“I have done much rebuilding. To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future.”
Marguerite Yourcenar
It all begins with his imagination. Like the many millions who on this sacred day celebrate revered replicas of a barn with a little baby, set up in their homes, churches and squares - Ezekiel the exile is homesick, longing for the land of Israel and its storied, sacred past. He doesn’t build a model of the temple of his youth, but he arrives there in his mind, guided by god’s hand:
בְּמַרְא֣וֹת אֱלֹהִ֔ים הֱבִיאַ֖נִי אֶל־אֶ֣רֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וַיְנִיחֵ֗נִי אֶל־הַ֤ר גָּבֹ֙הַּ֙ מְאֹ֔ד וְעָלָ֥יו כְּמִבְנֵה־עִ֖יר מִנֶּֽגֶב׃
It brought me, in divine visions, to the Land of Israel, and set me down on a very high mountain on which there seemed to be the outline of a city on the south.
Ezekiel 40:2
He dates the vision - the tenth day of the month of Nissan, 573 BCE, 25 years after leaving Jerusalem, and 14 years after the city was destroyed. Starting with this mountain summit - which is assumed to be the Temple Mount, Ezekiel visits his hometown again - in some sort of eerie detailed dream that will last for eight chapters and conclude his career, and this book.
What he describes in this vision is the temple - or some sort of temple, and he describes it in peculiar detail which has puzzled readers for thousands of years. Is it a nostalgic reverie of a homesick refugee who returns to the sanctuary he once served in as a priest and now recalls each corridor and stairway? Is it a blueprint for a future temple to replace that holy home so brutally burned down? Perhaps a bit of both, and some more mystical aspects of the body of the divine essence, as well. The medieval French commentator Rashi admits halfway through this chapter that “I was unable to understand these three verses at all.” Another medieval commentator, Radak, writing in Italy, admits similarly: “The truth is that the measurements of this edifice are not clear to us since they pertain to a future construction, and whatever a person will offer in their interpretation by means of independent reasoning is unreliable.” The debate about the meaning of these verses continues till today, as mystics and architects, poets and scholars probe Ezekiel’s path through the edifice. It has also been adopted by political-messianic readers, avid to build the temple Ezekiel could not have even dreamed of - not the second one to replace the one he missed so much- but the third one - to replace the second that was burned by the Romans.
But beyond the volatile political possibilities of this future temple, some prefer to read these chapters as another metaphor - not to the actual temple in Jerusalem but to the essence of the divine as it lives in the body, and as the last longings of a displaced person, forever torn between here and there, body and soul, the earthly and the celestial realities.
Prof. Adriane Leveen, published Returning the Body to Its Place: Ezekiel's Tour of the Temple, in the Harvard Theological Review, exploring the inner dimensions of this journey:
“ The reader accompanies Ezekiel on an elaborate and detailed guided tour, stepping off the page as it were, seeing what Ezekiel sees, traversing open spaces, entering gates, calculating their width and depth, and measuring—measuring over and over. Numbers of cubits accumulate. We climb stairs, cross chambers, gaze at palm trees painted on walls, pant at the exertion, and perhaps stoop to climb a winding stair...The vision in Ezekiel 40-48 is strangely exhilarating —dramatic, densely detailed, concrete, and visual. We are not just listening to or reading about a description of a building but are asked to observe a body, that of the prophet, as it moves through that building. He enacts what he longs to have happen — a return to God's "House" while we become eyewitnesses to that rebuilt house.
...Thus in this reading the prophetic description of the temple is not simply an opportunity for nostalgia over a quickly disappearing past—a rhetorical tour de force that commemorates the former glories of the Jerusalem temple. Nor is it only an abstract vision for a distant future, a valorization of a temple that is wholly theoretical as the community resigns itself to an exile of undefined length.
It can certainly be understood as both. Chapters 40-48 commemorate the loss of the temple and offer a vision for the future. But neither proposal captures, or accounts for, the compelling nature of the prophet's vision with its striking sense of immediacy.”
For 45 verses in today’s chapter, Ezekiel is led by a mysterious man or creature, measuring string in hand, as he silently measures walls and stairways, only speaking once to indicate the purpose of rooms dedicated for priestly use. As Prof. Leveen writes in her article - it’s all very eerie - simultaneously compelling and dull. Why all this detail?
In the chapters left we’ll try to tackle the dimensions of this vision, verses that create a sacred worship center in a land longed for, ravaged by war, yearning for order and structure when so little of either is the reality at hand for its homesick refugees. It is the gift of the religious imagination to bring us back home, deeper in our mind or heart into the holy shelter, to offer us divine visions and hopeful imagery when all around us, then, as now, so much violence threatens our very existence and the very essence of the sacred.
On this day: Wishes of sacred and serene shelters and seasonal celebrations of life, love and hope, for all.
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Ezekial's temple makes me think of Escher. Of an impossible architecture, one that can exist only in the mind. He says to me 'be not afeard of the temple in your own mind. A time may come again when that can be your only refuge.
And thanks for the Yourcenar quote; it's now up on my wall.