Meir Kraus
This article originally appeared in Hebrew in Ofakim and is published here with permission. English translation by Levi Morrow.
The Desire for the Temple
In recent decades, Israeli society has seen the emergence of a new phenomenon within its religious sector, a new movement which aspires to rebuild the Temple, if not immediately, then in the foreseeable future. This movement, which encourages people to ascend to the Temple Mount and engages in a wide variety of educational activities, constitutes a dramatic religious, theological, and historical shift in Jewish life. At the heart of this shift lies the attempt to breathe life into a messianic vision of the Temple—to spread the desire to rebuild the Temple and restore sacrificial worship. This movement seeks to instill in the hearts and minds of Jewish believers the sense that sacrificial worship in the Temple is in fact the ultimate form of religious worship (avodat Hashem).
Traditionally, Jews saw the Temple as an object of prayer and yearning but believed that its construction should be left in the hands of Heaven, to be carried out at the End of History. This new movement, however, is turning the vision of a restored Temple into a realistic goal to be attained via human endeavor. The Temple has spent the last two thousand years inhabiting Jewish memory, ritual life, and mythological language, but, through the activism of these Temple visionaries, it has returned to real life.
For generations, common practice by all manner of observant Jews forbade ascending to the Temple Mount. Then, in 1996, the Rabbinic Council of Judea and Samaria put out a call for people to ascend to the Temple Mount, while of course observing all Jewish laws involved.[1] This kicked off a significant wave of Jewish ascents to the Temple Mount and, today, hundreds of rabbis permit ascending to the Temple Mount and even encourage their congregants to do so.
The Temple organizations are also engaged in a variety of activities aimed at centering the idea of the Temple in public consciousness. These activities aim at implanting the Temple vision in the hearts and minds of the community, but also at developing and transmitting the knowledge that would be necessary for building the Temple with all its vessels and implements. These organizations even train Priests (kohanim) and Levites in the details of their roles within the sanctum. Their educational endeavors take a variety of forms, including seminars, exhibits, conferences, rituals, lectures, parades around the Temple Mount, printing prayer books with images and visual aids depicting the Temple and its worship, children’s books, and more.
These endeavors have been broadly successful and have drawn many people to the movement. The number of Jews ascending to the Temple Mount has increased year over year.[2] Public support—even in the secular and traditionalist (mesorati) sectors—has steadily grown both for ascending to the Temple Mount and for praying there.[3] Once marginal, Temple Mount activists are now an integral part of the religious-nationalist elite. Even the internal discourse around the Temple in Religious Zionist study halls (batei midrash) has expanded beyond all previous scales, including a vast collection of essays, books, and lectures.
Motti Inbari, Haviva Pedaya, and others, have analyzed the origins and causes of this new focus on the Temple and the Temple Mount, and why it has emerged in this specific historical moment.[4] Inbari claims that the movement emerged in the wake of the Oslo Accords and reflects a common pattern taken by messianic movements as recognized in messianism research: moments of dissonance between historical reality and messianic vision lead to crisis, causing many believers to double-down on their devotion to the vision and to attempt to restore the progression of history to its messianic path. Pedaya describes similar processes, but she focuses on the Disengagement from Gaza and Northern Samaria as an event that intensified the call for restoring the Temple and the Temple Mount. She further claims that some Temple Mount activists maintain a redemptive vision wherein they attribute to the Temple Mount and to their activism a mystical capacity to reorganize reality itself in accord with their redemptive vision.
These mystical and redemptive motives do not suffice to explain the movement, however. Temple Mount activists are also clear-eyed political actors who believe that any concession of Israeli land will lead the Jewish people to lose hold of the Temple Mount, failing the test of this historical opportunity to set in motion the future of the Temple. For instance, R. Eliezer Melamed claims that, in principle, ascending to the Temple Mount ought to be forbidden. It is only in order to contest the dominant presence of Muslims on the Mount that it is, in fact, permitted for Jews to ascend to the Temple Mount.[5] A number of rabbis even ruled—quite radically—that not only may Jews ascend the Temple Mount, they may even walk across every inch of its surface, including those places where halakhah absolutely otherwise prohibits it. This is because the purpose of ascending to the Temple Mount is to create Jewish presence on the Mount as part of the struggle for control over it, and it therefore falls under the halakhic category of acts of “conquest” (kibbush).[6] The movement’s attempt to realize its messianic vision therefore cannot be reduced to a purely religious project. It serves also as part of a political strategy in a struggle for sovereignty and dominance. That being said, when it comes to the Temple and the Temple Mount, attempting to distinguish between religious and political motivations is a project doomed to failure; for most of the Temple Mount activists, the two are inextricably intertwined.
