The Holy Temple: Soul, Knowledge & Beauty
Rabbi Elazar said, ‘whenever a person has Dei’ah [“knowledge”] it is as if the Holy Temple has been built in his days.’
True Daat: knowing how to use all the facets of the soul…a central function of the Beit HaMikdash [was] to engage our aesthetic senses and imaginative faculties to holiness and splendor [1]
To know ourselves we must know God and the nature of the soul. To the extent that we know, and understand what knowledge is, we grasp the nature and extent of freedom and the complementary facts of divine mercy and the means and place of forgiveness: the Temple service on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that elevates all faculties of soul to support this path of knowledge most fully.
To know ourselves we must know God and the nature of the soul. To the extent that we know, and understand what knowledge is, we grasp the nature and extent of freedom and the complementary facts of divine mercy and the means and place of forgiveness: the Temple service on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that elevates all faculties of soul to support this path of knowledge most fully.Abraham arose to bring knowledge of the Creator to human beings and thus to allow their humanity to develop. Knowledge of the Eternal One, the Highest Wisdom that created time, space, informs the foundations of the earth and all worlds so that one may say, “the heavens forever are built of kindness, You establish Your faithfulness in them” means knowing the discriminations that structure creation including the extent to which man is made in the shadow of God [2]. The Temple and its service, “the beauty of the universe” elevate and stimulate all the faculties, imagination, aesthetics, reason, and wondrous awe to “sublime holiness and inspiring splendor.” Rav Kook adds that the Highest Wisdom “prepared the imaginative powers for a sacred purpose: so that the soul may be receptive to the Temple’s splendor and holiness.” This is the Yesod HaTiferet, “foundation of holiness” and glory in generation, the line of Jacob-Joseph that is the settlement, integrity and flourishing of Israel, the basis of peace organized around its axis like the universe around the wisdom of its Creator [3]. This is their generation, when the head of the poor, afflicted ones will be raised, — “the appointed time will have come”; “what now appears to be broken will be restored,” the well springs will spread forth, be’er mephorash and written and oral teaching fully reconciled and understood [4]; the seed of Israel shall be by abundant waters and his king exalted over Agag, Amalek in every generation. As this fulfillment draws near, the nations increasingly distort and appropriate all that is Israel, destroying its foundations and their consummation of peace and forgiveness. They do not know God, they do not know themselves; “they walk in darkness, all the foundations of the earth collapse.” Life is displaced by “virtual reality” and “consumed with bewildering terrors” (tehillim 82:5, 73:20).
Yet still and forever the Creator seeks His inheritance, the Children of Israel from all the nations, — and will pluck them out, with fire, fury and wrath poured out, if need be, and set them on their land, arranged around the Temple and its service like the tribes in the wilderness encamped around the Mishkan.
“The Temple Service awakens the soul from its sleep and rejuvenates all its powers”; no wonder our popular culture generates endless life styles, attitudes, impulses pretending to be ideas and images of living death: it is numbed by its attack on its salvation and peace, by its attempts to blot out Israel and create new gods; its preference of magicians and magic to miracles. Magicians and witches are people who presume to be and purport to attain to powers of the Highest Wisdom. They “steal the mind” (gonev daat), literally steal the knowledge that is the form of the soul, and they steal the eyes until the foolish cannot discern what is unreal from what is real [5].
To the extent that people lack knowledge, they do not understand God, the soul, their humanity, the vital need for the Temple service and settlement of Israel; they do not understand, perhaps above all, that the essentials they need to know are limited. All references to physical attributes of the Highest Wisdom “are metaphoric imagery, all metaphoric imagery” (mashal, kal mashal, Yesodei HaTorah 1:9). Because the Creator is beyond investigation but ‘wants’ the creatures made in “His shadow” to know Him with true Daat as the Primary Being, “the Torah speaks in the language of man…with expressions of prophetic vision and imagery and the truth of this concept cannot be grasped or comprehended by human thought; this is what the verse [Job 11:7] states: “can you find the comprehension of God? Can you find the ultimate of the Almighty?”
