| After the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in the year 70, the priestly service ceased, thus catalyzing Judaism to redefine sacrifice. Ideas about sacrifice, so bound up with notions of covenant and atonement that had long defined Israelite religion, did not simply disappear from religious discourse but instead were revised for post-Temple Judaism. Via scriptural exegesis, ancient rabbis sanctioned the performance of certain activities as “sacrifice” by other means. Fasting and repentance, prayer and study, and good deeds such as charity and hospitality became surrogate modes for keeping the Israelite covenant and atoning for its sins. In thinking through these ways of performing “sacrifice” without the Temple, rabbinic discourse employed a variety of revisionist strategies (such as asceticization, domestication, spiritualization, and textualization) and often had recourse to a rhetoric of self-sacrifice, in which the fundamental surrogation of any sacrificial act is exposed and troped upon.;Revisions to the canonical category of sacrifice continued into the Middle Ages, in which Jewish sources attest to the development of a belated strategy of symbolization. This approach considers the tabernacle and Temple to be miniature models of the entire universe. The notion that the archaic cult encodes medieval cosmology receives one of its most sustained readings in a text known as Midrash Tadshe. Midrash Tadshe utilizes numbers to comment upon scripture, finding repeated patterns in both space and time, and tracing out a series of correspondences between the world and the Temple. These correspondences are further correlated to the human form, providing a seemingly scriptural basis for the idea of ‘Man’ as microcosm. Although the details of the homologies do not align from one set of correspondences to the next, an overall exegetical and rhetorical strategy is maintained: the symbolization is consistent, even when the symbolism is not. Through symbolization, the Temple becomes a template: it is read as an archetypal pattern, capable of explaining God's plan for creation and the human purpose therein. Thus the exegetical reconstruction of Tadshe not only anticipates the actual rebuilding of the Temple, but offers an apology for current Jewish practice as a whole. |