We should note that, alongside the new focus on the Temple and the Temple Mount, there have been people who oppose the movement, citing traditional halakhic prohibitions and theological claims in tandem with geopolitical concerns. The primary ideological divide between the Temple movement and its opponents concerns how and when the Temple vision should be realized, whether it will be built by God (bi-dei Shamayim) or by human hands (bi-dei adam), etc.—not the content of that vision itself. Both groups yearn for a day when the Temple will be restored to its place, and the sacrificial worship will be observed in all its minutiae, just as before the Temple was destroyed. Neither group is willing to grapple directly with the problems this vision sets before contemporary religious Jews. Ironically, while Religious Zionist study halls echo with discussions of the Temple and the Temple worship to an unprecedented degree, there is very little in the way of deep discussion of the content of the Temple vision and the challenges it represents.
We Need to Talk About the Temple
Taking the religious vision of the Temple seriously means grappling with deep theological, moral, and even aesthetic issues. These are not questions we can push off until the end of history (le-atid la-vo); they are burning contemporary problems which we have to deal with now, before the vision of the future is realized. The Temple vision destabilizes and challenges prevailing Jewish practice, with potentially radical implications for the religious experience, theology, and faith of the modern believer.
Historically speaking, we must keep in mind that the Temple(s) and the sacrificial worship only physically existed for a fraction of the time Jews have been living their religious lives. Over the two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish tradition took shape in its absence—as did the religious lives of Jews. The Jewish sages developed worldviews, customs, and practices, creating a whole alternative way to be religious. The sages explicitly described many of these practices—such as prayer, Torah study, and acts of kindness (gemilut hasadim)—as substitutes for the Temple worship, or even as superior to it.[7]
For Jews who seek to draw close to their God, the Jewish tradition created a comprehensive, all-encompassing religiosity, providing a sense of divine closeness, a religious vision of the future, and rites and rituals meant to help realize that vision. Judaism’s comprehensive religious praxis commands a person to observe certain rituals and to live a life of devotion. It awakens within them yearnings for the sacred, inspiring within them a desire for closeness to God, and directing them to live an ethical life as part of a religious community. Judaism today provides everything the contemporary believer needs in order to live a full, religious life.
That being said, the vision of the Temple is present in every corner of the Jewish tradition. The Temple was imagined as the axis mundi, the primary channel between heaven and earth—the place where one could attain closeness to God. The sacrificial worship in the Temple was not just one more form of Jewish ritual practice; it was uniquely capable of bringing a Jew into contact—and connection—with God.[8] After the destruction of the Temple, the sages embedded and enshrined the memory of the Temple and the sacrifices—as well as the mourning for its loss and the hope for its restoration—into Jews’ everyday ritual life. They made texts about the Temple and sacrifices into a significant portion of the Jewish canon, and wove images of the Temple and sacrifices into their utopian visions of the messianic era.
In this manner, over the course of generations, Judaism developed a split between the actual experience of daily religious life and the vision of the Temple embedded in the rituals themselves. While this religious experience is itself full and rich, the specific content of this religious language expresses the desire for a totally different form of worship: the sacrificial worship in the Temple. The intensity of this split results from the way that the Temple worship is not only opposed to the prevailing tradition, but is also deeply foreign and threatening to it.
Religious Jews throughout history have found different means of coping with this tension: the power of prevailing custom and commitment to it, physical distance from the geographical space of the Temple, the unrealistic nature of trying to plan to realize the Temple vision, and mental distance from the space as a result of the halakhic prohibitions against going there and of the theological texts which grant the Temple tremendous symbolic and mythic dimensions. Now, however, we have much greater access to the Temple Mount. Partisans of the Temple vision refer to the idea of the Temple as “samukh ve-nir’eh,” literally “nearby and visible,” because of how attainable the dream now seems. There is a massive, multi-channel educational project aimed at spreading the Temple vision into popular consciousness and restoring the Temple from the realm of myth to real life. There are people claiming that we can and should be actively fulfilling the commandment of building the Temple. The delicate balance created and maintained over generations has thus been destroyed.