The Torah and Temple service support us as we begin to comprehend, love, and arouse our faculties via awe. This also was the purpose of circumcision (required only of Jews), to bond perfections and completions (tamim, Bereishis17:1) to generative sexuality and the loving bond of present to past; this covenant of the word, brit milah, thus helps establish history, the centrality of history to human consciousness, passion and knowledge of the soul, the Creator and the entire adventure of human freedom and dignity. The faculties of reason, intellect, and will must integrate “prophecy which involves the powers of imagination and the senses as a portal for acquiring daat. Like an entire knowledge of God, “it deals with a sphere that is beyond human comprehension…God’s command was that Abraham ‘walk before’ God and ‘walk himself’ (hit’halekh, reflexive tense)” just as he had been told to “go to [or for] your self” (Bereishis 17:1, 12:1) [6]. All faculties are part of “Daat, the form of the soul,” the nexus of discriminating energies in which we are made in the shadow of God.
The soul [nefesh] of all flesh is the form [tzurat] it was given by the Power. The extra dimension which is found in the soul of man is the form of man who is perfect in his knowledge [HaShaleim b’daato]. Concerning this form the Torah states, ‘let us make man in our image [literally, “shadow”] and in our likeness,’ granting man a form which knows [tzurah hayodaat] and comprehends ideas that are not material… Knowledge is the form of the soul [HaDaat shehi tzurat HaNefesh] and it is concerning this form of the soul that the verse states, ‘in our image and in our likeness.’ [7]
The challenge, the honor and the goal of Israel is to know G-d which means to know and be in awe of Him and to teach all the people of the earth to know Him. This includes knowing that “there is no true existence like His” and that personal pronouns like “His” reflect the Torah’s need to approximate in language, in thoughts that human beings can grasp the nature of the Primary Being (Matsui Rishon) [8]. “The knowledge of this concept is a positive commandment” for Israel “and the great principle of faith upon which all depends”; to know that the Highest Wisdom, this Primary Being “brought all into existence” is “the foundation of all foundations and the pillar of wisdom” [9]. “He alone is true and the truth of His [being] does not resemble the truth of any [other] beings” [10]. Our soul and its degree of understanding of Him is love including sexual love which is essential to knowledge, as is imagination, reason, beauty and wonder. When Adam knew Eve all of these were united in clear perception and comprehension of the immaterial but all pervading truth of the Creator Who alone is fully true. When they sought to be as God [fully] knowing good and evil” they gained the sure knowledge of the fact that Rambam states above: that no human being can fully grasp or become the Creator Who is beyond space and time and “Whose infinite wisdom surpasses all comparison” This knowledge of the gap, of the difference between human and Primary Being (for “God is not a man”) “provides a foothold for a person of understanding to develop love for God” through “contemplation of his wondrous and great deeds and creations,” and a thirst to know the Creator and ourselves more fully, “as David stated, ‘my soul thirsts for God, for the living God’” [11].
As expressed by Rav Kook quoted above, the purpose of the Holy Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, upon which directly depend almost a third of the commandments and, indirectly, all of them is to stimulate the imagination to help one achieve full knowledge of the beauty and holiness of creation. Judaism exists to unite and show the way to unite body and soul, earth and heaven: “kindness and truth have met, righteousness and peace have kissed. Truth will sprout from the earth and righteousness will peer from heaven,” verses that reference Abraham, Jacob-Joseph and David and the Holy Temple where this unification of full knowledge, the beauty of sanctified life can be imagined, felt and anchored in deeds and an integrated way of being in the world [12].
The path of this knowledge of ourselves and the infinitely wondrous Primary Being lets us not ‘blame God’ and then turn away from the Creator because of the suffering and injustice we witness or experience, and which we at times mis-perceive. The path of knowledge frees us from this blame and darkness because to the extent that we travel it we understand and begin to feel our degree of freedom and responsibility: not our God-like autonomy or total independence. We are contingent, affected by those around us and who came before us, rooted in spiritual forces that we also affect, albeit indirectly, along with impacting directly those around us. We are interdependent, partly free and have great responsibility to heal the world with knowledge, with our souls as defined above. The Ramchal describes this well:
The details of each individual’s challenge have their primary roots in the spiritual world…for each person receives a different blend of perfection and deficiency. How it comes about that particular challenges are meted out to particular individuals depends on these spiritual roots [but] the distribution of challenges takes into account the true nature of all parties and circumstances and is decided by the Highest Wisdom [who] determines what is best for each individual.
