Why I Mourn the Loss of the Temple

As we go through the Nine Days preparing to mourn the loss of the Beit HaMikdash, the Temple, on Tisha B’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, many are sharing what the loss means to them. I have decided to do so as well.

As a small child, I was fascinated by maps and floor plans (which I called “house maps”). My parents had subscribed to National Geographic for years and even before I could read, I would spread out the maps on the floor and pore over them – my mother said that instead of wall-to-wall carpeting, we had wall-to-wall maps. One place we lived, when I was in third and fourth grade, the Sunday paper featured a floor plan as part of a spotlight on a particular house and my mother would carefully cut out the floor plan for me once my parents were finished with the newspaper. I would spread them out in neighborhoods with my Matchbox cars in front of them.

I was raised evangelical – Southern Baptist and Assemblies of God. Evangelical Bibles usually have maps in the back, including floor plans of the Mishkan and Beit HaMikdash (Tabernacle and Temple as they call them) and I could draw the floor plan of the Mishkan with the altars, laver, table, candlestick, and Ark by the time I was nine. There was something about that holy floor plan that spoke very deeply to me. There was a neo-Pentecostal minister my father liked to listen to and he got his sermons on cassette tape. One series was about the Mishkan and there was an accompanying small booklet that I liked to look at. He saw the Mishkan as a model of the human soul.

It turns out that this idea was not original to him – kabbalistic and chasidish rabbis before him also see the Mishkan/Beit HaMikdash as the model of the human soul, the Jewish people’s collective soul, and indeed, the soul of all creation. I find this model very comforting and illuminative. The Ark with the tablets inside – both the broken pieces of the first set and the whole second set – this speaks to what is in the innermost depths of my own soul. The cherubim who face one another in times of harmony and face away from each other in times of strife.

The traditional understanding is that G!d has been exiled from the world after the destruction of the Temple, with the Jewish people then exiled from G!d as well. However, we know G!d is everywhere and, as Psalm 139 so beautifully teaches, G!d is closer to us that we are to ourselves. This has not changed – even if our perception of G!d’s presence is different.

The real exile is from our own souls. We no longer have the physical replica of our soul with us – it has been destroyed – and we are in exile, unable to understand who we are meant to be – unable to actualize our purpose, with the Ark of our covenant with G!d – both our collective Jewish covenant and the individual covenant each person has with Hashem – misplaced. The light of the seven-branched menorah illuminating our actions, the bread of the Presence sustaining us, the sweet incense bringing our prayers sweetly to the Divine – absent. The korbanos – the sacrifices of drawing near –to G!d and to ourselves and to one another– and the cleansing of the laver – we don’t have them and must find other ways to draw close.

It is this excruciating pain of being in exile from our own souls that is the real pain of Tisha B’Av. It is this journey back to our soul – the return – the teshuvah – that is the geulah we seek. But we cannot begin the journey until we feel this loss – this ultimate alienation – very deeply in our very bones. Until we come to desire the restoration of the Temple of our souls more deeply than any other desire.

May we feel this loss so keenly that we may set out on and complete this journey – with G!d and each other as our traveling companions – and experience geulah shleimah – complete redemption.

Pinchas and Beruriah

This past Shabbos, when Parshat Pinchas was read, I was walking to shul in the afternoon and realized that the gematria for Zimri, from the tribe of Shimon, murdered by Pinchas, has a gematria of 257 – 49 more than the gematria for Pinchas. My interpretation is that by this murder, Pinchas brought the people down 49 levels of the 50 levels of impurity – the same 49 levels of impurity the Jewish people had gone down in Egypt and had left behind in the redemption. Kozbi, the Midianite woman also murdered, has the gematria of 39 – the same number of categories of work, melachot, used in constructing the Mishkan and prohibited on Shabbat – thereby destroying the holiness of both the Mishkan and Shabbat. The command to keep Shabbat includes the command to work - what work are we commanded to do? - the 39 malachot that we don't do on Shabbat - the things we do to build the mishkan. I would argue that we are commanded implicitly to build a dwelling-place for Hashem on earth (the Alter Rebbe talks about this) - and any work that does this counts metaphorically. Pinchas, through killing them, rather than building/caring for/doing the service in the Mishkan, is in fact destroying it through a zealous act of killing.

