I think Robert Eisenman’s perceptive editorial in the Jerusalem Post on “Herod’s Temple,” i.e., the 2nd Temple (really the 3rd), destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans, has much good to ponder. As he notes, there is surely a place with Judaism and Jerusalem for a “Temple” if understood in terms of a mishkan, i.e. dwelling place for the divine Presence, or as Isaiah put it, “A House of Prayer for all peoples,” but in my humble opinion much of what is propagated today regarding “rebuilding the Temple” is modeled much too much upon what I would call “2nd Temple fantasy,” confusing the “3rd Temple” that Herod built with anything Holy or worthy of recovering, and thus trading a legitimate Jewish nationalism for an era that can in no way be a model for the future in our modern world.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1256557977301&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Tabor's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.