“As a remembrance of the Temple,” we say in the middle of the seder as we eat marror wedged between two pieces of matzah, imitating Hillel the Elder’s ancient practice. Unlike us, though, Hillel would include a piece of the Pesach sacrifice offered up at the Temple in his sandwich. But since the destruction of the Temple, we have not been able to offer such a sacrifice. Without the roasted meat, what we are left with from Hillel’s tradition is the bitterness of marror. The sandwich that once celebrated a successful Pesach offering now serves instead as a reminder of the Jewish people’s many exiles.
But perhaps there is another, more subtle relationship between the Temple and Passover. The Talmud teaches that the First Temple was destroyed because of idolatry, sexual violence, and bloodshed: with total disregard for laws and norms, people gave themselves over to their basest and most vile desires. “[King] Manesseh put so many innocent persons to death that he filled Jerusalem [with blood] from end to end” (2 Kings 21:16), the Rabbis remind us.
By contrast, the Second Temple, Rabbi Yohanan says cryptically, was destroyed because its judges “judged according to the laws of the Torah.” But how could judging by the laws of the Torah be a sin? “Should they have instead judged by the ‘laws’ of thievery?,” the Talmud wonders aloud. It concludes that what Rabbi Yohanan meant was that judges only judged according to the Torah, and refused to go beyond the letter of the law. It is tempting to read this passage as a merely polemical claim that failing to go beyond a strict interpretation of the law is as terrible as idolatry, sexual violence, and bloodshed.
Maybe, though, Rabbi Yohanan was suggesting a more direct and radical parallel: that while the First Temple was destroyed because of wickedness in violation of the Torah, the Second Temple was destroyed because the Torah was twisted to legitimate such wickedness, to permit “villainy within the bounds of Torah.” Perhaps the Torah itself was used to authorize those very sins for which the First Temple was destroyed, and the judges who did not “go beyond the letter of the law” were those who responded to such grotesque violence by merely saying, “What is there to condemn? The law hasn’t been broken!”
It was such potential abuses of the Torah that Aharon Shmuel Tamares, a 19th-20th century Lithuanian orthodox rabbi and anarcho-pacifist, had in mind when he warned that those seeking to legitimate domination might “snatch the ‘Torah,’ stick it in [their] coat[s], and turn the Torah itself into an instrument of destruction”…
Read the rest in Gashmius Magazine’s Haggadah companion
Good and interesting post 👍🏾 thank you