To be clear, they were sinning – but murder was not the correct response but helping them to teshuvah – the murder was far, far, far worse. Pinchas destroyed two people created in the image of G!d. When Rabbi Meir was mugged by bandits, he prayed for G!d to cause them to die in retribution. His wife, the sage Beruriah, interpreting the last verse of Psalm 104 to read “Let SINS (rather than sinners, as it is commonly translated) cease from the earth, and the wicked will be no more [because they are now righteous, having repented]. Rabbi Meir did pray for their repentance – their teshuvah – instead, and indeed, they did!

The verse ends with “My soul bless Hashem, Hallelukah!” I would add to Beruriah’s interpretation that this part of the verse acknowledgess, by saying “my” soul, that all of us have also sinned and need to do teshuvah – and, not only need to do teshuvah, but are capable of doing teshuvah. This psalm is read on Rosh Chodesh, the new moon. The first commandment given to the Jewish people is to make the month of Nisan the first month of the year. The Jewish people are associated with the moon, as the rabbis have taught. One of the most fundamental aspects of being Jewish is the hope that, just as the moon that has waned will wax again, so when we do teshuvah, when we repent by turning from sin and returning to be the people G!d created us to be, G!d will forgive us and restore us even higher. As the rabbis teach, the sinner who repents is in a higher state than the one who never sinned. There is even a midrash that explains the curious commandment to bring a sin-offering FOR G!d on Rosh Chodesh by saying that after G!d created the two great lights, G!d then diminished the moon, and the sin-offering is to atone for this. G!d can do teshuvah, we are taught.

But Pinchas, in his zealotry, cannot place himself with the sinners – he cannot acknowledge his fallibility – he cannot add his “MY soul will bless Hashem” to the prayer for sins to leave the world so the sinners repent and become righteous. He cannot pray for their restoration. Instead, he kills two people made in the image of G!d, believing himself to be pure and perfect. If only he had followed in Beruriah’s footsteps and prayed for their repentance, rather than killing them, the story would have been so much more powerful.

In a world of Pinchases, may we be given strength by G!d to be Beruriahs instead.

The Broken Peace Pieces of Pinchas

At the end of Parshat Balak, Pinchas, in a fit of zealotry, thrusts a spear through an Israelite man making love to a Midianite woman. At the beginning of Parshat Pinchas, G!d seems to praise him and bestows upon him a covenant of shalom – of peace.

But – here’s the thing. As I learned from my wise friend Joey Eisman, the vav in shalom (the vav is a long mostly straight letter in Hebrew) is broken in the middle. It is not whole. The word shalom comes from the root for whole/complete – shleimut, a related word, is the Hebrew word for wholeness. So the brit shalom is not really shalom – not whole – it is broken. Some covenant to be given! 

The two most central parts of the Jewish liturgy are the Shema and the Amidah. The Shema proclaims that Hashem is our G!d and that Hashem is One. The blessing before the Shema proclaims G!d’s ahavah, love, for Israel – and the first paragraph of the Shema, after the first line, commands us to love G!d. The gematria for ahavah is 13 – and so is the gematria for echad, the word “one.” A broken peace – a peace that is pieces – cannot, therefore, be a peace that is from G!d. It lacks unity – it lacks love – and it is a false peace.

The Amidah, the central prayer, always ends with the blessing for peace. Our prayer must, to be kosher, end in a prayer for peace – for wholeness – for oneness. Again, the brit shalom is not this but the opposite. In effect, three times a day – four on Shabbat and chagim – five on Yom Kippur – we pray, ultimately, to NOT be like Pinchas. But perhaps we can pray that he found his way to teshuvah – that the vav was, at some point, completed as he repented of destroying the image of G!d in the two people he murdered.