Pain and punishment is not random nor is it always just, or even legal by our standards, depending as it does on many factors, spiritual, natural, and human. But suffering has redemptive power for “it was only created to exist in the absence of repentance. [Even] if one does not repent he still can be purified through these punishments and [his soul] not be annihilated completely.” To be nothing but dust and to turn to dust only is the worst punishment conceived by a faith in the immortality of the soul linked to the Creator by knowledge in the fullest sense. We may also take heart “that there is a limit placed on the amount of evil that a person can do. Once that limit is reached, God no longer gives that individual a chance… their measure is filled.” And just as one can suffer because of those who precede or are contemporaries with one, one’s connection to God, one’s soul can be saved by “association with righteous people “whose suffering can atone for an entire generation.” So either through one’s own suffering or repentance, good deeds or even association with righteous people one can avoid being “cast aside completely from perfection.” Thus, “the ultimate bliss is maximized” by the Highest Wisdom and by human choices; no person or group of people is autonomous or omnipotent; none are absolutely powerless or ineffectual. And the Creator is not a dictator: we have free will.
As Ramchal explains:
When an individual is judged, Providence takes account of his state and level with respect to what precedes him, what follows him, and what is associated with him. Each man is thus judged in relation to his forebears who preceded him, his descendants who follow him, and the people of his generation, city and community who are associated with him. After all this is taken into account he is given his particular service assignment and challenge, as well as a specific responsibility in serving God… God arranged matters so that man’s chance of achieving ultimate salvation should be maximized. “One’s judgment in this world” thus depends on many people, groups, events and epochs and our struggle for redemption is thus a “service assignment and challenge” in which others may help or hinder on the path of knowledge. “But in the world to come, the state in which a person finds himself depends completely on his own deeds” [13]. Thus the way of Judaism teaches the degree of our freedom and responsibility according to the context in which we exist: the Highest Wisdom comprehends all this. All meaning, all truth is in context from the stretching of the heavens to the foundations of the earth. “One’s judgment in this world” thus depends on many people, groups, events and epochs and our struggle for redemption is thus a “service assignment and challenge” in which others may help or hinder on the path of knowledge. “But in the world to come, the state in which a person finds himself depends completely on his own deeds” . Thus the way of Judaism teaches the degree of our freedom and responsibilityaccording to the context in which we exist: the Highest Wisdom comprehends all this. All meaning, all truth is in context from the stretching of the heavens to the foundations of the earth. Growing to a knowledge of the soul, ourselves and God in the way of Judaism involves understanding the nature of freedom, responsibility, suffering and redemption and even the vindication of the Creator by distinguishing our ways from “His,” by knowing as fully as possible that knowledge links us to Providence and the Highest Wisdom but also teaches the limits of all created things, including ourselves and our judgments. Thus the need for mercy, forgiveness, and repentance (or drawing near) which is the purpose of the Torah and the Temple Service whose loss is grieved on Tisha B’Av and whose rebuilding is urgently desired, for mercy and wonder’s sake; for joy.
