The Jews and Their Temple (6) (original) (raw)

The Missing Temple: The Status of the Temple in Jewish Culture following its Destruction

European Judaism, 2013

Almost 2,000 years after its destruction, the Jerusalem Temple remains present in the Jews’ imagination and imagery. The Temple is remembered in Jewish tradition as a place of unity, utmost purity and holiness, an intersection between the divine and the human, between Jew and Jew, between the vertical and the horizontal. Generations of Jews have prayed to be able to behold the restoration of the Temple but have not been privileged to witness it. Nevertheless, it shaped their language and encapsulated their hopes for redemption. The Temple was the essence to which all other practices were compared; after its destruction, the Temple itself became the measure of many contemporary rabbinic practices. This article surveys the different ways the Jews kept the symbolism of the Temple and embedded it in their lives. It also examines the contemporary state of affairs – what was viewed in the past as an almost imaginary messianic hope, is now on the agenda of some right-wing groups who wish to hasten rebuilding of a Temple on the Temple Mount.

Introduction to the Theme: The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual

AJS Review, 2019

The following group of essays emerged out of a seminar held at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in 2015. As section heads of Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity and Rabbinic Literature and Culture, tasked to think about how to address gaps in our fields, we recognized that despite a large amount of scholarship available on the Jerusalem Temple and its priesthood, there was a dearth of cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange, especially between ancient Jewish historians and those of us who engage in literary analysis of rabbinic sources. As a result, our divisions joined together to create “The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual,” taking advantage of the “seminar” format at the conference. Twelve scholars, each working with different source material and employing different methodological approaches, participated.

Contextualizing Jewish Temples

Contextualizing Jewish Temples, 2020

Jewish temples stood in Jerusalem for nearly one thousand years and were a dominant feature in the life of the ancient Judeans throughout antiquity. This volume strives to obtain a diachronic and topical cross-section of central features of the varied aspects of the Jewish temples that stood in Jerusalem, one that draws on and incorporates different disciplinary and methodological viewpoints. Ten contributions are included in this volume by: Gary A. Anderson; Simeon Chavel; Avraham Faust; Paul M. Joyce; Yuval Levavi; Risa Levitt; Eyal Regev; Lawrence H. Schiffman; Jeffrey Stackert; Caroline Waerzeggers, edited by Tova Ganzel and Shalom E. Holtz.

The subversive utopia: Louis Kahn and the question of the national Jewish style in Jerusalem

1996

This dissertation examines the critical role of modern architects in shaping and transforming national Israeli symbols with special regard to Jerusalem. According to customary views, Zionist symbols image the secular state of Israel as an emancipation of the Jewish nation from the oppressive Diaspora past. The first part of this study analyzes pre-1967 designs, by architects including Baehrwald, Geddes, Mendelsohn, "Bauhaus" practitioners, and Rau that attempted to construct a Jewish style relating these national symbols. Images of the Diaspora in their designs are shown to conceal areas of tension with official Zionist memory. Louis Kahn's later design of the Khurvah synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem creatively exploited this tension to redefine the national style. As a case study, Kahn's design distinctly shows that the shaping of national symbols and memory is a process contested not only by competing state institutions, but by marginal elements, in this case individual architects. This challenges the predominant view that national symbols are forged, consolidated, and disseminated by cohesive state institutions, collective power-structures, and ruling elites. The present study scrutinizes and pieces together discrepant archival documents, drawings, and accounts of what were commonly regarded as unrelated intentions, interpretations, events, policies, and projects in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, to reveal a crucial unrecognized aspect of Kahn's Khurvah design. I specifically analyze the interplay of Kahn's double metaphor with the competing traditional and national symbols of Jerusalem, such as the old Khurvah, the western Wall, and most importantly, the mythical Temple and the Dome of the Rock. The analysis reconstructs the continued drastic impact of the transformation of Kahn's idiosyncratic metaphor into an authoritative symbol, even more into a subversive utopia, on shaping Jerusalem and national memory. The impact of Kahn's paradoxical metaphor is traced through analysis of subsequent archaeological excavation, planning and designs for the Jewish Quarter and its structures, including the western Wall plaza, the Cardo, and the Khurvah synagogue proposed by Safdie, Lasdun, Bugod and others.

Psychoanalysis in Israel: New Beginnings, Old Trajectories

Journal für Psychoanalyse

The arrival of psychoanalysis in pre-state Israel in the early 20th century presents a unique chapter in the history of psychoanalysis. The paper explores the encounter between psychoanalytic expertise, Judaism, Modern Hebrew culture and the Zionist revolution. It offers a look at the relationship between psychoanalysis and a wider community, and follows the life and work of Jewish psychoanalysts during World War II. The coming of psychoanalysis to pre-state Israel, where it rapidly penetrated the discourse of pedagogy, literature, medicine, and politics, becoming a popular therapeutic to establish its identity in the face of its manifold European pasts and discipline, is regarded as an integral part of a Jewish immigrant society’s struggle with its conflict-ridden Middle Eastern present.

“Who Will Put My Soul on the Scale?”: Psychostasia in Second Temple Judaism

“Psychostasia” is the notion that a divine or supernatural figure weighs and/or measures the souls of people when judging them. The present effort represents the second of three articles on psychostasia. The first article focused on the occurrences of psychostasia in the OT. In the current article, attention is paid to the occurrences of psychostasia in apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Jewish writings from the Second Temple period, including the Qumran Scrolls. The current purpose is firstly to determine whether or not the concept of psychostasia was a recognised and recognisable feature of Second Temple Palestinian Judaism. Allowing for a positive answer to the latter, the second purpose of this article is to ascertain how the idea of psychostasia was understood by Palestinian Jews of the Second Temple period.