I want to have a conversation wherein we think deeply and seriously about the content of the Temple vision and the challenges it presents. The conversation is meant for anyone who cares deeply for the Jewish tradition and who sees value in maintaining or preserving it. I primarily have in mind those faithful upholders of the living tradition, those who feel the dissonance between the act of daily prayer and the words they say in that prayer—words which seek to restore sacrificial worship—between their deepest religious intuitions and their fundamental commitment to rabbinic Judaism, on the one hand, and the realization of the vision of the Temple, on the other.
The Challenge of Returning to “The Place” (Ha-Makom)
Daily religious life, as shaped by the Jewish tradition after the destruction of the Second Temple, contains no one specific, concrete space wherein an individual can encounter God. The Jewish encounter with God takes place primarily within a person’s consciousness, in the moment when they perform a religious act, without depending on, or being mediated by, a holy space. The roots of this religious experience run deep within the tradition, finding their anchor in a theology which challenges the idea that a transcendent, infinite God could ever have self-limited into a specific place. Lacking a “place,” religious worship focuses on the direct relationship between a person and their creator. In this model, a person’s holiness derives from their actions and behavior, not from the place in which they stand, nor from any other external factor. This is the critical distinction between contemporary religious experience and how people in the era of the Temple understood religious experience—as something local to a specific, geographic place where individuals could go to encounter God. Although the Jewish tradition does maintain the idea of holy spaces, the religious experience of the modern believer can take place anywhere.
The Challenge of Sacrificial Worship
The form taken by worship in the Temple presents even more difficult challenges for the modern Jew. A gaping abyss separates how we think of religious experience today from the sort of religious experience expected by those who want to bring back sacrificial worship. Jewish sacrificial worship came to an end with the destruction of the Second Temple, and pagan sacrificial worship in the region was outlawed by the Roman Empire when the Empire became Christian in the fourth century CE. Over the centuries, sacrificial worship came to be rejected and seen as strange throughout the cultural, religious, and geographic spaces of all three monotheistic religions.
Sacrificial worship is deeply foreign to contemporary believers in a variety of ways. The desire to sacrifice or offer something to God—for the sake of atonement for sin, as a gesture of gratitude, in order to effect change in reality, or as a symbolic act of self-sacrifice—is indeed familiar to the modern religious person, both personally and as part of their religious tradition. But the idea of giving something physical to God is not—in fact, it comes across as deeply strange. Over the course of history, the individual’s self-sacrifice in the act of fulfilling God’s will replaced the act of sacrificing something physical to God. Giving to poor people, widows, orphans, and strangers—to whom God commanded we give charity and engage in acts of kindness—replaced giving gifts to God. In the absence of the Temple, imitating God (halikhah bi-derakhav) and performing acts which embody religious devotion took the place of sacrificial worship. These historical and ritual changes correspond to a theological change: modern believers do not worship the sort of God to whom one would give a physical gift. The God who wants offerings of grain and meat is worlds apart from the God who seeks the actions and spirit of the individual. This shift naturally creates an entirely different kind of relationship between God and the believer.
Another deeply foreign element of the sacrificial worship which the Temple activists wish to restore is the mediation of worship via the priesthood—the people who actually perform the sacrifices. Shifting from an unmediated, individual worship of God to a mediated, hierarchical form of worship would create distance between the individual and God, and would harm their sense of having a personal connection to God.
Beyond how foreign sacrificing animals is to modern believers, it also strikes them as religiously and ethically problematic. The idea that the brutal, violent act of killing an animal, burning its flesh, and sprinkling its blood constitutes sacred worship designed to bring a person closer to God is hard to imagine. Even just on an aesthetic level, we recoil from the thought that the site of holiness and divine encounter would be a slaughterhouse. Look at how much effort modern society puts into hiding the meat processing industry from view! We can barely tolerate the ethics and aesthetics of the process as something which provides us with food. We certainly cannot imagine it as religiously valuable. An unbridgeable chasm separates the Sages’ glowing depiction of priests up to their knees in the blood of sacrifices (Pesahim 65b) from the religious experience of the modern believer.
