“Listen carefully,” Rabbi Tovia Singer told his interviewer, leaning toward the camera. “Daniel was a holy prophet who gives us this unbelievable revelation at the very end. So much revelation that an angel comes and says, ‘Shut the book. You’re giving away the time of the end.'”
Then Rabbi Singer did the math. “Happy is the one who waits. Are you ready? 1,335 years. Stop. 691, using a secular dating. Add that 1,335. You’re in the year 2026.”
The remarks came in a recent episode of Parsha Inspired, the YouTube podcast hosted by Rabbi Aron Sokol. Rabbi Singer, the founder of Outreach Judaism and one of the best-known Bible teachers in the Jewish world, laid out a reading of the final chapter of the Book of Daniel that ties the prophet’s numbers directly to the Dome of the Rock, the reunification of Jerusalem, and the building of the Third Temple. He urged viewers to check his work. “I plead with you, the viewer, to please look it up. Don’t trust me,” he said. “We’re living in such a time. And it’s happening now.”
The question at the heart of the interview is one that has occupied Jewish scholars for more than two thousand years: what did the angel mean when he gave Daniel two numbers, and from what point does the count begin?
The Numbers in Daniel 12
The Book of Daniel closes with a cryptic exchange. Daniel is told to seal his prophecy “even to the time of the end,” and is then given two figures:
“And from the time that the continual burnt-offering shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days. Happy is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.” (Daniel 12:11-12)
Rabbi Singer read the “days” as years. “I just want to be very clear so everyone understands that when the word day is used in Daniel, it always means a year,” he said.
The starting point, he argued, is the moment the “abomination that maketh desolate” was erected on the site of the Temple. For Rabbi Singer, that structure is the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691 CE.
He stressed that the label has nothing to do with idols inside the building. “It’s not because there are any idols in there. There’s nothing,” he said. “It’s because it sits on top of the holy of holies, which is the Jewish holy place. It’s the essence of everything. It’s from where heaven and earth, where literally the world was created from that spot. That’s it. Full stop.”
Counting 1,290 years from that point, Rabbi Singer arrived at the year Israel declared a united Jerusalem its capital. The Knesset passed the Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel in July 1980. “And then it says happy is the one that waits 1,335 years for the redemption,” he said. “And it’s happening now.”
How the Dome Was Built
Rabbi Singer traced the history of the site from the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638 CE. Islamic sources record that the Caliph Umar, after the Byzantine surrender of the city, sought out the location of the Temple. Rabbi Singer described how the Muslim leader “takes a Jew and asks him, tell me where the exact stone is, which is the Even Shetiyah,” the Foundation Stone. Islamic tradition identifies the man as Ka’b al-Ahbar, a Jewish convert to Islam.
“This event is not just in our sources. It’s in Islamic sources as well,” Rabbi Singer said. “This is not some mythical thing. The Muslims all know about this.”
The Mount itself, he said, had been deliberately turned into a garbage heap under Byzantine Christian rule. “The Christians used it as a garbage place deliberately because they wanted to say that the destruction of the Temple Mount was a sign that God was done with the Jews,” he said. “And this is what happened to Judaism. It’s over.”
The Muslim rulers had Jews clear the debris. Construction of the Dome began in 688, with Jewish artisans among the workers, and was finished in 691. “So they really, really wanted to supplant,” Rabbi Singer said. “Unlike the Christians that said we’ll make it into a garbage can, the Muslims said no, we’re going to build our Dome of the Rock, not a mosque, right over the place of the Mikdash,” the Temple.
Rabbi Singer framed the Dome as a theological statement. “Both Christianity and Islam believe they’ve replaced us. And that’s very critical,” he said. “The church believed that the Jews were once chosen, but now the church is the new Israel, and therefore the Jews cannot return back and have sovereignty over the Temple Mount. That can’t be.”
