make these observations about expressly Jewish ideas—here and elsewhere in this book—from outside the Jewish community, aware of the dangers that adhere in Christian readings of Jewish history and thought. If I presume to do so, it is as a Christian aware of my own tradition’s essential tie to this legacy. When the Temple was destroyed, in sum, the sacred imagination was quickened, and something new happened between God and God’s people. Even if this was the initiating spark of Christianity as a separate religion, the phenomenon of renewal out of loss was Jewish to the core—because it had brought Judaism into being in the first place.
As the twentieth-century Holocaust can be said to have been at least analogously foreshadowed by events two millennia earlier, so with the Roman assault on Jerusalem. It, too, was a kind of replay. Jewish religion, after all, had its true beginning six centuries before, when armies of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, carted away the Ark of the Covenant, enslaved the people, and carried them off to exile. The Babylonian Captivity lasted about sixty years (597–538 B.C.E.), a period of time roughly duplicated by the Roman-Jewish war (and, coincidentally, roughly duplicated by the time elapsed from the liberation of Auschwitz until today). When the Jews returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, picking up the pieces of faith and tradition, they were—as this Christian reads the story—a different people, with a different God.
Out of the trauma of destruction and banishment, that is, they had created something new. Prophets, especially Ezekiel and Jeremiah, had recast the meaning of what happened—proclaiming a God who had used belligerent Nebuchadnezzar as a purifying instrument; a God who had accompanied His people into exile; a God, therefore, whose presence was no longer seen as restricted to the Temple of Jerusalem. Where, previously, the Holy of Holies had held the Ark of the Covenant, that sacred object, whatever it was,31 had been lost in the destruction. From now on, once the Temple was reconstructed, the Holy of Holies was to be left vacant—a numinous nonappearance that perfectly symbolized the new understanding to which the people had come. The God of Israel was seen as transcending place. A particular sanctuary defined by absence became the sacrament of God’s universal omnipresence. With that apophatic affirmation by means of negation, the imagination of Jewish religion sank its roots in paradox.
Editors and redactors, through the same experience of Babylonian exile, had recast the oral and written traditions that had long shaped the consciousness of this people—but now with a new order, a coalescence carrying a new meaning. Creation myths, ritual songs, poems, etymological tales, proverbs, parables, and narratives of memory were selected, discarded, reshaped—and composed. Only now did the people recognize in their rich store of tradition the collected revelation of God’s Word—the Bible, or Tanakh, an acronym for “Torah, Prophets, and Writings.” Returned from captivity, they became people of Torah—of the Book. And more: only now had editors arranged the revelation to begin with Genesis, a creation myth that accounted not, like others of the ancient Near East, for the origins of the tribe, but for origins of the cosmos. Genesis made the astonishing primordial claim that the God of this people, no mere local deity, was the Creator of the universe, the God of all people. Only now, that is, was the God of Israel understood to be one God, transcending not only place but time. Monolators had become monotheists.32 Such are the radical new religious convictions that came from prophetic reflection on the first of the Temple destructions. The religion of Jews was begun.
The second destruction of the Temple, in 70, was equally decisive. It sparked an immediate crisis in the life of every surviving Jew, and that crisis is the dominant—if not necessarily only—source of the Gospel preoccupations with the Temple. All Jews were forced to ask the great questions: how could the chosen people undergo such near eradication? And, in particular—now!—what is it to be a Jew without the Temple? The Temple was the seat of the priest-led theocracy established by God Himself! What is it to be Israel without that? Without priesthood, sacrifice, the Holy of Holies—sacred ritual that had brought Israel close to God for a thousand years?
Two surviving parties of Jews offered their answers—surviving parties, by the way, that were alike in having sought and found distance from the violent rebellion of the Zealots and from those who rallied to their revolution, which had brought down the wrath of Rome. Only such distance from Zealotry, which the Jews in the thick of combat had to experience as betrayal, enabled their survival as Jews. Thus, in 68 or 69, as the Romans were closing in on Jerusalem and the Temple, a Pharisaic party led by Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai petitioned the Romans to be allowed to leave the city. They were permitted to go, establishing themselves in Yavne, on the Mediterranean coast. This core would flourish as the center of a post-Temple Rabbinic Judaism. In a similar way, speaking generally, followers of Jesus decamped Jerusalem for Pella, across the Jordan, and for places in Syria, Asia Minor, and North Africa. In Palestine, the Jesus movement remained centered in Galilee, where Roman legions raised havoc, but not with the brute totality of their assault against Jerusalem. Both groups, in line with previous prophetic readings of the Temple destruction wrought by the Babylonians, saw in the Roman destruction a purification willed by God, but they differed in their views of what constituted the behavior from which God took offense.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s call the first group “the rabbis,” attached to a party of Jewish leaders identified in the Gospels as Pharisees. They were inclined, even before the Temple destruction, to emphasize observance of the Law and study of the Torah more than, say, the priests of the Temple, who, given their ritual role at the altar, would have placed prime emphasis on cultic sacrifice. But with the Temple gone and the priests either killed or made superfluous, the rabbis insisted that to be a Jew now was to be focused more than ever on Torah, study of texts, and close observance of the Law. Their attachment to the study-centered institution of the synagogue came into its own. When the tradition of priestly sacrifice was replaced by the metaphoric sacrifice of “a broken and contrite heart,”33 manifest in Law observance, Rabbinic Judaism was born.
Let’s call the other group “the Jesus people.” They had an even more succinct answer to the question “What is it to be a Jew without the Temple?” Now, they said, Jesus is the Temple—“the new Temple.” Here, too, cult sacrifice has entered the realm of metaphor, with Jesus having accomplished the last sacrificial offering “once and for all when he offered up himself.”34 In this the Church was born. The first group said that the Temple had been destroyed because Israel was insufficiently faithful in observing God’s Law. The second said the Temple had been destroyed because Israel had rejected Jesus. The point is that both groups consisted of Jews searching for meaning in the midst of the Roman-generated catastrophe, centered on the destruction of the Temple.
These equally Jewish answers to the Jewish crisis both envisioned an imagined Temple and the necessary movement of sacrifice into the realm of metaphor,35 yet the answers seemed profoundly contradictory, and, in a context in which civil war among Jewish groups was rife, those proposing these answers became fiercely antagonistic. Such competition between factions of an oppressed people was deliberately stoked by the imperial overlords—the universal practice of empires.36 So Rome, too, is a factor in the conflict between the rabbis and the Jesus people.
Usually, the Christian story is told without reference to the fact that the approximate year of the first Gospel’s composition—Mark, in 70—was the same year as the destruction of the Temple.37 If the connection is noted by Christians today, it is assumed to be coincidence, since, in the Christian memory, the fate of the Jewish cultic center four decades after the death of Jesus could have no real bearing on Christians, who by the second century had come to regard their movement as having begun in Jesus’ own repudiation of the Temple.
It may well be that when Jesus of Nazareth arrived on the scene in the year 28 or 29, it was as part of a Temple purification movement. The facts that Herod the Great, the despised Roman lackey and puppet ruler, had rebuilt the Temple, and that his structure reflected the Hellenized style of grandiose pagan temples elsewhere in the Near East, had, as we saw, discomforted some Jews. It sparked full-bore opposition from certain Jewish critics, like the
