big, that after that nothing else can happen.”  As if the fact that the divinity had crossed that threshold had consumed the door, exhausted its function, left that access reserved forever. And the text adds something more.  He says there is an exception.

  It says that the prince, and only the prince, will sit in it. One. Just one.  Now, Christian tradition reads this in a very specific way. That when Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, riding on a donkey, coming down from the Mount of Olives, crossing the Kidron Valley and entering through the eastern gate, the Lord entered and therefore, from that day on that gate remained closed and will only be opened when he returns.

  And Jewish tradition reads something else , different but convergent.  Read that the Messiah will enter through that door when he comes, and that this is the threshold of redemption.  Two traditions, two theologies that agree on practically nothing, and both look at the same door and both expect the same thing from it.

  May it open one day, and may someone come in when it opens.  I want you to get to know Suleiman, because if you imagine him as a superstitious tyrant, you’re going to miss the important part. That man was not an ignorant fanatic; he was probably the most capable ruler of his century.  In the West he was called the magnificent, in his own empire he was called the legislator, because he reorganized the Ottoman legal system from top to bottom and gave it a coherence that lasted for centuries.

He wrote poetry, under a pseudonym, thousands of verses.  He was a brilliant administrator, a formidable military strategist, and an obsessive builder.  He built mosques that are still among the most beautiful in the world today.  He reformed entire cities and rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem.

  [music] That’s true and it needs to be said.  The walls that surround the old city of Jerusalem today, those that appear in all the photographs, were built by him; they date from his reign.  There are inscriptions that attest to this. So when I say he boarded up the golden door, I’m not talking about vandalism, I’m talking about a man who was doing a huge and well-planned public works project and who, in the middle of that project, made a decision, and that, for me, makes it more disturbing, not less, because a fanatic who boards up a door out of

superstition is just an anecdote. [music] a rational, cultured administrator, poet, legislator, the most informed man of his time, who in the middle of a perfectly sensible engineering project , decides to block a particular door and put a cemetery in front of it. That’s no longer superstition, that’s a political decision made by someone who has calculated the risks.

  And if a man like that calculates that there is a risk, it’s because he thought there was one.  And there’s something else, and this is my hypothesis and I’m marking it as such, not as a fact.  [music] Suleiman ruled a multi-confessional empire.  Under his rule lived millions of Christians and hundreds of thousands of Jews.

  The Ottomans were not generally particularly intolerant by the standards of the time.  In fact, they welcomed the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, when Europe was expelling them.  So Suleiman knew these communities, lived among them, had Jewish officials, had Jewish doctors, and these communities spoke to each other.

  And in Jerusalem, messianic hope was a living theme.  It was talked about, it was expected.  And a well-informed sultan, with spies and advisors, knew perfectly well what was expected and from where it was expected to arrive.  And he decided to close that door, not because he was ignorant, but because he was very well informed.

  And now we go back to Suleiman and back to 1541 and back to that bricklayer placing the last stone, because now you have the context and now you can understand what was happening.  Suleiman knew the prophecies, not his own, but those of others.  That is the detail that I find most extraordinary in this whole story, and that no one emphasizes enough.

  The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the Kalifa, the most powerful man in Islam at that time, read or was told what the books of another religion said about a gate in his city and heeded it.   He didn’t call them superstitions, he didn’t despise them, he didn’t treat them as the mistake of some infidels, he took them seriously enough to spend public money on boarding up a door.

  And there you have a very important psychological fact .  That man believed there was a real possibility that it would happen and he didn’t want it to happen during his reign, because he thought about what it would mean for him.  If the Jewish Messiah were to enter Jerusalem through the eastern gate with all the prophetic weight that entails, what would be left for the Ottoman Empire?  What is left for a sultan who rules that city? Nothing.  His world is ending.

