On Impermanence: The Two Sanctuaries

The Exodus story — recounted each year at Pesach seders around the world — tells the story of the Israelites’ two great sanctuaries. 

The first is the Tabernacle — constructed by the Israelites in the Sinai desert after their deliverance from Egyptian slavery. 

The second is the Temple — built on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem after the Israelites had settled in the Promised Land.

Each sanctuary represents an entire worldview — a hashkafa, or way of seeing … they present an entangled unity — a double helix of spiritual DNA.

Each sanctuary represents an entire worldview—a hashkafa, or way of seeing. This is not to say, however, that these sanctuaries represent two different Judaisms. Rather, they present an entangled unity — a double helix of spiritual DNA which winds its way through every level of Jewish thought, practice, ritual, and history.

The Tabernacle was built for a people on the go, and was thus designed with modularity in mind. Its sacred furnishings were outfitted with rings so that they could be hoisted onto carrying poles and moved through the desert. The Israelites would set up camp where God told them to set up camp. There they would stay until they received the sign to move on. The location of the Tabernacle, therefore, was not static. It was ever in flux in accordance with the evolution and revelation of God’s desire. 

The Temple, on the other hand, was built for a people rooted in a particular land. Its place was the holy mountain at the center of that land’s capital — Jerusalem. Unlike the portable Tabernacle, the Temple was not to be moved so much as an inch. As Maimonides stresses in the Mishneh Torah, “The altar is placed extremely precisely and may never ever be placed anywhere else …” (Laws of the Chosen Temple 2:1). 

Schematically, both sanctuaries looked the same. They consisted of an outer courtyard where sacrifices were offered; an inner sanctuary called the Kodesh (the Holy), which contained a number of sacred vessels; and then, behind a curtain, an small innermost sanctum called the Kodesh Ha’Kodashim (the Holy of Holies), where God’s very presence was encountered. 

The Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle, however, was not the same as the Holy of Holies of the Temple. 

After all, during the time of the Tabernacle, any space could become the Holy of Holies if that’s where the sanctuary was assembled. What made that space holy, then, was the act of framing. In the openness of the desert, it was through putting up walls that the necessary conditions for the encounter with God — intimacy, enclosure, acoustics — were created. 

We are told that there, in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle, the voice of God would emanate from between the statues of the winged cherubim that sat perched above the Ark of the Covenant. This, too, can be seen as an act of framing. The curved wings of the statues become a miniature bandshell in which the voice of God can reverberate and become audible. 

This is a non-essentialist view of sacred space, much in keeping with the rest of the Book of Exodus. When God descends in a cloud on Mount Sinai, for instance, Mount Sinai becomes holy ground. Its base is cordoned off so that no Israelites will draw too close or let their livestock graze there. When God is not on the mountain, however, these restrictions are lifted. Without the presence of God, Sinai is once again just a mountain. 

A different conception of sacred space is employed for the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem. There, it was the space itself that was considered sacred. Referred to in Deuteronomy as “the place that God will choose,” it was in fact the place that God chose again and again and again. Mount Moriah (also known as the Temple Mount) is said to be the site where Abraham was tested, where Jacob dreamed, and where the dust for Adam’s body was gathered. 

Even more fundamental than all this, the Holy of Holies was said to be the very navel of the world — site of the foundation stone, from which the rest of the world grew outward like a plant from a seed. 

This is an essentialist way of understanding sacred space. The holy mountain’s holiness is intrinsic to its precise location, irrespective of what happens there or how it is framed. 

As Jews, the memory of these two sanctuaries is our birthright. One is temporary and the other permanent, one moveable and the other rooted, one circumstantial and the other essentialist — but in all final reckonings, the distinctions between them begin to fall away. 

The Temple — that great house of permanence, fell to the flames of Jerusalem’s destruction in the year 70 AD, proving to have been temporary all along. The Judaism that one can take on the go, meanwhile, has proved enduring.

That things come to an end, it seems, is the only thing that never comes to an end. In this sense, impermanence is the signature of eternity. 

The builder of the Temple, King Solomon, is said to have asked his wise men to find him a piece of wisdom that would always be true. They returned to him and said “this too shall pass,” which he had engraved on a ring to look at in good times and in bad. That things come to an end, it seems, is the only thing that never comes to an end. In this sense, impermanence is the signature of eternity. 

The Holy of Holies of the Temple — that square of unbounded space left abandoned on the Temple Mount — is said to have endured in that spot ever since. Though the walls that once framed it have long ago crumbled, it nevertheless remains — an indestructible rectangular prism of charged space invisible to the eye. 

Perhaps this is how it should be — a sign to believers of that which is invulnerable to the assault of the sword and the aggressions of time. 

Or perhaps it is only there because we left it there. Like a treasured item left behind in an old home, it remains there on the Temple Mount because we somehow forgot to pack it up and take it with us when we went — or, as it were, we forgot that it could be packed in the first place. 

But perhaps also it’s not there at all. Perhaps our only real sanctuary is the one that can be taken on the road, the one that puts on no airs of permanence or essentialism. Its courtyard is formed by the individuals who come together to pray or learn together. It is both eternal and ephemeral — a sacred paradox. Its holy of holies is the human heart.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.