A Fragment of Jerusalem

Balaam, the pagan prophet hired to curse Israel, looked down on its assembled tribes and declared, “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.” The talmudic sages, reflecting on his oracle, had no doubt what he meant. The tent was the beit midrash, the “house of study.” The dwelling place was the beit knesset, the “house of the congregation,” the synagogue. These were the two institutions which between them would guarantee the survival of the Jewish people through centuries of exile and dispersion. In them the Jewish spirit would be expressed, rehearsed, renewed and sustained. So long as there were houses of study and synagogues, there would always be a Jacob and an Israel.

Heinrich Heine once described the Torah as the “portable homeland of the Jew.” It is a phrase which could equally well be applied to the synagogue. Here, more than anywhere else, the scattered descendants of a once compact nation gathered and reconstituted themselves as a single people, united across geographical and cultural boundaries by a shared history and hope, expressed above all in the language of their prayers. The synagogue was one of Jewry’s most remarkable institutions. Through it they overcame the pressures of history, resisting the otherwise overwhelming forces of forgetfulness and assimilation. Driven from the land of their origins, the synagogue became their sacred space, their fragment of Jerusalem, their home.

We still do not know when and how the synagogue was born. Some scholars trace it as far back as the First Temple period. Others, noting the Greek origin of the word, attribute it to the Hellenistic diaspora during the era of the Second Temple. But the most probable hypothesis is that it began sometime between the two, and somewhere other than in Israel: in Babylon, during the exile imposed by Nebuchadnezzar’s defeat of the southern kingdom. Out of the crisis following the destruction of the First Temple, the synagogue emerged.

It has been a characteristic of the Jewish people that its most creative periods have arisen in response to catastrophe. It sometimes seems as if it takes disaster, real or impending, for the true nature of Jewish spirituality to reassert itself. With the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile, Jews found themselves without a land and a central place of worship. It was as much a spiritual as a political crisis. “By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept as we remembered Zion... How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a strange land?” How could they pray when the House of Prayer lay in ruins? But while the question was being asked, an answer was being born. The Temple no longer stood, but its memory remained, and this was strong enough to bring Jews together in collective worship. In exile, in Babylon, Jews began to gather to expound Torah, articulate a collective hope of return, and recall the Temple and its prayers.

The prophet Ezekiel was one of those who shaped a vision of return and restoration, and it is to him that we owe perhaps the first reference to the nascent institution of the synagogue: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet I have become to them a small sanctuary [mikdash me’at] in the countries where they have gone.” Ezekiel’s phrase contained the foundation of hope. The central sanctuary had been destroyed, but a small echo of it remained.

The Jewish assemblies (kinishtu in Babylonian, knesset in Hebrew) were not substitutes for the ruined Temple in Jerusalem. The importance of this cannot be overstated. It was not that the exiles had decided to make Babylon their permanent home and there build Jerusalem. The prophet Jeremiah wrote them a letter in which he told them to “Build houses and settle down... Also, seek the peace of the city to which I have carried you into exile and pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers you too will prosper.” Nonetheless he assured them that within seventy years God would bring them back from captivity. It was this delicate balance between adjustment to exile and sustained longing for return that found its most important expression in the synagogue.

In it, Jews recreated something of the lost Temple without forgetting that the real Temple was somewhere else. The reminders were to be found not only in the expositions and prayers uttered in the synagogue, but in its physical orientation. The book of Daniel suggests that Jews in Babylon were accustomed to pray towards Jerusalem, thus preserving the memory of the holy city as the ultimate place of prayer. Synagogues have shared this feature since. But even as they remembered Jerusalem, Jews made the crucial discovery that they could recapture a little of its spirit elsewhere. As the rabbis of a later age were to put it: when Israel is exiled, the Divine presence goes into exile with them. It was a turning point in the history of Judaism. Though Israel never gave up hope of living as a sovereign people in its own land, it discovered that it could sustain its inner life even in a diaspora. The synagogue became the centre of its collective existence. It was the home of the Jewish heart.

A Jewish historian, Professor M. Stern, has written that “in establishing the synagogue, Judaism created one of the greatest revolutions in the history of religion and society, for the synagogue was an entirely new environment for divine service, of a type unknown anywhere before.” It is a verdict shared by Ernest Renan, the nineteenth century French historian, who called the synagogue “the most original and fruitful creation of the Jewish people.” Neither temple nor shrine, it was a place sanctified by the purposes of those who met there. It was, simply, a house of prayer. As Salo Baron, the Jewish historian, puts it, it represented a “truly epochal revolution” through which “the exilic community...completely shifted the emphasis from the place of worship, the sanctuary, to the gathering of worshippers, the congregation, assembled at any time and any place in God’s wide world.” Its influence was eventually to travel far beyond Judaism, for it became in time the prototype of the Christian church and the Islamic mosque.