  So he boarded up the door.  And here’s the bit about the cemetery.  And I want to tell you about it in detail because it’s sinisterly cunning.  The logic is this.  In Jewish tradition there is a notion of ritual purity and certain priestly figures, particularly the descendants of the priestly caste, must not come into contact with the dead or walk over graves, because that makes them ritually impure.

  And if the Messiah comes accompanied by priests or if the Messiah himself is understood as a priestly figure, then a cemetery in front of the door is a barrier.  Not a physical barrier, a ritual barrier, a spiritual obstacle built with the dead. Now look at what that man was doing.  He was using the rules of a religion to block the promises of that same religion.

  He was taking the opponent’s rules and using them against him.  It’s a breathtaking display of theological cynicism.  He wasn’t denying the prophecy, he was accepting it as real while simultaneously looking for a legal loophole, like a lawyer who doesn’t argue with the law, but looks for the loophole.  And that’s why he killed people.

  He buried people in front of a door to try to stop God.  And now I’m going to tell you what I think, and this is my opinion and I’m marking it as such. I believe that Suleiman was afraid, and not in a military way.  That man wasn’t afraid of any army in the world, and rightly so, because he was destroying them all. He was afraid of something he couldn’t fight, and so instead of sending soldiers he sent bricklayers and then, just in case , he sent gravediggers.

And now I want you to sit down because here comes the moment when this story comes full circle.  Return to the text of Ezekiel.  What exactly does it say? He says that door will be closed. [music] And now tell me, is it closed? Yes. Who closed it?  Suleiman.  And there you have it, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, with all the force of his power, with all his fear, with all his theological cunning, with his bricklayers and his dead, did exactly what the prophecy said would happen.

  The prophecy said that door would be closed, and he closed it with his own hands, with his own money, by his own decision.  A man who tried with all his heart to prevent a sacred text from being fulfilled, and all he managed to do was fulfill it to the letter.  I want you to hold onto that idea for a moment because you won’t find it in many places, and I think it’s the most important thing about this video.

Ezekiel didn’t write that someone had to close it, he wrote that it would be closed. And 500 years ago, a man who did not believe in that book, who belonged to another religion, who ruled another empire, and who acted for completely selfish and political reasons, became the instrument that made that verse literally true.

  And it has been ever since .  You can go to Jerusalem today in 2026 and see with your own eyes that the gate of the sanctuary facing east is closed.  Just like the book says.  And it was shut down by a man who wanted the book to be wrong.  Now let’s be rigorous because I owe it to myself and I owe it to you.  There is a perfectly reasonable alternative explanation and I’m not going to hide it.

  There are historians who maintain that Suleiman sealed that gate for purely defensive reasons, that he was reinforcing the walls of Jerusalem, that he did indeed reinforce them, that he carried out important works throughout the city, and that a gate in the eastern wall, in an exposed area, was simply a weak point that needed to be closed, and that the cemetery was not his idea or that there were already Muslim burials on that hillside before, because that area has been a burial site for a very long time, and that the connection with the prophecy

is a later interpretation. That’s what some people argue, and it’s a serious position that needs to be addressed .  I have two objections.  The first is that Suleiman closed that door and did not close the others. If the problem was defensive, why are the other gates of Jerusalem still open today?  And the second one is simpler.

  He closed the only door through which two religions say the Messiah will enter.  Exactly that one.  And if that ‘s a coincidence, it’s one of the most precise coincidences in history.  I want us to go down to the valley because the land between the gate and the mountain has its own story and it’s chilling. The Kidron Valley is a ravine, a hollow that separates the eastern wall of Jerusalem.  from the Mount of Olives.

  And to cross from one side to the other you have to go down and then back up again.  And that valley is full of graves, not just a few, tens of thousands.  The slopes of the Mount of Olives are the oldest Jewish cemetery in the world in continuous use. Graves everywhere covering the entire slope, facing the city, white stones piled one on top of the other climbing up the hill.

  And on the other side, attached to the wall, the Muslim cemetery ordered by Suleiman, and in the middle the ravine. And now I’ll explain why it’s full of dead people.  Because in the book of Joel there is a prophecy that says that the nations will be gathered in the valley of Jehoshaphat and that there they will be judged.

