'Father had kept his promise'
When Yishai Sarid wrote "The Third Temple" in 2015, his vision of a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem may have felt like sci-fi. Now, as it's published in English, it could be torn from tomorrow's headlines
I still remember the first time I heard a bar mitzvah boy, a cousin, deliver a speech about the laws of the temple. He had been educated in religious schools here in Israel, and in between the main course and dessert at the lavish dinner-dance his parents threw in his honor, he spent 10 minutes explicating the precise instructions that halakhah – Jewish law – relates to a particular point in the design or operation of the temple. Laid down first in the Book of Leviticus, and then parsed and elaborated upon in the Talmud, the rules for the functioning of the temple take into account most every contingency, so that we know how to respond if conditions change, or mistakes are made.
This surprised me on several levels. I was used to Jewish boys and girls, when they came of age, being required to show off their knowledge and worldview with a brief talk. In my experience, though, they generally used the opportunity to tackle a specific moral dilemma that engaged them in their Torah portion, or to connect the reading to a contemporary issue. Here, though, the bar mitzvah boy was showing his mastery of the ins and outs of Jewish law – with regard to an institution that had not existed for nearly two millennia.
The temple in Jerusalem of antiquity had an especially important role to play on Yom Kippur, “For on this day atonement shall be made for you to purify you of all your sins” (Leviticus 16:30), and we can read about the high priest’s preparations for the day, and its special sacrifices in detail in Tractate Yoma in the Mishna and the Gemara. This was the one day of the year when the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies, and any variation from the guidelines could result in his death.
It is thus fitting that novelist Yishai Sarid placed Yom Kippur at the climax of the action of “The Third Temple,” to be published in English translation in November.
Published originally in Hebrew in 2015, “The Third Temple” takes place in a near-future Israel, but one that is nearly unrecognizable. It is a quarter-century since the State of Israel and “Amalek” (the Arab enemy) engaged in a nuclear war that left the land scarred and the Jewish and Muslim peoples both decimated in their numbers. What is called the Kingdom of Judah was left controlling the inland, including Jerusalem, while Amalek holds the coastal plain, whose cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa, were “evaporated” during the war. A final rematch between the two states is just a matter of time.
As Sarid imagines it, the Kingdom of Judah is led by a new royal family that has come up with a pedigree tracing its descent back to King David. One of the first orders given by King Jehoaz was to destroy the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and rebuild the temple in their place, in strict accordance with the specs laid out in the sources.
Until not long ago, I found it hard to take talk about a reconstituted temple seriously. Yes, our liturgy and tradition have always expressed the hope to see the temple rebuilt, but since that isn’t supposed to happen before the arrival of the Messiah, I related to the prospect much as I did to the evangelical Christian anticipation of the Rapture – with a wave of the hand and a superior snicker. And I assumed most other Jews felt the same way.
With all our claims to long nostalgically for the good old days, to me it was obvious that most Jews had little desire to return to a Judaism in which our relationship with God was conducted by way of intermediaries, namely the priest-bureaucrats of the temple, and measured by the number and quality of animals we slaughtered and offered up on the altar.
I’m not snickering now. Today there are very large numbers of Jews for whom the idea of a rebuilt temple is not a metaphor, nor a vision to be realized at a far-off end of days. Today, there are Jews who not only long for a temple but are planning for it. (Yoram Peri and Gabi Weimann wrote a sobering summary of these efforts in a piece in Haaretz this past summer, in which they reported claims that the challenge of breeding a red heifer appear to have been overcome.) They are no longer small in their numbers, nor are they marginal in their influence, as they have representatives in Israel’s current government.
If in 2015, Yishai Sarid’s book read like apocalyptic science fiction, a warning meriting consideration, reading it today, I found myself wondering if it might not be too late to avert the apocalypse it envisions. I was also curious how he himself regards the novel today, when tensions over the Temple Mount run so high. We talked about these and related matters, in a conversation toward the end below.
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The narrator of “The Third Temple” is Jonathan, third and youngest son of Jehoaz, who is both king and high priest of Judah. Jonathan was, he tells us, “two years old when the first nuclear bomb landed on the city of Haifa, igniting the oil refineries, which burst into a fireball that could be seen all the way up north, and obliterating the city. The second bomb landed in Tel Aviv two minutes later, a hundred meters away from the General Military Staff building.”
At that moment of devastation and weakness, Jehoaz appeared on the scene, after being visited by God in the desert, where he worked at an observatory. It’s a story that all the kingdom’s children learn about in school, in which the formerly secular astronomer reluctantly came to Jerusalem to take charge of the army and then the state following the evaporation.
“Fourteen days later there was not one surviving Amalekite west of the Jordan River. On the fifteenth day, the Engineering Corps blew up the mosques on the mountain and Father ordered soldiers to search its ruins for the Ark of the Covenant buried there by King Josiah. The ark was found, and immediately thereafter the cornerstone of the Third Temple was laid in Jerusalem. Father had kept his promise.”
Jonathan grows up a damaged individual. Not only is he competing with his siblings for the love and attention of a narcissistic father, but he is regarded as damaged by Jewish law, as he was wounded at age 3 by a grenade that had been intended for the king. Its shrapnel hit “both my legs and the space between them,” leaving him with psychological wounds no less severe than physical ones. Jonathan grows up with sexual desires he will be unable to fulfill, and with a need to serve both God and his father with a loyalty that will remain unrequited. It is Jonathan who keeps the machinery of the temple running as smoothly as possible, even as the kingdom is crumbling around him.
In fact, by the time “The Third Temple” opens, the Kingdom of Judah has been defeated, and our narrator is being held captive in a cell in an Amalekite fortress by the sea. His captors have supplied him with writing materials so that he can record for posterity his first-hand account of the kingdom’s rise and fall. His report is reliable, even if he himself is still not fully capable of acknowledging the moral bankruptcy and deceit of the regime he served that brought his people to ruin.
Yishai Sarid, 59, is the author of 10 novels in Hebrew; “The Temple” is the third to appear in English translation. Sarid, who has a day job as a lawyer, is certainly drawn to provocative topics: His two previous English publications were “The Memory Monster,” a critical look at the way Israeli society teaches itself about the Holocaust, and in particular about the deleterious impact that high school students’ trips to the death camps can have, and “Victorious,” the story of an army psychiatrist who specializes in helping combat soldiers lose their inhibitions about pulling the trigger, so that they can become more effective killing machines. (Sarid’s newest novel in Hebrew, “The Panelist,” is about a washed-up journalist who has an opportunity to revive his career – but at a price.)
Sarid’s writing, he says, is always preceded by a period of research about the subject at hand, so that his accounts are convincing and his point of view nuanced. He is not interested in writing polemics.
Sarid is the son of Yossi Sarid, the longtime politician from Labor and later Meretz, who was known for his erudition and his razor-sharp wit. Because of these attributes and because he was a man of the left, and secular, Yossi Sarid, who died in 2015, was viewed by some on the right as an enemy of Judaism, a grave misunderstanding of the man.
When I interviewed the son a first time, for Haaretz English Edition in 2020, he told me he regarded his father as “the most Jewish man I knew. In terms of his connection to the sources, his ability to quote the Bible like an encyclopedia, his level of learning, and also his sense of Jewish continuity – including in the matter of the Shoah, and perhaps most important, in his sense of moral obligation. Even if he didn’t believe in God, he possessed a ‘fear of heaven’ in the sense that he felt we Jews had obligations in this world.”
I spoke with Yishai Sarid again this month, in anticipation of the English-language publication of “The Third Temple.” I was naturally curious about what led him to write the book in the first place, but was also interested in hearing how he regarded the book’s subject matter a decade on, at a time when Israeli society is so much more conspicuously divided internally, and when so much of the division seems to be over the role of Judaism in public life.
What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation.
You wrote “The Third Temple” almost a decade ago. What was the impetus for it at the time?
It came from several directions. First of all, I was enthralled by the entire “scene” of the temple from when I was a child and we studied the Bible in school.
“Enthralled” [“muksam” in Hebrew] -- that sounds positive.
Definitely. For a kid. It’s also frightening. Look, the idea that there is a God, who is present in a particular place, through the eyes of a child. And the whole thing with the priests and the sacrifices. The mystery, and the magic, the awe.
Sarid says that he decided to write a book about it when it became clear to him that there were people in Israeli society who had a “real, concrete intention to recreate the Temple, with everything implied by that.”
Yishai Sarid: For the activist wing of religious Zionism -- the settlers, the movement’s yeshivot -- the Zionist project and the Return to Zion will be incomplete as long as the temple remains unbuilt. Because there are many halakhot [religious laws] that require the temple. Of course, the sacrifices, the pilgrimages, Yom Kippur. Also, in terms of the mythology of it. The temple is the place that represents the union between the shekhina [the divine presence], which represents the upper being of the people of Israel, and God. It’s an erotic union of sorts. This appears a lot in the kabbalah.
And in principle, they aren’t willing to accept a situation in which we have returned to the Land of Israel, but we don’t have a temple, and we aren’t able to undertake the mitzvot that are connected to the temple. With all due respect to the fact that we established a state, and towns, and an army, and an economy, the basic thing is missing – and that’s the temple.
Did you see the book as a wake-up call?
On one level it was a warning, but on another level, it’s a story that explains the magic of the temple. And also, why it’s a move to a new kind of Judaism… a Judaism based on religious rituals, sacrifices, temple, in place of the Judaism that was built, stage by stage, after the Second Temple was destroyed, and Yohanan ben Zakkai created the first beit midrash in Yavneh.
We might have thought that Judaism was progressing [forward] in a unilinear direction, but here we see that this was something people actually desired. They weren’t just paying lip service to the idea of the temple. And now it’s in our power.