The rebuilding of the Temple, in his view, overturns that claim at its foundation. “When the Beit HaMikdash is built on exactly Mount Moriah, on the holy place where the holy of holies is, what happens is it destroys what Islamic thinking spread and what the church thought,” he said. “It will tell the world that the church fathers were wrong.”
Knowledge of God Brings Peace
Rabbi Singer insisted that the prophecies of the end of days are written plainly for this generation. “This can’t be complicated, reserved for unique scholars that have access to unique esoteric knowledge,” he said. “It has to be very simple, just like Purim. It was a very simple event. What Haman was up to was transparent. We’re living in such a time.”
He described the order of events in the Messianic era as cause and effect. Peace comes as a result of the nations recognizing the God of Israel. “Ants don’t cause humans to have picnics,” he said. “The Messiah will rebuke the nations. Isaiah 2:3 and 4. He will judge among the peoples. They will then stream to recognize the one true God of Israel. The result of that, there’ll be peace on earth.”
Rabbi Singer turned to the camera and pointed his audience to the closing verse of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones: “And the nations shall know that I am the LORD that sanctifies Israel, when My sanctuary shall be in the midst of them for ever.” (Ezekiel 37:28)
“It is the knowledge of God that brings peace, and my Beit HaMikdash will be there, and that’s how it ends,” he said. “We’re not crazy people. Just for a moment, suspend. Go on your computer. Ezekiel 37:28.”
He cited Maimonides, the Rambam, to explain why wars end in that era. “When all the nations worship one true God, the result is that war will come to an end, because wars are really there because of a difference of ideology,” he said.
The Candle and the Tzitzit
Rabbi Singer addressed his largely non-Jewish audience directly. “Most of our viewers, I’m sure, are not Jewish,” he said. “That means we are teaching Torah as best we can, and doing our best that we should only be a vessel.”
He pointed to Isaiah’s promise that “nations shall walk at thy light, and kings at the brightness of thy rising” (Isaiah 60:3), and explained why the prophet chose the image of light. “If I’m holding a candle, I could illuminate an unlimited number of other candles, and it doesn’t diminish from my candle,” he said. “If I had a pail of water and I gave other people water, my water goes down. But with fire, I can illuminate billions of candles, but my candle remains lit. The light of Klal Yisrael,” the people of Israel, “remains lit.”
He connected this to Zechariah’s prophecy: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts: In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold, out of all the languages of the nations, shall even take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying: We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” (Zechariah 8:23)
Following Rashi, Rabbi Singer identified the corner of the garment as the tzitzit, the ritual fringes commanded to Jews in the Book of Numbers. “Why the tzitzit? Because they’re saying at the end, we realize that you were the only one who’s supposed to wear tzitzit. That commandment is not in the seven Noahide laws. It’s only for the Jew,” he said. “We’re living in that time, my holy brother. We’re living in that time of ten Gentiles who grab the tzitzit of a Jew.”
Rabbi Singer said the vision he is describing comes from the Rambam, who taught that the spread of Christianity and Islam across the globe prepares the world for the Messiah. Billions of people, he explained, already hold “a concept of God, a basic outline, a concept of commandments, a concept that there’s a Torah.”
“That’s why we don’t want to say anything anti-Muslim or Christian. That’s not the point of this conversation,” he said. “When the true Messiah comes, and the Jews are there, and the Beit HaMikdash is built on that spot, then they’ll grab the tzitzit and say, you were always the one who was committed to it.”
The Count Runs Out
By Rabbi Singer’s reckoning, the clock Daniel was told to seal started the day a golden dome rose over the Even Shetiyah, passed its first marker when the Knesset declared Jerusalem whole, and reaches its final number this year. Daniel was given no further details, only an instruction and a blessing: “Go thou thy way till the end be; and thou shalt rest, and shalt stand up to thy lot, at the end of the days” (Daniel 12:13). Rabbi Singer’s message to his viewers was the same one the angel gave the prophet. The ones who wait for it are called happy.