When the Talmud Replaced the Temple as the Structure at the Heart of Jewish Life

Judaism became a religion of laws, haunted and bound by the absence of a home for Jewish sovereignty

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

The destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. might easily have meant the death of Judaism. As we have seen again and again in the Talmud, the Temple was the center of Jewish belief and practice in a way that we can hardly imagine today. It was the only place where Jews could sacrifice to God, the only place where God’s spirit dwelled on Earth—not to mention a powerful symbol of Jewish sovereignty. The fact that Judaism managed to survive after the Temple was burned to the ground is the most remarkable of the many acts of renewal and transformation that have preserved Jewish life over thousands of years.

The legend of Yochanan ben Zakkai is a vivid parable of how Judaism managed to endure that trauma. According to tradition, Yochanan, the leading rabbinic sage of his generation, was trapped in Jerusalem during the Roman siege. The historian Josephus describes this as a time of horrific suffering, when starvation led to infanticide and cannibalism. Yochanan, seeing which way the wind was blowing, decided that his duty was not to perish with the city but to escape. You could not simply walk out of besieged Jerusalem, however—not because of the Romans, but because the Jewish Zealots in charge of the city killed anyone who tried to go over to the enemy.

The dead, however, could be taken out of Jerusalem for burial. So, Yochanan pretended to be a corpse and had himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin. Once he made it to the Roman lines, he pleased the general Vespasian by prophesying that he would one day become emperor—a prediction that indeed came true. In exchange, Vespasian granted Yochanan’s request to set up a new Jewish academy and court in Yavneh. In this way, Yochanan and Judaism itself passed through death into a new, different kind of life. From then on, Judaism would no longer be a Temple-centered religion but a religion of laws. The Talmud itself would replace the Temple as the “structure” at the heart of Jewish life.

The absence of the Temple cannot help but haunt the Talmud, especially in Order Moed, the section that Daf Yomi readers have been exploring for the last two years. These tractates deal with the Jewish holidays, many of which used to be highly Temple-centric. Yom Kippur, for instance, was the occasion of an elaborately choreographed sacrificial ritual in which the high priest would atone for the people’s sins. Rosh Hashanah, too, had its special Temple practices. In Rosh Hashanah 29b, we learn that when the holiday fell on Shabbat, it was forbidden to blow the shofar; but an exception was made for the Temple, where it was allowed.

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