“One’s judgment in this world” thus depends on many people, groups, events and epochs and our struggle for redemption is thus a “service assignment and challenge” in which others may help or hinder on the path of knowledge. “But in the world to come, the state in which a person finds himself depends completely on his own deeds” . Thus the way of Judaism teaches the degree of our freedom and responsibilityaccording to the context in which we exist: the Highest Wisdom comprehends all this. All meaning, all truth is in context from the stretching of the heavens to the foundations of the earth. Growing to a knowledge of the soul, ourselves and God in the way of Judaism involves understanding the nature of freedom, responsibility, suffering and redemption and even the vindication of the Creator by distinguishing our ways from “His,” by knowing as fully as possible that knowledge links us to Providence and the Highest Wisdom but also teaches the limits of all created things, including ourselves and our judgments. Thus the need for mercy, forgiveness, and repentance (or drawing near) which is the purpose of the Torah and the Temple Service whose loss is grieved on Tisha B’Av and whose rebuilding is urgently desired, for mercy and wonder’s sake; for joy.Already eighty years ago, Rav Kook commented on “paths to purity” in a world whose “rampant levels of violence [Hamas] and impurity have become entrenched…the world [already] deserves to have been destroyed. Yet God in His kindness established another method of purification that repairs moral defects over time…the ashes of the red heifer” (Numbers 19) whose ritual acknowledges in deeds that the greatness of the Creator’s mercy is beyond our ability to fully grasp, and the Temple service which stimulates our faculties to approach it. As does Ramchal in Derekh Hashem, Rav Kook explains that “only in extreme cases is it necessary to purify through destruction” [14] as in the case of Amalek, the expression of Edom whose affliction of Israel increases in our days, the ikva shel Mashiach and multi-faceted battles of the martyr Mashiach ben Yosef.
We are created in the knowledge of wonder, love, awe, beauty, wholeness and marital complementarity, — how limiting to say ‘male and female chromosomes’ or DNA of the cerebral cortex that enables language, thought and the integration that is knowledge, the form of the soul that can know the perfect Unity and Truth; impossible to do this without wonder, beauty, imagination… and sobriety embedded in the requisites of the Temple service which circumscribe an entire pattern and way of a nation’s life keyed to free will choices by every individual who is tasked with the challenge of becoming themselves in knowing the Eternal Wisdom, to “go to yourself” as Abraham was commanded [15].
Thus the masters of return and repentance, the descendants of Korach, Levites all, sang in the Temple of the trials of Israel and of all confused, violent and struggling mankind: “those who traverse the valley of thorns transform it into a wellspring,” for “singers as well as flute-players; all wellsprings are in you, O Zion.” And one immersed in the waters of Torah is “like a wellspring forever strengthening.” Thus, to struggle through the blindness and brutalities of history, the alliance of Edom and Ishmael is to “advance from strength to strength” and “appear before God in Zion…for one day in Your courtyards is better than a thousand elsewhere, for a sun and a shield is Hashem” [16].
Judaism, the way of the Children of Israel is an attempt to do justice to the wondrous lucidity and loving kindness of the Creator, although we can never fully grasp it, and to support and build respect for the wondrous capabilities of human beings, especially for their knowledge in all its senses, the form of the soul made in the shadow of God.
Because Israel cannot fulfill its mission for the Creator and for the world unless it is intact, complete and in that sense, perfect, the form and “habitation” of the Creator, none of its mitzvoth have full healing efficacy for mankind for the Torah is complete and true as is the Highest Wisdom. So it is written that had the nations only understood the blessings and salvation anchored in the Holy Temple, if they only understood now, they would surround it with all their armies to defend it and the Temple Service of Israel established in their entire land whose produce is essential to this service. “Upon three things the world depends: Torah, the Temple service and deeds of loving kindness,” and there is no greater kindness than to integrate these three stanchions, to protect and sustain the Torah and Temple Service and Israel which in every way is organized around it. Productivity, study and learning, abundance and peace are the goals of Israel; how terrible that the nations, or the leading oligarchies of the powers want to steal and create wars over the Promised Land and Jerusalem above all, making the source of blessing “a burdensome stone” where there should be light and joy. “And when I reflected to consider the [apparent] peace of the roisterers, it was iniquity in my eyes; — until I came to the sanctuaries of God [and] contemplated their end.” Our release from despair, our insight and joy depend at our visit to the Temple Mount and its rebuilt sanctuaries. Then we will not be “senseless” but ‘close’ to God and recount all we can of His wonders, as Rambam explained, in love, awe and recognition of our contingency.
