In the Prologue to The Wisdom of Jokes, Alejandro Jodorowsky discusses his zen master Ejo Takata and what he learned. One of the things he learned was this:
"A temple isn't the "exclusive" place of the sacred.
You go to a temple to learn the meaning of the sacred.
If you've understood the lesson, the entire world becomes a temple."
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And so what is holy - everything, or nothing?
Don't answer, or you will slip past the point.
"A temple isn't the "exclusive" place of the sacred."
According to the prophets of Ancient Israel, that's exactly what the Temple was. Unless you say you are only talking about your own temples, not that Temple, an opinion to the contrary has no validity.
"You go to a temple to learn the meaning of the sacred."
The Israelites went to the Temple to sacrifice, and rightly so, since their God required this of them.
Many an ancient sailor went to a temple for the temple prostitutes, and that was just fine by the rules.
If you were to say "we go to our temples to ..." and specified who you were, what your doctrine was, and how your temples worked, that would be fine. Otherwise you're just babbling.
"If you've understood the lesson, the entire world becomes a temple."
Not according to the prophets of Ancient Israel, who one must respect if only for their stubborn loyalty to their God: this place is the right one for sacrifices, and all those high places are wrong and unacceptable. It was not all one big temple.
Of course other people followed other gods and had other rules and other perspectives on this. An Egyptian sage might have said: the cosmos already a temple, and if you don't know it the gods do, so get with the program!
To pronounce as though you were an authority on the meanings of temples you know nothing about is baseless and folly. To defer to such an empty teacher and "learn" such nonsense is worse. To strike a superior pose as a hip insider who's in on what you wrongly suppose must be a deep, hidden meaning of some kind is even less impressive. I won't agree with any of that.
I don't mean to offend or denigrate anyone here. This is not personal. Nor is it about any kind of ill-will.
I backed away from discussion of what seems to me to be religious cant, when it was concerned with internal matters. If zen masters and sufis want to play games of verbal one-upmanship, that's their right. They are operating within the rules of their religions.
But the discussion just shifted to temples in general, and even (in a related thread) to the Great Pyramid. Here I'm calling "baseless!"
I can't imagine why the opinions of the prophets of Ancient Israel would matter in the slightest to a Zen Master.
Note the source of this quote.
I'll note, also, that Judaism's conception of The Temple and the sacred has changed radically since the destruction of the Temple about 2,000 years ago. So invoking them on this subject doesn't get you very far even in an entirely Jewish context.