More than any other faith, Judaism embodies the tension between the particular and the universal. It is the faith of a particular people but it worships the universal God, creator of heaven and earth. Its values are those of humanity as such, and no book has been more influential than the Hebrew Bible in shaping the moral aspirations of mankind. But the ways in which it lives out those values are highly specific and particular: the elaborate code of commandments through which holiness is brought down from heaven to earth. One of the most vivid ways in which Jews have lived out this tension is in its understanding of the idea of sacred space.

The Jewish journey, begun by Abraham, continued by Moses, and revived by modern Zionism, reaches its destination in the land of Israel. But Jews have spent most of their history outside Israel, exiled and dispersed. A question therefore arises about sacred space. Is it particular or universal? Does it belong somewhere or everywhere? Is the centre of spirituality to be found in Jerusalem or wherever Jews meet and dedicate themselves to prayer? The synagogue brilliantly resolved the tension. Wherever Jews remembered Jerusalem and turned their faces toward it, there they heard an echo of Jerusalem. The synagogue evoked past glory and future restoration. It could be built anywhere at any time, but it always pointed towards another place, another time. It was the particular universalised, sacred space diffused and transmitted across the globe without losing its point of origin and eventual destination. When the rabbis said that in the time to come all the synagogues of the diaspora will be transported to Jerusalem, they were articulating a deep truth. The synagogue was Jerusalem temporarily in exile.

It was a house of prayer, though unlike the Temple it was prayer without sacrifice. Throughout the First Temple period the prophets had an uneasy relationship with the sacrificial order, sensing the constant danger of external ritual without personal transformation. Prayer had always been both the accompaniment of sacrifice and its most important feature. Indeed the great dedicatory prayer of Solomon at the inauguration of the Temple does not mention sacrifice at all. The destruction of the two Temples suspended the argument, for in the synagogue prayer was substituted for sacrifice, in the spirit of Hosea’s injunction to “Offer our lips as the sacrifices of bulls” and “Take words with you, and return to the Lord.”

No less importantly, the synagogue was a place where Torah was taught and expounded. Study has always been a religious act in Judaism, and it may have been in the gathering of people to hear the words of the prophet – mentioned several times in the book of Ezekiel – that religious assemblies had one of their points of origin. There is a reference in the story of Elisha and the Shunamite woman several centuries earlier to regular visits to the prophet on Sabbaths and New Moons. At a later date, when exiles returned from Babylon, we read in the book of Nehemiah of the great ceremony conducted by Ezra in Jerusalem in which the Torah was read from publicly and the Levites instructed the congregation: “They read from the book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read.”

The priestly exposition of the Torah and the prophetic interpretation of its texts evolved over time into the rabbinic derashah or homily, which continued to hold a central place in religious gatherings. Philo, writing about a typical Jewish assembly in Egypt, explains that “some priest who is present, or one of the elders, reads the sacred laws to them, and interprets each of them separately until evening, and then they depart, having gained some skill in the sacred laws and having made great advances toward piety.” The synagogue thus became the community’s ongoing tutorial in its own teachings and traditions.

Not only was Torah expounded. It was read, or more precisely, proclaimed. The book of Deuteronomy refers to a seven-yearly convocation of the entire people, men, women and children, to hear the Torah publicly recited. This was partly a moment of national education, “so that they can listen and learn to fear the Lord your God and follow carefully all the words of this law.” But in part, too, it was a political-religious event, renewing the covenant of Israel as a people whose constitution was the Torah. The regular reading of the Torah in the synagogue, with its echoes of this national ceremony, was thus a reminder and ratification of the terms on which Jews came together to form communities. As Daniel Elazar notes, individual congregations reproduced in miniature the classic terms of Jewish nationhood. “In effect, every local Jewish community, as a congregation, was considered to be a kind of partnership based upon a common contractual obligation within the framework of the overall Jewish constitution, namely the Torah.” By regularly proclaiming the Torah, Jews reaffirmed its sovereignty as the code of their common life.

As the name beit knesset, “house of gathering,” implies, the synagogue was also a communal centre in the broadest sense. The vast synagogue in Alexandria, whose lavishness awed contemporary observers, was divided according to trades, each sitting in separate sections, so that newcomers to the city were able to use it as a kind of employment exchange, easily locating their fellow craftsmen. Other ancient synagogues were organised on Landsmannschaften principles, providing a home for Jews from similar places of origin. The synagogue became the place where communal announcements were made, law suits were heard, and charitable funds deposited and distributed. The Talmud informs us that in Babylon places of Jewish worship were often supplied with temporary lodgings where visitors could receive hospitality.