Everyday since Israel began gathering in irreversible strength to sovereignty in its land, and to the integrity this involves, the nations have intensified their war on the Jews, to partition Israel and erase its service of liberating knowledge, and the means of wonder, sanctified imagination, beauty and peace. Thus they are “consumed with bewildering terrors” and increasingly slip into the shadows of “the dark places of the earth, filled with the habitations of Hamas” [17]. They transform peace to war, grace to horror, and life to death. Instead of wealth there is impoverishment; instead of wisdom, ignorance; instead of abundance there is desolation of the seed, the dominion of Esau and the subjugation of Jacob [18]; and the sick world dies; such waste, until the horror shocks the survivors awake and they remember the past that has been erased and the truth that has been buried by lies [19]. Then Israel will settle in its place, in Jerusalem…
Observers might say that Israel is forsaken, infiltrated, betrayed, pushed again to the precipice, but the ways of the Highest Wisdom are not the ways of man, and the “thoughts” of the Primary Being are not our thoughts. “His greatness is beyond investigation.” “To whom can you liken God and what likeness can you attribute to Him” as Isaiah pronounced and Rambam explicated. The way of Jacob is never hidden from Hashem; “He does not weary, he does not tire; He gives strength to the weary and abundant might to the powerless” as shown by the survival of Israel in defiance of human systems of “pure reason” from Plato till today and despite the malicious envy and genocidal slander of the nations. But “all the nations are like nothing before Him; as nothingness and emptiness are they reckoned by Him…the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and like dust rubbing off a scale; He will cast away the islands [continents] like dust.” As for Hizballah and their patrons, East and West, “the Lebanon is insufficient kindling, and its beasts are insufficient oleh-offerings” [20]. Jewish leadership with wisdom and knowledge of its origins, with love, beauty, self-respect and integrity will fulfill these words and grace us all with beauty and peace from the Temple, the Holy House of the foundation of all foundations… and we will know Hashem.
Beauty and knowledge, understanding of the Eternal Creator, sexuality and wonder; they must be entwined, shaleim, in wisdom. They are so easily dissevered and then each in its own way becomes an idol leading from constrained but intense pleasures to selfhood, power, ambition, misunderstanding, blindness and violence: our world fights hard against and also toward the light in these twilight times. The more Israel emerges and strives to be intact, bringing with this the essence of peace (shaleim – shalom) the more the nations persist in frantically adoring and seeking to impose their fictions. This is the ultimate ignorance, the antithesis of knowledge the form of the soul; it is the essence of war, a war of terror and its “peace process,” the antithesis of true peace, the virtual peace of a culture filled with shadows and consumed with terrors. When things deteriorate still more, they will awaken; they will reach the limit of contraction. The Highest Wisdom provides for a jolt strong enough to do so, however strong it must be; for “truth will sprout from the earth, and righteousness will peer from heaven…” when the Temple service is renewed by a rebuilt Beit HaMikdash and atonement for all mankind is annually achieved in a joyous week-long festival that reflects and restores creation.
1. Rav Abraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook, Ein Ayah II.157 as adapted by Rav Chanan Morrison, “Tisha B’Av: ‘the Beauty of the Universe’”; Rav Kook quotes Rav Elazar from Berachot 33a
2. Tehillim 89:3; Isaiah 40: 12-14, 28, 42:5-8, etc.
3. Rav Kook, op. cit. with quotes from Zevachim 54b and Shemonah Kevatzim I.606
4. Rav Kook on portion Beshalach in Gold from the Land of Israel (Urim 2006) arranged by Rav Chanan Morrison, 124-9, 284-9; the first and second set of tablets, the mekudash and tadir (intense & gradual return) each will bring their respective gifts to mankind; the essential holiness (segulah) of Israel and its acquired, “willed holiness” will integrate and be appreciated as will the written and oral Torah, cf. Exodus 17:14, 16, “write this as a reminder…and repeat it in Joshua’s ears…God shall be at war with Amalek for all generations.”
5. Rambam, Sefer HaMitzvoth, negative commandment 32 against necromancy, divination, and sleight of hand. Similarly, this section of the book addresses the prohibitions of “idol” worship and its link to many sexual perversions and disruptions of social daat (e.g. against ‘cross-dressing’). This is because “the Eternal hates lechery (zimah) which takes the heart of a man and distances it from good” the way magic steals the mind (Sanhedrin 93a). See also Midrash Mishlei 31 on “her hands hold the spindle” with reference to Yael who did not wear man’s clothing or use a man’s weapons even during an obligatory war.
