What If Jews Rebuilt The Temple?: A New Book Imagines A Dark Future For The Jewish State
(REVIEW) In the Levant, bombs have reduced cities to rubble. A punishing embargo and siege has left the people starving and with limited access to water. Corrupt officials, playing at piety, enrich themselves with the finer things while refugees languish in tent camps at the gates of sanctuary. It isn’t Gaza, Lebanon or Syria — it’s Israel.
Yishai Sarid’s novel “The Third Temple” was prescient when it debuted in Israel in 2015. Nearly 10 years later, Yardenne Greenspan’s English translation warns of the danger of the right-wing messianic movement and its ambition redraw the map of Israel and resume the biblical rhythms of life in the land.
“Nowadays, readers no longer see ‘The Third Temple’ as an imaginary tale,” Sarid wrote in a 2024 author’s note. Rather, the story of a reestablished monarchy with the temple as the center of Jewish life, it is seen as a possible, fundamentalist future that he believes has only accelerated since Oct. 7, 2023.
One need not read too deeply to see connections.
The world of the narrator, Prince Jonathan, a royal writing to us from his captivity after the conquest of his Kingdom of Judah, is one of primal opposition. On one side are extremist Jews who have rebuilt the temple on “the mountain,” the compound where its predecessors once stood. To lay the temple’s cornerstone the Jews leveled the Al-Asqa Mosque and drove off their sworn enemies, known simply as “the Amalekites.”
You’ll recall how in the days after Oct. 7, the largely secular Netanyahu urged his country to “remember Amalek,” the biblical enemy of Israel, whom God tasked Saul to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”
You may also remember how Hamas codenamed Oct. 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood,” writing in a statement that the attack was in part a response to Jewish groups’ “intentions of erecting their alleged temple on the ruins of the shrine of our Prophet Muhammad.”
In Sarid’s novel, the settlers become the priestly caste and royal family, hatching a coup after a calamitous attack on modern Israel. Cut from the violent cloth of Kahanists, they malign the Haredi Jews, making them study krav maga alongside Torah.
They save the most scorn for the secular population in the coastal cities who, hit with nuclear bombs from an unspecified nation, are now wretched refugees forbidden to enter the temple grounds for reasons of purity. (Only Jews, microchipped shortly after birth in a bris-like ceremony, are allowed entry at all).
As for judicial overhaul? That’s child’s play. King Jehoaz, an astronomer who spoke to God and also serves as high priest, has reinstated the Sanhedrin, the halakhic assembly that legislated until the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, in place of the Supreme Court.
But to dwell too much on the almost prophetic parallels risks downplaying the merit of Sarid’s storytelling.
“The Third Temple,” in a diaristic mode, recounted after the kingdom’s demise, has shades of Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” and even a bit of Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” as the plague-like portents roiling Jerusalem play out as a palace drama. Of course, in realizing an apocalyptic vision, the book is indebted to accounts of the turbulent fall of the two previous temples and the warnings of our prophets.
Sarid’s vision, translated with aplomb by Greenspan, has a wryness to it.
Jonathan, the de facto custodian of the temple, maimed in an assassination attempt on his father, dictates its daily business, which often departs from the strictly sacred. One patron brings a large bull sacrifice to expiate his sins — and, with a woman who may be an escort, gets a tour of the Holy of Holies for his kind donation. A master perfumer, who lost his family in the nuclear “Evaporation,” shifted from scenting the napes of wealthy women to God’s dwelling place. The state-of-the-art microchips for temple entry seem to be the work of the onetime start-up nation, whose workers have all left, not caring for the country’s slide into zealotry.
Sarid is no less sardonic when it comes to Israel’s global standing after it abandoned industry for devotion: The kingdom is a pariah state, which, leaving its ruined cities as smoldering monuments to sin and alienating its professional class, has no economy to speak of apart from harvesting the seven biblical species.
The kingdom’s air force, reduced to ramshackle planes, is made up of cadets who, though blessed with dove sacrifices in the temple before their first flights, don’t expect to survive their missions.
As we learn more about how Jonathan came to be captured — and his own disorienting visions of the divine — Sarid unsettles us with the zeal of a true believer, blind to the clay feet of all who stand around him. Most chilling is his rage.
Following his father’s hard-won victory for control of the source of the Yarmouk River, Jonathan sees video of Amalekite hostages “sitting on the ground, blindfolded, their hands behind their backs.” One of these men, he muses, might be related to the man who threw a grenade at his feet as a toddler.
“I would have happily slaughtered each and every one of them with my bare hands,” Jonathan writes, from his prison cell.
The book doesn’t find this bloodlust a productive response to a sensitive conflict, nor does it think a Jewish state can weather today’s world while isolated from other nations. It suggests, instead, at every turn, that there is no going back to a past that was, in all likelihood, better in retrospect.
Ultimately God, whether He dwells among his people or not, can’t save us from ourselves.
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com and @pjgrisar on Twitter.