Like kidnap victims who defend their captors, many modern Jews have become comfortable in exile, resisting the very redemption their ancestors yearned for in a kind of religious Stockholm syndrome.
The destruction of our Temple has always been viewed by our faith as an open wound in our national body. To cope with this, the sages of old created practices, formalised prayer most prominent among them, as a way of coping with the loss of national sovereignty and identity, a way of persisting in exile in lieu of a Temple and sacrifices
Today, many Torah-observant Jews have come to view our current situation as ideal.
We don’t want the return of the Temple; indeed, many relish the fact that Judaism has moved into the cleaner, more acceptable intellectual realm. Rather than wishing for the return of God’s presence among us, we look at the Temple as a backward institution of yesteryear, better left in the dustbin of history.
This viewpoint is an error, and in rabbinic thought, lies at the heart of what keeps the final redemption at bay.
“There are three things they will come to despise: the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of the House of David, and the building of the Temple… Rabbi Shimon ben Menasia said: Israel will not see a sign of blessing in the world until they return and seek these three things” (Midrash Shemuel, Buber edition 13:4).
More than half of our Torah is devoted to the construction of the Tabernacle, the order of the service and the sacrifices, and the accompanying laws of purity. Throughout rabbinic literature, laws connected to the Temple, like sacrifices and purity, are learnt and debated with the full expectation that they will again become reality.
Further, the Temple is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. It is mentioned in our prayers, at our meals, at weddings and when we build our homes. The structure of the sacrifices is the template for the prayers. The Kohanim and Levi’im who are properly honoured in our society are treated thus by dint of their positions in the service in the Temple. The central focus of our holiest day, Yom Kippur, is the service of the High Priest in the Temple.
The misunderstanding of the Temple's significance extends to one of its most central and controversial aspects: animal sacrifices. Many modern Jews, accustomed to the intellectual and seemingly more “civilised” practices of prayer and study, recoil at the idea of returning to a system of animal offerings. Some even argue that the practice is barbaric.
This viewpoint misunderstands human nature.
Modern society has allowed us, for this brief blip in the history of humanity, to believe that we are above the organic nature of the world. We live sterile, clean lives, where our meat is prepared for us in a butcher shop and our eggs arrive packaged in cardboard and plastic in the supermarket.
This is not reality and breeds a very dangerous relationship to the world around us. We are removed from what it takes to live on Earth — the physical struggle and toil, the blood and flesh of animals that we consume, the backbreaking labour that was the lot of humans for nearly all of their history. We are enraptured by an “optical delusion of consciousness”, in Einstein’s words, experiencing ourselves as “separated from the rest” of the universe.
The Temple, with its insistence and emphasis on non-sterility, on the dirty, organic nature of our existence, calls us to internalise who and what we are, “for you are dust and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). It is no accident that we read many times in the Torah, “for in blood is the life-force”. The Temple brings us face to face, in a visceral way, with our continuity with the universe.
Others argue the Temple is rife for misuse, as with all power structures.
This is true, but hardly a reason to derogate the Temple.
Our human nature is such that it lends itself, at times, to corruption. That does not mean, though, that we give up our most important and valued institutions because they could become corrupted. People are fallible and fail often. This process is intrinsic to the making of a righteous person and a righteous nation, part of the process of becoming a worthy human being; as Solomon writes, “the righteous will fall seven times and rise up again”.
The idea of a Temple has always been challenging, and our Tanach is replete with our struggles as a nation in accepting God in our midst. But let us not make the mistake for one moment of thinking that we’ve somehow moved past the Temple.
The Temple, properly conceived of, was the beating heart of our people. It was the place where God’s presence was most readily felt, the place where God “dwelt” among us. God's entire vision of Judaism, as told to us in His Torah, is a world where He lives in our midst, and where we are worthy of that relationship.
On Tishah b’Av, we grieve not only for the physical loss of the Temple but also for what that loss represents — our current distance from the ideal relationship with the Divine that the Temple embodies. We yearn for a day, soon to come, when we are again worthy of God’s presence.
Sam Millunchick is the rabbi of Belmont (United) Synagogue
