New Translation – Meir Kraus's Article on the Beit Hamikdash in Our Days
I am proud to share this article by Meir Kraus, which I translated and which went up on the LehrHaus earlier this week. I don’t agree with all of it, but I do agree with a lot of it, and most importantly, it directly raises questions that are often ignored.
The book explores the theological superstructure of the activist movement to rebuild the Beit Hamikdash in Israel today. Those wanting to know more about Kraus’ arguments can see him interviewed here or here.
The desire for the Beit Hamikdash exists in some theological tension with other elements of the Jewish tradition. Perhaps the best example of this is described in a paragraph from Kraus’ article discussing “traditional worship vs. worship in the Temple”:
“To highlight the difference between these two forms of worship, imagine how Yom Kippur looked in the Temple in contrast to how it has looked in the generations since the destruction of the Second Temple. Today, Jews primarily experience Yom Kippur as a day when they stand before God as individuals seeking atonement for their sins, hoping for forgiveness from, and purification before, God. Their primary means in this quest are fasting, repentance, prayer, and charity (teshuvah, tefillah, u-tzedakah). These tools help them experience an inner process of spiritual transformation and purification from sin. This experience takes place in the penitent’s heart, but also between the penitent and God. In contrast, Yom Kippur in the Temple is entirely about the actions of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, which aim at receiving atonement before God. The day’s worship (seider ha-avodah) succeeds or fails based on whether or not he fulfills the sacrificial rituals with exactitude in all their meticulous detail, and on this rests the promise of atonement from sin. Neither the individual Jews nor the religious community as a whole are in any way involved in the process.”
“The essence of the day atones”—so on some fundamental level, perhaps there is no difference between the two forms of Yom Kippur. However, in terms of how we actully experience Yom Kippur, a real tension exists between the two. Today, Yom Kippur consists primarily of individual communal fasting and prayer wherein every individual actively participates (barring exceptions for illness, parenting, etc.). In the Beit Hamikdash model, the process of atonement is enacted by the Kohen Gadol in the Beit Hamikdash. There’s not mitsvah of aliyah laregel for Yom Kippur—no reason to think most Jews would have been there to even spectate. We probably have more of an experience of the original Yom Kippur service reading the seder ha’avodah in mussaf than we would have had at the time. In contrast, now our fasting, tefillah, and communal participation are paramount. Do we want to go back?
This is just one example of theological tensions he explores. Others include the relationship of individual mitsvah observance and ethics, and the relationship between physical, geographic space and sancticty.
Do we want to go back?
The foreignness is real. Part of where I part ways with Kraus is that I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. I’ll close by posting a passage from Franz Rosenzweig dealing with exactly this issue in context of the prayers for sacrifices said in the amidah every day:
“The difference between prescribed prayer and spontaneous prayer is that the latter is born out of the need of the moment, while the former teaches him who prays to feel a need he might otherwise not feel. This is particularly true of the prayers for the messianic age, insofar as they are not merely tuned to the desire for liberation from the pressure of the present Man is sufficiently rooted in all life, even the most difficult, so that, although he may have good reason to long for a partial change, he fears a radical one. And such a radical change, the radical change, is the messianic age, which will indeed set an end to the hell of world history, but also to its ambiguities and seeming lack of responsibilities. In the messianic age everything will become clearly visible, yet man shies away from this perfect clarity and the unequivocal responsibility it entails, just as he shies away from God's nearness in death, a nearness he may earnestly covet without, however, bringing himself to relinquish his love of life, even of an imperfect and sinful life. For such change is much too radical! Yet he must learn to pray for this radical change even though that prayer may be difficult for him until the change actually occurs.
What Judah ha-Levi discovered when he woke from his dream and returned to the world was that God is with man even in our present world with its inadequacy and confusion, its half-measures and mirages; or, rather, that man is with him, or can find a way to him. If yearning were to forget what it already possesses it would be a lie, but if possession forgot to yearn-that would be death.”
–Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 351–353; the passage is taken from Rosenzweig’s translations of and commentary on poems by R. Yehuda Halevi
The article can be found here:
https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/a-temple-in-our-days-a-long-overdue-conversation/