  And tradition identifies the valley of Jehoshaphat with the Kidron Valley.  That ravine, that ravine is, according to that reading, instead of the final judgment.  And that is why for centuries people have wanted to be buried there to be in the front row, so that when the day comes, when the time comes to play, they are already there and do not have to come from far away.

Think about that for a moment.  Tens of thousands of people chose the place where they would spend eternity, calculating the logistics of the final judgment.  And now add it all up.  A door boarded up by a sultan who was afraid of a prophecy. A cemetery placed in front, deliberately positioned to block a priest.

A valley filled with tens of thousands of dead who were buried there to be close when judgment comes.  And opposite is the hill from which, according to another book, the feet of the one who returns will land.  All of that in a space of less than 1 km.  That kilometer of land is probably the square meter most charged with eschatological expectation on the entire planet.

  Everyone there is waiting for something.  Those who boarded up the door hoped to prevent it.  Those who were buried in the hillside were waiting to witness it.  And those who pray today on both sides of the wall continue to wait.  And in the middle of all that, a closed door.  And there’s something under that door that very few people know about, and it seems to me the most unsettling detail of all.

  The golden gate that you see today, those two stone arches covered with ashlar blocks, is not the original gate, it is a later construction. Specialists debate its exact dating, and most place it in Byzantine times or in the early centuries of Islamic rule, that is, centuries after the time of Jesus.  And here many skeptics rightly say that the story falls apart, that if that door did not exist in the first century, then Jesus could not have entered through it and the whole edifice collapses.

  But wait, because there’s something underneath.  In the 1960s and 1970s and in subsequent work, the existence of an earlier structure was detected under the current golden gate , remains of an older gate, buried below the current ground level, several meters deep.  And that previous door is much older.  Some have linked it to the time of the second temple, that is, to the correct time.

   It ‘s not resolved.  There is debate.  The area is politically impossible to excavate normally because any archaeological excavation in the vicinity of the temple mount triggers an international diplomatic crisis.  You can’t dig, you can’t investigate freely. So what we have are clues, old photographs, observations from researchers who managed to look at specific moments, and a suspicion—the suspicion that beneath the sealed door there is another, older door, also sealed, and that if that one were opened, if someone were to excavate and

clear the original level and reveal the threshold through which one entered in the first century, that would be the real threshold. And it can’t be touched because the ground is several meters above, because there’s a cemetery in front of it, because any excavation would cause a conflict, and simply because nobody dares.

  So we have a boarded-up door on top of another boarded-up door and neither of them can be opened and they both face the same mountain.  And I want to tell you something that almost nobody knows, and that is that Suleiman was not the only one who tried to do something with that door.  There have been more attempts and they have all ended the same way.

  At the beginning of the 20th century, still under Ottoman rule, the complete demolition of the gate was even considered.  Not to cover it up, to tear it down, to rip it from the wall and make it disappear, because they considered it a symbol of Jewish hope, which was better to eliminate completely than to leave it there, blinded, but visible, reminding everyone what it represented.

  And those plans were never implemented. Political events intervened.  Jerusalem changed hands. The Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, and with it collapsed the plans of everyone in charge.  And the door remained.  And then came 1967, which I’ve already told you about, when the door could have been opened but it wasn’t.

  And now look at the pattern, because that’s what makes this matter so difficult to file away.  Those who wanted to destroy it could not.  Those who could have opened it refused.  And in both cases the result is the same.  The door remains exactly as it was, closed, [music] neither open nor destroyed, in the exact state described in the text of Ezekiel.

  And so it has survived 500 years of the most violent and disputed history on the planet.  Jerusalem has changed hands several times.  There have been wars, sieges, occupations, intifadas, attacks, bombings, and that wall of ashlar blocks has not moved.  Now the rational explanation is obvious, and I’m going to tell you because I don’t want to sell you magic where there’s politics.

