In this week’s Torah portion, Tetzaveh, we continue to read about the Mishkan, the Tabernacle which takes up a great deal of the laws of the Torah. It is arguably the most central element in the Biblical communal life of the Jewish people. The Mishkan not only was a place of Divine service but represented the Jewish people’s relationship with God. As the Torah puts it, “Make a sanctuary for Me and I will dwell among them.” And as the Talmud states (Yoma 74a): “Rav Katina said: “When the Israelites would come to the Temple for the holiday the curtain (of the Holy of Holies) would be pulled back for them and they would see the cherubs intertwined with each other. The priests would say to them: “Behold, the love of you before God is like the love of man and woman.””

The destruction of the Temple was a tragic event. To go from being quite Temple-focused, with personal and communal sacrifices, thrice yearly pilgrimages, and the constant miracles in the first Temple which expressed God’s presence to the Jewish people, to living without it, was obviously a sea change. One wonders how the Jewish people understood their ability to relate to God in the aftermath of the destruction.

The Talmud (Menachot 97a) has a very interesting solution to the recession of the Divine presence after the destruction: “Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Eliezer together said, at the time that the Temple stood the altar atoned for a person, but now that the Temple no longer stands one’s table atones for them.” It seems that the home, our everyday lives, can be the place where the Shechina, the Divine presence, dwells after Its home has been destroyed. This is even more true on Shabbat when we make Kiddush on wine and Hamotzi on loaves with salt on them. All symbols reminiscent of the sacrifices in the Temple. (Some are even careful to make two six braid chalot so that they symbolize the 12 loaves which were on the shulchan, the Temple table, as commanded in our parshiot.)

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg pointed out that the destruction was not merely a loss of Divine presence or a substitution of home for the Temple, but also a process of maturation for the Jewish people’s relationship with God. In the era of the Divine miracles and prophecy, the covenant between God and the Jewish people was like the relationship between a parent and young child. The parent is present all the time, cares for and guides the child, and the child does as the parent says. As the child matures they become more independent and the parent’s role in their life recedes. The destruction of the Temple and the disappearance of prophecy are a product of the relationship between God and the Jewish people changing. Now the Jewish people must play a more active role in Torah and Jewish life, forging a path through history and theology almost on their own.   God does not reward and punish in any direct way and is less outwardly manifest in the life of the nation. The Jewish people must take more religious initiative, and indeed they do this.

With the destruction of the Temple, the volume of the Divine presence is turned down but the Rabbis of Talmud find ways to, ironically, make God more present through everyday life. The home is now the Temple, and every time we eat is an occasion to bless God and find the Divine in the world. Destruction, in a sense, frees the Jewish people and makes them more independant, but they find ways to make God present on new terms. The rabbinic mitzvah of Chanukah, for instance, casts the individual Jew as the High Priest and his house as the Holy Temple.

Rabbi Greenberg also recognizes that in addition to the destruction of the first and second temples, moments of God becoming subsequently more hidden and yet more ubiquitous, there is a third destruction—the Holocaust. With this destruction God becomes even more hidden and more self-limiting, God does not save the Jewish people from the greatest destruction they have known. It is not a case of Divine reward and punishment, for the torture and destruction were so great there is no crime henious enough to deserve the punishment.

With this destruction, as God becomes even more hidden, and there is even more tzimtzum, more withdrawing, as it were; the human must step forward and find God on his or her own. As the rabbis of the Mishnah, following the destruction of the Temple established the blessings on everyday occurrences, creatively making God who had become less manifest, more ubiquitous, so too following this third destruction the same process must occur. God is more hidden and so we must find ways to make God more present in the everydayness of our lives. But how do we do this?

One way is through the most accessible image of God we have, which is the human being. Human dignity, the recognition of the human made in the Divine image, must play a central role in this process and is indeed a realization so needed in our fractured world.