6. Rav Chanan Morrison, op. cit. 37-8 on Torah portion Lekh Lekha as discussed by Rav Kook in Olat Re’iyah I. 396-7
7. Rambam, Sefer HaMada, Yesodei HaTorah (“Foundations of Torah”), 1.9., 2.4, 1.7 4:9-10
8. ibid. 1:4, 1:1
9. ibid. 1:6. 1:1; “the Highest Wisdom” (HaChakhma HaElyonah) is a term used frequently by Ramchal, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato (1706-47) to refer to the Eternal One in Derekh Hashem [“the Way of God”] e.g. 2.3.2 ff.
10. Yesodei HaTorah 1:3
11. ibid. 2:1-2
12. Tehillim 85:12
13. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, Derekh Hashem (Feldheim, Kaplan translation 1978, revised and corrected 1997 edition), 2.3.2-9
14. Gold from the Land of Israel, op. cit. 282-4 adopted from Ein Ayah III. 47-8; Derekh Hashem 2.3.8: “the only ones who are cast aside completely are those who are not worthy of perfection at all, neither through their own merit nor through association with a [righteous person]. The number of those saved from annihilation and assured of ultimate bliss thus is maximized” which is the work of the Creator, Judaism teaches and, through the Temple service, offers. The Creator “knows” “that good or evil [may] befall a person because of the place where he lives or because of the group with which he is associated,” 2.3.7.
15. Bereishis (Genesis) 12:1 passim
16. Tehillim 84:7, 87:7, 73:1-20; Pirke Avot 6:1; Isaiah 55:1-12, the waters and life of Torah are free for the hungry and thirsting, “the enduring promises of David,” the “milk and wine” of Judah. “Come buy and eat, even without money and without price…” for the God of Jacob is “abundantly forgiving”; Tehillim 84:8-12; 83:1-7; even the pursuit and destruction of the enemies of Zion is “so they will know Hashem…”
17. tehillim 74:20; this verse is the leitmotif of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness a meditation on the morbidity of lies, of a society of pervasive insincerity, greed and violence, — a society built on the imperial cult that re-defined the Eternal, razed the Temple and to this day seeks to uproot Jews from the Promised Land, negating the glory and holy joy of seed and abundance; it is a society unable to know truth or act in any nurturing and meaningful relation to “the form of the soul,” which ‘buries’ the Eternal One beneath an implacable, brooding, mute and perhaps dumb wilderness of “primeval mud”; in short, the nightmare world, the valley of thorns of Darwinism from which, like a black hole, nothing escapes; a neo-pagan world in which Nature displaces the Primary Being, a world into which Abraham arose to teach daat, to liberate the soul of humankind by giving it knowledge of God.
18. Sefer Yetzirah (“the Book of Formation”) version of the Vilna Gaon as this writer interprets the structure of history, the week of three phases discussed in Sanhedrin 97a5-6 deriving from tehillim 90:4. As far as the temporal dimension of a settlement in Israel “like a bridegroom rejoicing over his bride” for a week of ‘honeymoon,’ Isaiah 62:5, the sages offer various opinions; the messianic era (as opposed to the world to come) may last seven thousand years for Israel on the principle of a thousand years for a day, supra. It may be for the duration of the world, for the length of human history, or of human history since Noah, “as it is stated, ‘this is like the waters of Noah to me, regarding which I swore,” Sanhedrin 99a3 on Isaiah 54:9. As so often, Rambam offers a comment at once sensible, awed and humble, that is, wise: “a human being does not have the capacity to properly comprehend the goodness of the World-to-Come. No one knows its glory, beauty and potency except God. All the benefits the prophets predicted for Israel are physical matters which the Jewish people will enjoy in the Messianic era when their sovereignty is restored. The goodness of the world to come is immeasurable…” Hilchot Teshuvah [”Ways of Repentance”] 8:7.
19. Paraphrase of the modern age as perceived and succinctly stated by George Orwell, 1984, chapter 7; it is a perfect motto for what the dynamic, guilt-ridden West has done to Israel, the people and the Land and its blessings: the desolation of the seed.
20. Isaiah 40: 12-29; 55:8-12; Rambam supra; see my essay, “Humiliate the Jew”