  The rational explanation is that this door is in such a sensitive, charged, and explosive location that no one dares to touch it, because touching it would trigger a regional conflict.  And that’s true.   That ‘s absolutely true.  But look at what I just said.  Nobody dares to touch her.  And now you tell me why.

  Because it’s not just any wall.  It is the wall that two religions guard.  And that vigilance, that burden, that symbolic weight that makes it so that no government, no army and no empire dares to lay a hand on it. Where does it come from?  It comes from the text, it comes from the fact that 2500 years ago a man deported to Babylon wrote that the eastern gate would be closed and the whole world, even if it doesn’t recognize it, even if it laughs at the prophecies, even if it considers itself secular and modern, is paying attention to him.  Nobody opens it, nobody

tears it down, nobody touches it, and it’s been like that for 500 years.  And now we go to 1967, because it is the moment when everything could have changed and it didn’t.  June 1967, war, 6 days.  And in those 6 days, Israeli forces took the Old City of Jerusalem.  Let’s understand the weight of that.

  For the Jewish people, that was the end of a wait of almost 2000 years.  the old city, the temple mount, the Wailing Wall, which they had not had access to for decades.  There is a radio recording from that day of an Israeli officer, his voice breaking, announcing that the Temple Mount is in their hands.  It is one of the most emotional recordings of the 20th century.

   They were inside and the golden door was there, sealed by a Tomarian sultan 426 years before.  And now, for the first time since then, those who controlled that wall were Jews, they had the power to open it, they had the means, they had the authority, they had the machines, and they also had every symbolic reason in the world to do so.

  Knocking down the stone that a Muslim empire had placed to block the arrival of its Messiah would have been a gesture of immense power; it would have been the image of the century.  And they didn’t, they didn’t open it. And the reason that has been told ever since, and that is repeated in many stories, is that there were religious voices that warned very clearly against it, that that door is not opened by an army, that that door is not opened by a government, that that door is opened by one person alone, and that one person has not yet arrived.  And they

stopped.  [music] And I want you to appreciate what that means because it’s very rare.  A victorious army at the height of its victory, with absolute power over a territory it had been waiting 2000 years to recover, stands in front of a wall and decides not to touch it out of respect for a text. And from 1967 to today, more than half a century, [music] with Jerusalem under Israeli control, with all the technology in the world available, the gate remains sealed and the cemetery remains in front.

  And the stone that that anonymous mason placed in 1541 is still exactly where he put it.  And now I have to talk to you about 2019, because there are a lot of people saying that the door opened that year.  And I’ll tell you the truth, even though it takes my strength, it didn’t open.

  I’m going to tell you what really happened, because it’s interesting, but it’s not what you’ve been told.  Behind the golden gate, within the temple hill enclosure, there are rooms, an interior space, rooms that in Arabic are known as Bab al Rahma.  And those rooms have their own door, a modern metal door that has nothing to do with the stone blocks that Suleiman’s mason laid .

  That interior space was closed.  It was closed by Israeli authorities in 2003 for political and security reasons in the context of the tensions of those years.  And in February 2019, some activists forced open that metal door and went inside and prayed .  And there were photos and there were videos and there was considerable political conflict with arrests and protests.

  That’s what happened.  It was a dispute over the use of a venue, not a prophetic opening.  The golden gate, the stone gate, the one in the outer wall, the one that Suleiman covered up, was not touched.  It’s still covered up.  It’s boarded up right now .  While you’re listening to this, you can look it up.

  You can look at a photo from this year.  The ashlars are where they were.  And I could have told you the other version.  I could have told you that in 2019 the door started breathing from the inside and it would have sounded mysterious and you would have believed me and this video would have been more exciting and I would have lied to you.

And a year from now, when someone told you that it wasn’t like that, you would have felt like an idiot, and rightly so.  So no.  What you see is what you get.  a boarded-up door since 1541, a cemetery in front and a 2500-year-old text that says it will be closed.  And let me tell you something, that’s extraordinary enough.

