Haftorah This Week
Welcome to Haftorah This Week, the place where you will find thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on this week's Haftorah.
HAFTARAT TETZAVE
(Ezekiel 43:10-27)
The prophet, Ezekiel, prophesied the destruction of the Temple and the return of the Jewish people to its land, but he envisioned a rebuilt Temple whose physical dimensions and sacrifices would be greater than ever!
What accounts for the Temple's hold on the Jewish imagination? Why did Jews pray for its restoration daily for millennia? Why, even now, do people study the dimensions of the building and the laws of the sacrifices?
The Temple is a microcosm of the world that Judaism seeks to create. This building was consecrated to life. Inside, no war was permitted; no death or dead body (or even a person in contact with a dead body) was allowed to enter (Numbers 19). No hunger or poverty marred this building. Those who were better off were commanded to include the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the Levite in their feasts and celebrations (Deuteronomy 16:14ff).
The Temple was a place of moral purity. All who sought to come in were asked, "Who shall ascend the Lord's holy mountain? Who shall be permitted to stand in God's holy place?" (Psalms 24:3). They had to answer: "One who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not taken a false oath by God's life or sworn deceitfully" (ibid.). Before giving that answer, the person would have to correct whatever behavior contradicted that statement -- or face the searing flame of God's judgment for lying in God's presence at the holiest place on earth.
Of course, Jews did not always live up to these expectations. Still the Temple remained a model of a better world, a place where each one's better self came out and was lifted to even loftier heights by God's presence. No matter how ethically compromised a person became in the course of living, he or she could return to the Temple for moral renewal, to envision the world as it could and should be -- a world of justice and peace. Years and centuries of oppression and degradation passed over the Jews, but the dream of being restored and made whole again could not die.
As long as people can dream of a better world, they will not yield to the injustice in this world. As long as people can conceive of their own liberation from pettiness and cheating, from selling out and settling, they will seek to regain a better self. The Temple is that once and future shining place where the individual, the people and the world are made whole.
Now that our land is in the process of full restoration, now that peace may be possible, do we not need a microcosm, a perfect place to model the kind of society and people we want to be? Will Israel become that Temple for our times? The answer is in our hands.
(Irving Greenberg)
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