We see sacrificial worship as fundamentally similar to pagan worship, and it makes us uncomfortable. Even if we can make theoretical distinctions between the two forms of worship, they look too similar in practice, as the Jewish tradition itself notes.[9]
From a theological perspective, restoring the Temple and the sacrifices would threaten to breathe new life into anthropomorphic ideas about God. Any activity which emphasizes God’s presence in some physical sense risks becoming the first step on the path to anthropomorphism—and the slippery slope to idolatry. This is no theoretical concern; it has real historical precedent, such as the recurring prophetic critiques of idolatry in the Temple.[10]
Traditional Worship vs. Worship in the Temple
The reappearance of the Temple vision raises questions about the relationship between the imagined and expected worship in the Temple and actually existing Jewish religious praxis. The Temple vision contains an implicit expectation that contemporary religious praxis, in whole or in part, will be replaced by sacrificial worship—“the worship of God in its ideal form.”[11] Returning to a sacrifice-first model of worshiping God would be a revolution, one which would be expected to overturn traditional Jewish religious praxis.
To highlight the difference between these two forms of worship, imagine how Yom Kippur looked in the Temple in contrast to how it has looked in the generations since the destruction of the Second Temple. Today, Jews primarily experience Yom Kippur as a day when they stand before God as individuals seeking atonement for their sins, hoping for forgiveness from, and purification before, God. Their primary means in this quest are fasting, repentance, prayer, and charity (teshuvah, tefillah, u-tzedakah). These tools help them experience an inner process of spiritual transformation and purification from sin. This experience takes place in the penitent’s heart, but also between the penitent and God. In contrast, Yom Kippur in the Temple is entirely about the actions of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, which aim at receiving atonement before God. The day’s worship (seider ha-avodah) succeeds or fails based on whether or not he fulfills the sacrificial rituals with exactitude in all their meticulous detail, and on this rests the promise of atonement from sin. Neither the individual Jews nor the religious community as a whole are in any way involved in the process.
It is hard to imagine that these two forms of worship could coexist in any way. The possibility that Temple worship might become dominant—whether via intentional activism or as a result of natural processes—and marginalize contemporary Jewish religious worship is very real. The dramatic cultic experience, combined with nostalgic desires for the restoration of what it sees as a national golden age, is much more seductive than today’s religious routines.
Traditional Jewish Theology vs. Temple Theology
Religious worship always exists within a theological context which provides its theoretical underpinnings. The two theological contexts of the Temple worship and contemporary religious Jewish praxis could not be more different. Here, I want to highlight this difference by way of three specific concepts: “The holy man,” “the religious act,” and “the indwelling of the Divine.”
The idea of the holy man—an idea which has its roots in the Hebrew Bible and in rabbinic literature, in medieval Jewish theology, in Jewish mysticism, and in Hasidism—is one of the fundamental influences on the religious experience of Jews today. It has taken many forms throughout history, but its fundamental claim is that an individual—or any individual—can be holy in such a way that they are the highest purpose of religious life, and, as such, constitute an axis mundi—an alternative locus of holiness to the Temple. We can find a powerful expression of this claim in R. Moshe Alshikh’s commentary on the biblical verse, “And I will dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8). Alshikh’s interpretation makes the individual into the primary locus of holiness in which the divine presence can rest.[12]
The very purpose of religious practice in a Temple reality would be fundamentally different from its purpose in the prevailing tradition. In the Temple model, religious practice is directed toward serving and influencing God, God’s actions, or the world. In the rabbinic tradition, the purpose of religious practice is “to walk in God’s ways”—the human being is the object of religious service, and the goal is the spiritual, psychological, and moral transformation that a person must bring about within themselves and their environment in order to become sanctified.[13] A Temple reality would shift the focus of sanctity from the individual back to the physical Temple and redirect the focus of religious practice from the individual to God.
The concept of the indwelling of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) expresses believers’ expectations of what the process of restoring the Temple and its service will bring, but it also illustrates the theological gap between the two different forms of worship. The appearance of the Temple is associated with an anticipation of the appearance of divine spiritual and material abundance; a transformation on the national, universal, and even cosmic levels; an intensified experience of closeness to God in personal religious experience; and the return of divine revelation in the relationship between God and humanity. Indeed, some argue that there is an inseparable link between the Temple and revelation.[14] According to this model—in the theological space where the Temple and its service existed—the source of religious authority is tied to revelation, and is fundamentally different from that of the rabbinic tradition. If the desire to return to the Temple is indeed bound up with the expectation of revelation and its restoration as a source of authority, then the upheaval anticipated with the realization of the Temple vision will perhaps be even greater than imagined, undercutting the very foundations of prevailing practice and tradition.