  There is no need to add anything because the real fact, the pure fact, without embellishment, is this.  Almost 500 years have passed. The Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire have fallen.   There have been two world wars. The airplane, the atomic bomb, the computer, and the internet have been invented.

  Man has been to the moon and that door remains closed. I want to stop and ask you a question that has nothing to do with religion.  What truly frightens the powerful?  Because we’ve spent this whole hour talking about a man who controlled armies, territories, trade routes, and fleets.  A man who could order the death of thousands of people with a gesture.

  And that man was afraid of a sentence written in a book, not of an army, of a sentence, and he decided to fight it with stones.  And this, if you think about it, is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history and never works.  The powerful always believe that ideas can be stopped with matter.   They burn books, brick up doors, build walls, imprison people, ban words [music] and always, always the result is the same.

  Matter degrades, ideas do not.  Suleiman is dead, his empire is dead, the bricklayers are dead.  The gravestones in their cemetery have eroded with the wind, rain, and sun, and many of the names are no longer legible.  And Ezekiel’s words remain there, unchanged.   It is still being read, still being quoted, still being discussed, and is available in more languages today than in all of previous history.

There are more copies of that text on the planet right now than at any time since it was written.  The sultan lost.  He lost completely.  And he didn’t lose because someone went through the door; nobody has gone through it.  He lost because in trying to destroy the prophecy he became part of it.

  And now everyone who looks at that door remembers Ezekiel and Suleiman, they remember him only because he tried to close it. His great work in Jerusalem is a magnificent set of walls that almost no one knows are his.  And what he is remembered for in this story is a wall of ashlar blocks in a wall that he blinded out of fear.

  That’s what the prophecy did to him.  He turned it into a footnote by his own enemy.  And that , I believe, is the lesson that lies beneath all of this.  And it has nothing to do with believing or not believing, that there are things that cannot be covered up and that when someone tries, the only thing they achieve is to demonstrate how afraid they were.

  And we’ve reached the end.  And I want to tell you what I believe and also what I don’t know, because both things matter.  What I don’t know is if that door will ever open.  Don’t know .  Nobody knows.  And anyone who tells you they know when is lying to you and is probably asking you for money. What I do know is what’s out there.

  And this is what we have .  There is a gate in the eastern wall of Jerusalem.  It has been sealed off since 1541. It was sealed off by the most powerful man of his time out of fear, because he believed enough in the prophecies of a religion that was not his own, to spend money blocking them.  And if the stone wasn’t enough, he put dead bodies in front of it.

  And that gate faces directly towards the Mount of Olives.  And there is a text written 2,500 years ago by a man deported to Babylon that says the eastern gate will be closed because God entered through it and it is closed.  And the one who closed it was a man who wanted to prove that the text was worthless, and all he did was fulfill that promise.

  That’s the story, and it leaves me feeling a bit unsettled, and I’m going to try to explain to you that it’s not a prophecy.  It is not the possibility that someone will ever cross that threshold again .  Frankly, that doesn’t keep me up at night, and everyone should resolve it with their own conscience.

  What leaves me unsettled is the gesture.  He is an extremely powerful man, owner of half the world, with armies that made Europe tremble, who is so afraid of a promise written in an ancient book, that he orders a door to be boarded up and then, still afraid, returns and orders people to be buried in front of it.  And yet, even with the stone, even with the dead, even with all the power of the Ottoman Empire behind him, that man died, his empire died, the masons who laid those stones died, and no one remembers their names.  And the door is still

there, closed, just like the book says.  And now you can believe that it is a historical coincidence, one of many that exist.  Or you can believe something else.  I’m not going to tell you what to think, I’m just going to leave you with the image.  A stone wall in Jerusalem, a cemetery at its feet [music] and opposite, on the other side of the valley, a hill full of olive trees.

  Waiting for both things to face each other for 500 years.  M.