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.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