Yes, it’s in our power. Since the liberation of East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War…. But generally, for the state’s founding generation, whether they were socialists or Ben-Gurion’s Labor movement, or they were revisionists, the temple didn’t interest them. They wanted to build a state, one that was more or less modern, and the last thing that interested them was building a temple.
But today I see that all roads lead to it. Because that’s generally happening in Israel in terms of its concept of Judaism. It’s something different altogether. It’s a pagan concept, something almost idolatrous, which deals with ceremonies, and with sacred places, in place of texts, and all the other things that developed over the years as a replacement for the temple. And now, many years later, the direction is to go back in the other direction.
Now, of course, we need to say that, in addition to all the other practical issues, this happens to be one of the most holy sites in Islam. Al Aqsa Mosque is there.
What I did in the book -- I placed the book some 25 years after the blowing up of the mosque. At this point, it doesn’t exist…. And I focus on the meaning of it for us. What does it mean, this passion to rebuild the temple, what does it mean for Judaism? If we blow up the mosques, God forbid, it will be a catastrophe. That’s the focus of my book.
And it’s not just the blowing up of Al Aqsa. It’s also after the “evaporation,” which is your euphemism for an apocalyptic catastrophe, which has a continuation 25 years later.
Yes. Look, I am very afraid of what the Iranians could do to us with a nuclear bomb. I really do believe that they would use it, that they wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation. Israel is a very small state, and in geographical terms, they could finish us off with two or three bombs. On this point, I’m definitely not a naïve left-winger.
Today, as opposed to a year ago, do you feel that we are closer to that, that we are on an irrevocable path to [regional] war?
Look, we’re already in a place that is apocalyptic, as compared with all the preceding years of Israeli history. We’re already in a place of lack of security. It’s the first time in my life, on a personal level, that I have a real fear about the continuation of the state. Of course we are closer.
But as for the matter of the temple: Of course, If there’s a war, and we see this already today, when there’s a war, and spirits are whipped up, people get the motivation, and there is the danger of this happening – of taking over the Temple Mount. I pray ever day – well, I don’t pray -- but I hope that someone is keeping an eye on the site and taking care that no one plants a bomb there.
The political and moral message and dialogue of this book seem more relevant than even before. But beside the political, the personal is very moving and disturbing. Psychologically subtle. Yonatan is a troubling character, for whom I felt both sympathy and disgust.
First, I also have empathy for him. You know, during the nights when I was writing, we were together. During the nights, I really did worship God, and my father was the king.
It’s a national story, but the heart of the book is a family story. The story of a damaged child, who wants above all to please his father, by way of his work, which he carries out with profound dedication and full belief.
And the book is the story of sacrifice. He too is a sacrifice, in his wounding as a child. And also afterwards. The temple is a place that deals with sacrifice on a daily basis. Our story today is also one of making of sacrifices – to the nation, to the state, to our sovereignty. And most of the sacrifices are of young people, young people, like Jonathan. Who have naïve belief in the things that they do. And there’s always someone who exploits it to bad ends.
It seems to me that the war we are currently involved in is being experienced by many as a holy war, in a way more pronounced than in previous wars. Do you see that?
I think that for many people, this has become a holy war. A national war and a religious war. You see it with the soldiers with the Mashiach patch on their uniforms. And you see it in the prayers that they are saying in Gaza. The religious right is directing this. And more than that: Religious war is part of their ideology. Part of their plan. It’s not something forced upon us. It’s not something terrible we need to carry out in order to survive. War is part of the concept of this new Judaism. Of the persona of the New Jew.
This was part of Zionism from the beginning, but war wasn’t seen as something desirable. [If necessary,] we needed to be able to defend ourselves. And that of course is correct and good. But it was never an ideal. There was also the aspiration to arrive eventually at peace. They wrote songs about peace. That’s something that is no longer done.
And additionally, in terms of religion and the dehumanization of the Palestinians, of the Arabs. That something that didn’t’ exist in the past. And that’s something bad, it’s very very negative.
Beside this terrible war, we are also in a fight for the image of Israel and also over the image of Judaism. Will it continue to be a Judaism that includes morality, and also creativity, and free thought? Will it have tolerance for others? Or will it be a Judaism of extremism, and racist, as I describe in the book. The direction we are going in today, I believe.
Your book is about to be published in English. Do you feel you can go talk to foreign audiences about the book, for example, and offer a message that goes beyond a feeling that all is lost?
I live here in Israel, and I have no intention of leaving. My grandfather came here as a baby in 1913. On both sides, my family gave up their lives and I’m invested here. And I won’t give in. There’s an existential struggle going on. Not just against external enemies, there’s also a fateful struggle over how Israel will appear, and if it will survive. If Israel continues in the present direction, it won’t be able to survive.
At the end of the day, there needs to be a solution that is good not just for the narrow democratic needs of Israelis, but also for everyone living here, including the Palestinians. Based on equality and human rights. But this isn’t for right now.
Thank you so, so much for publishing this - we need more explorations of the future if we're ever to chart a course to a better tomorrow.
Eye-opening and chilling.