Two Temples

Once one temple is destroyed,

the second one is sure to be

so full of ghosts one can’t avoid

the presence of each absentee.

Although rebuilders may have reckoned

that they could reconstruct in style––

with blueprints of the first––the second,

they realize when in long exile

that temples can’t be resurrected;

anachronisms, like rejected

candidates, unre-elected,

since unrestored sadly neglected,

best -worst reminders of a painful

past whose retrospect, though golden,

is haunted by ghosts who are disdainful

of mimesis of the longed-for olden,

while disregarding with enthusiasm

a disaster they can’t overwhelm

by building what can’t bridge the chasm

between them and God’s higher realm.

Inspired by a poem by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Leon Wieseltier in The New Yorker, December 26, January 2, 2006:

In a man’s life

In a man’s life

the first temple is destroyed and the second temple is destroyed

and he must stay in his life,

not like the people who went into exile,

and not like God, who simply rose to higher regions.

In a man’s life

he resurrects the dead in a dream

and in a second dream he buries them.

Tomer Persico discussed the rebuilding of the Temple in the 11/13/14 Haaretz (“Why rebuilding the Temple would be the end of Judaism as we know it”):

There is one overriding question that accompanies the Zionist project, wrote Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism – “Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the messianic claim, which has virtually been conjured up.” The entry into history to which Scholem refers is the establishment of the state and the ingathering of the exiles, borne, as they were – notwithstanding their secular fomenters and activists – on the wings of the ancient Jewish messianic myth of the return to Zion. However, when Scholem published the essay “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in 1971, the adjunct to the question was the dramatic freight of Israel’s great victory in the Six-Day War, four years earlier.