Beyond this, the accumulated historical experience of the two Temple eras simply does not live up to the dramatic expectations of the Temple Mount activists. The historical reality of those eras was far from religious and ethical perfection. The prophets constantly criticized the institutions of the Temple, the priests, and the sacrifices, for their part in the terrible socio-ethical state of the nation. Some of the prophets even claimed that the sacrifices directly contributed to the degraded state of society outside the temple.[15] Rabbinic literature is rife with depictions of the widespread corruption in and around the Temple toward the end of the Second Temple era. The promise that the Third Temple might somehow be dramatically different from existing social and spiritual reality, and that the whole world will as a result undergo some sort of spiritual elevation, falls apart in light of the historical realities of the first two Temple eras.
An Alternative Vision for the Temple Today
In light of the challenges presented by the Temple vision, I believe that we must find an alternative religious vision of the Temple.[16] Instead of the vision of a physical temple—built of wood and stone; its worship, of flesh and blood—I propose a new focus for our religious dreams and a new vision for what ideal religious worship should look like. This vision is based on the biblical vocations of “You shall be holy” (Leviticus 19:2) and “You shall be, for me, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Rooted deep in the very beginnings of the tradition, this vision sees holiness as the bridge between human beings and God, and therefore as possessing the potential to fill the role of the Temple as the axis mundi. Having come down to us throughout the generations, this vision fits well with the religious mindset of the modern believer, as well as with the character of their religious worship, values, and beliefs.
Paraphrasing the rabbis’ comments about the Temple worship and its replacements, I would say that there is an alternative form of worship—a better, more important form of worship—available today as well.[17] After the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis laid the practical and conceptual foundations for Jewish life in the absence of the Temple, and they provided a different answer to the everyday concerns evoked by the loss of the Temple and the sacrifices. From a historical perspective, they were wildly successful. Generations of Jews stayed loyal to the tradition, passing on their heritage from one generation to the next, transmitting down to us a rich, elevated religious world. Just as they did then, we, today, must provide an alternative to the Temple, one that will enable generations of Jews to continue to be loyal to their heritage in the future.
Pushing the vision of a physical temple from the space of realistic events to the messianic End of History, or into purely symbolic space, is nothing new to the tradition. The concept of “The Heavenly Temple” (mikdash min ha-shamayim) embodies exactly such a move. It denies any human agency in the construction of the Temple, subtly cutting “building the Temple” out of the list of commandments. Over the centuries, the vision of a physical temple took on mythic and symbolic dimensions which, to a significant degree, changed the idea of the Temple from something real to something spiritual and symbolic.[18] To suggest that we should frame our vision of the Temple as a fundamentally spiritual vision of the connection between the individual and God is to merely continue this trend.
This is not about the real tensions that often exist between Judaism and the broader world or Western values, etc. The Temple and personal holiness are two important concepts which both emerge from within the Jewish tradition and, in their depths, they contradict one another. Different theological systems have attempted to bridge between them in different ways, but they all ultimately fail—the religious depths of the desire for the Temple, on the one hand, and holiness embodied in human life, on the other, are just too different. On the holiness model, worship embodies a person’s individual responsibility for themselves, their society, and God within the world (tikkun olam). Temple worship—with its own conceptions of holiness, to be sure—transfers that responsibility to a mythic realm focused on procedures that regulate and rectify the divine metaphysics of the cosmos—a tikkun of a very different sort. The rising trend of Temple Mount activism seeks to make us choose between them—and, specifically, to choose the latter—a choice with dramatic ramifications for the personality, spirituality, and ethical responsibility of the modern believer, as well as for society as a whole and for the future of the Jewish tradition.
While the idea of individual and societal holiness has deep roots in the Jewish tradition, it will naturally require some “translation” for our generation—necessitating a serious, far-ranging conversation about what holiness means and what it demands of us. The “mitzvah” of the moment is to try to envision holiness in the context of Jewish sovereignty and sovereign responsibility—issues we have not confronted in 2000 years. We can expect to disagree with one another in how we answer these difficult and critical questions, but it is these questions that constitute the proper Temple vision for our day—not any others—and we must study the relevant halakhah carefully. We cannot let the vision of a physical temple distract us from our responsibilities in this historical moment: building the Temple of Holiness and perfecting its worship.
[1] Decision of the Rabbinic Council of Judea and Samaria, Shevat 18, 5756. The lone voices which previously called for ascending to the Temple Mount—including rabbis who made use of painstaking investigations into the permitted and forbidden spaces upon the mount—were isolated, exceptional cases. See Shlomo Goren, “The Temple Mount,” in Meshiv Milhamah, vol. 4 ( Jerusalem: Ha-Idra Rabbah, 2005); Zalman Koren, The Courtyards of God’s House (Jerusalem: Tzur Ot, 1977).
