![]() ![]() In Islamicate and Sephardic communities it is called the hekhal, after Temple shrine. Behind them is the Torah shrine, a late antique invention that came to be called the aron, in memory of the biblical Ark of the Covenant. Here we see a community gathered at night in their synagogue, seated on the floor, each member reciting from a printed book containing the biblical book of Lamentations together with a litany of liturgical poetry that evokes the sorrow of the day. The image created for Tisha be-Av by the anonymous artist is most invocative of Jewish understanding of this day. ![]() This slim book illustrates the rituals of the Jewish year as practiced near the turn of modernity, and is a fine metaphor for this entire book project. The Amsterdam Book of Customs, Sefer Minhagim, an image from which graces the cover of this volume, was published in 1723 by Herts Tsvi Rofe. At the same time, the destruction of the temples is an opportunity to reaffirm hope – hope for messianic redemption, and hope that “the temple will be rebuilt speedily in our days, amen.” It is no wonder, then, that space and memory are so essential to Jewish self-understanding. It is no small thing that the greatest destruction of all Jewish time, the Holocaust, was instinctively called by the European survivors ḥurban Europa, and that Jewish liturgical poetry invokes the language of the Temple to envelop Jewish memory of places past and communities ruined. It recalls the destruction of Jewish communities across the ages and on almost every continent of the synagogues burned and pillaged and abandoned, from ancient Alexandria to medieval Barcelona, from early modern Galicia to modern Berlin, Boston and Aleppo. This second ḥurban looms largest, but the day of fasting that is Tisha be-Av is more than isolated memory. Jews evoke the destruction, hurban, of the first Temple of Jerusalem built by Solomon, and destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and they remember the “Second Temple” rebuilt seventy years later by returnees from the “Babylonian Exile,” transformed by Herod the Great into one of the wonders of the Roman world, and destroyed by Titus in 70 CE. Each summer on the ninth day of the month of Av, Jews around the world fast in memory of buildings long lost, of structures preserved only in memory. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |