The Inner Temple That Was Never Destroyed

The Torah says: “Let them make Me a Sanctuary, and I will dwell within them.” Opening Picture King Solomon on the day he dedicated the Holy Temple. He had just built the most magnificent of all sanctuaries. He had offered more sacrifices than anyone could count. Fire had come down from heaven. And then he stood up and said: “Even the heavens, and the highest heavens, cannot contain You. How much less this house that I have built!” Think for a moment about what he said. The greatest builder of all, on the very day he finished his work, said it himself: Hashem does not fit in here. So what exactly are we mourning? Don’t misunderstand me. The mourning is real. The pain is real. But there is something we need to understand. It is something deep that the holy Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, taught. Sometimes, when a person hears it for the first time, he stops and takes a deep breath. The Temple That Was Never Destroyed The holy Baal Shem Tov taught: The physical Temple was destroyed. The building, the stones, the gold, the offerings were all taken away. But the spiritual Temple, the inner Temple that lives in the heart of every Jew, was never destroyed. And it never will be. This idea was not invented out of thin air. Ezekiel the prophet already said it in Hashem’s name, back in the exile in Babylon: “I have been for them a small sanctuary.” Rashi, the great Bible commentator, explains that this means the synagogues and the study halls. But the Baal Shem Tov added: the “small sanctuary” is the heart of every Jew. That is where Hashem’s presence rests. There, it never went into exile. And if you ask, “Where do we see this?”, the Talmud says that ever since the Temple was destroyed, “Hashem has nothing in His world except the four cubits of Jewish law.” Four cubits is the small space around a person. That is you. It is your heart, your mind, the four cubits where you live your life with Torah and the commandments. Then Why Build a Building at All? But here a question comes up, and we need to be brave enough to ask it. If what Hashem truly wants is to dwell inside, in the heart, then what was the Tabernacle, the portable sanctuary in the desert, for? What was the point of a physical building, the golden cherubs, the beams and the bases they stood on? The answer is very deep, and it touches us directly. When was the Jewish people commanded to build the Tabernacle? After the sin of the Golden Calf. Open the Book of Exodus. First comes the command to build the Tabernacle. Only later comes the story of the Golden Calf. But the order of the chapters is not the order of events. In reality, the command to build the Tabernacle was given after the sin. The holy Zohar, the great book of Jewish mysticism, points this out in its section on the Tabernacle: the command to build the Tabernacle came as a response to the sin. The people saw a calf, and something inside them caught fire. They saw something physical, something they could touch, something shiny, and they said: “This is your god, O Israel!” They wanted a Hashem they could touch. And when you want something physical, Hashem, who knows the human heart, does not leave you with emptiness. He gives you something physical that is holy. “You want a place? Fine. I will build you a place. But the place will be Mine.” That was not His first wish. It was a repair. It was Hashem’s answer to a human weakness. It was an answer full of love and full of respect for people, but it was an answer after the fact. Hashem’s First and Eternal Wish Hashem’s first wish never changed, and it was never destroyed. The verse says: “Let them make Me a Sanctuary, and I will dwell within them.” It does not say “within it,” inside the building. It says “within them,” inside every single Jew. This is what the holy Shelah, a classic work of Jewish thought, wrote. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, explains it the same way in his book Likkutei Torah: “within them” means within each and every one. This wish never ran out. No destruction ever touched it. And this is where the comfort comes from. You, a young married man, a Hasidic family man with a job: you are not in exile from Hashem. Your body may be in exile. The holy house may lie in ruins. But the inner point in you, the inner spark, what the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, calls “truly a piece of Hashem above,” never went into exile. It is here. It is in you.