[2] According to police records, approximately 37,000 Jews ascended to the Temple Mount in 2019. According to records from the Yeira’eh organization, more than 30,000 of them went up for religious-nationalist reasons. The numbers shrank in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the number rose again in 2021 to almost 35,000.
[3] According to a 2015–2016 survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, 31–47% of Israelis who self-identify as secular support Jews praying on the Temple Mount. Among religious Israelis, that number goes up to approximately 80%.
[4] Motti Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008); Haviva Pedaya, interview on the Ir-Amim website, http://www.ir-amim.org.il/he/node/1711/; Sarina Hen, Rapidly in Our Days: Shifts in the Religious Nationalist Public’s Relationship to the Temple Mount (Sde Boker: The Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, 2017), 86-88.
[5] Eliezer Melamed, “The Place of Our Temple in Israeli Sovereignty,” Be-Sheva 666 (17 Heshvan 5776).
[6] Shlomo Goren, “The Temple Mount,” 28-29; Yisrael Ariel, “The Commandments of the Temple Mount in this Era” in Rise and Ascend: A Collection of Essays and Readings Regarding the Temple Mount Today (Alon Shevut: Zomet, 2002), 211.
[7] See note 17 below.
[8] Daniel R. Schwartz, Priesthood, Temple, Sacrifices: Opposition and Spiritualization in the Late Second Period (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979), 46-49, 172.
[9] See Leviticus Rabbah 22:8; Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed III:32; Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 66.
[10] See Jeremiah 7:9-10; Yoma 9b.
[11] Yisrael Ariel, Temple Mahzor for Yom Kippur (Koren Publishing, 2019), 9. As Ariel further clarifies, “The sacrificial rites of Yom Kippur are so precious to God that no prayer could ever equal them” (ibid., 130).
[12] Commentary of Rabbi Moshe Alshikh to Exodus 25:8, s.v. “ve-asu li mikdash”: “‘And I will dwell in their midst,’ as opposed to having written ‘In its midst.’ I heard that we learn from this that the primary indwelling of the divine presence is in the individual, not in a structure, as the verse says, ‘in their midst’ … God desires to dwell, not on earth, but in each member of the Jewish people, whom he makes primary…”
[13] Yair Lorberbaum, “From the Temple to the Individual: Shifts in the Locus of Holiness in Rabbinic Literature,” Daat 86 (2018), 395.
[14] Rachel Elior, Temple and Chariot, Palace and Palaces in Ancient Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: Magnes Press 2002), 216-218; Michael Schneider, The Appearance of the High Priest – Theophany, Apotheosis and Binitarian Theology: From Priestly Tradition of the Second Temple Period through Ancient Jewish Mysticism (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2012), 117; Haviva Pedayah, The Name and the Temple in the Teachings of Isaac Sagi Nahor: A Comparative Study of Early Kabbalistic Texts (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2011), 12.
[15] Cf. I Samuel 16:22; Jeremiah 6:20; Ezekiel 8; Amos 5:22; Micah 6:7; and many more besides.
[16] This, in contrast to both the Temple Mount activists and their opponents, mentioned above, who would leave the building of the Temple in the hands of Heaven.
[17] Cf. Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version B, ch. 2 (Schechter Edition), 22; The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, trans. Judah Glodin (Yale University Press, 1955), 34: “Once, as Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai was coming forth from Jerusalem, Rabbi Joshua followed after him and beheld the Temple in ruins. ‘Woe unto us!’ Rabbi Joshua cried, ‘that this, the place where the iniquities of Israel were atoned for, is laid waste!’ ‘My son,’ Rabban Johanan said to him, ‘be not grieved; we have another atonement as effective as this. And what is it? It is acts of loving-kindness, as it is said, For I desire mercy and not sacrifice (Hos. 6:6)’.”
[18] Regarding the spiritualization of the worship of God at the end of the Second Temple Era, see Dov Schwartz, “Priesthood and Monarchy in the Hasmonean Period,” in The Congregation of Israel: Jewish Self-Rule Throughout the Generations (Hebrew), ed. Yeshayahu Gafni (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2001), 73-74; regarding the spiritualization and democratization of worship after the destruction, see Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 72-73.
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