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.