The remark of Israel Abrahams, the nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish scholar, about the medieval synagogue, that it “tended, with ever-increasing rapidity, to absorb and develop the social life of the community,” could be applied with equal justice to a much earlier age. It was the focus not only of relations between man and God, but also of relations between man and man. The interweaving of sacred and secular, already a feature of the Hebrew Bible, was here continued. The economic and social life of the community was brought within the ambit of the Divine presence.

The result was that by the time crisis again threatened the Jewish people, with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt sixty-five years later, an institution already existed that was to prove capable of one of the most remarkable of all achievements of religious and cultural continuity: the sustaining of Jewish identity through centuries of global dispersion. It was in the synagogue that Jews were able to keep alive the three things on which their existence depended, Torah or Jewish study, avodah or Jewish worship, and gemilut hasadim, acts of social welfare. It was their school, their miniature Temple and their social centre. It became their matrix of belonging, the place in which they reaffirmed the classic terms of Jewish existence and their membership in the great chain of the generations. It defied the normal categories of time and space. Whether in ancient Babylon or Greece, or medieval France or Spain, when Jews entered the synagogue they were transported back to biblical times, forward to a messianic future, and lifted to within sight of Jerusalem. It was their home-in-exile, their land-in-dispersion.

Nor was this an accidental development. In the synagogue Jews harked back to their earliest central place of worship, the mishkan or sanctuary constructed in the wilderness which, unlike the Temple, was portable and had no fixed address. It was this modest and movable house of prayer, described at length in the book of Exodus, which proved to be the most enduring metaphor for the Jewish spirit during large stretches of its history. The people of Israel never forgot its nomadic ancestors, its Egyptian exile, and its years of wandering in the desert, and memory gave it the resources with which to cope with extended periods of dispersion.

The synagogue did more than provide a focus for a scattered people. As Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik noted, it became a symbol of the human condition as such. We are strangers and sojourners on the face of the earth, temporary residents whose threescore years and ten are no more than passing shadows on the surface of eternity. The synagogue is “man’s refuge from the insecurity and vulnerability” of his existence. It “should be called not the House of God but rather the Home of God or more accurately the home of man. God is not homeless, man is homeless. God feigned homelessness in order to induce man to build a home.”

No less importantly it defined the nature of the covenant, and thus of the Jewish people. It is quite remarkable that the Torah takes no more than thirty-four verses to describe creation, but some four to five hundred verses to describe the building of the sanctuary by the Israelites in the wilderness. Close analysis of the two passages shows that the Torah intends a parallel between them. The sanctuary somehow mirrors creation. As I once expressed it: in creation God made a home for man. In the sanctuary man created a home for God. The enormous length and painstaking detail with which the Torah describes the latter indicates that the Divine presence is not brought fully to earth in sudden moments of inspiration but only through the long, structured and collaborative process through which the people Israel fashions its life in accordance with the Divine command.

Israel is a people at whose centre is the space we make for God. In the desert it was in the tabernacle in the middle of the camp, in Israel it was in the Temple in Jerusalem, elsewhere it was in the synagogue at the core of community. Jews wrestled with the paradox of the encounter between the infinity of God and the finitude of man. When Solomon dedicated the Temple he said, “But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain You. How much less this House that I have built!” Isaiah said in the name of God, “Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house you will build for Me? Where will My resting place be?” The answer the Torah gave to this most profound of spiritual questions is that God exists in the space we make for Him, and the purpose of the sanctuary is to open such a space at the heart of our collective life. It is said that when Titus entered the Holy of Holies he was astonished to find it empty, bare of all icons and sacred objects. If so, he misunderstood the nature of a holy place. It is not one which we fill, but one in which we are filled. Its point is, in a phrase I owe to James Kugel, “to open up a space, a possibility in our hearts and in our lives that would otherwise remain closed.” By its insistence that communities be built around such spaces, Judaism made a fundamental statement about its own identity. The Jewish people is not and cannot be a secular entity. It is a circle at whose centre is God.

So Balaam’s blessing, as understood by the rabbis, was indeed prophetic. “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places O Israel.” The dwelling place, mishkan, meant the synagogue, home of both the community and the Divine presence. The rabbis added to this interpretation a further note. They said: all of Balaam’s blessings eventually turned into curses, except this. Israel lost all its earthly glory, but it never lost its synagogues. Because of this, it survived. No other people maintained its identity through two thousand years of dispersion, but Jews did, because though they had lost their geographic home they preserved their spiritual home, and though they were no longer a sovereign nation they were still a constituted people, the “congregation of Israel.”

The history of Diaspora Jewry is therefore written in terms of how a series of groups of Jews in particular times and places constituted themselves as a community built around the synagogue. In the case of Anglo-Jewry, this means focusing on one event that, more than most, was to shape the contours of its religious life: the creation, in 1870, of the United Synagogue.