Destruction of the Temple

Judaism would not have thrived

if the Temple had survived:

like the Samaritans the Jews

would never have been disabused

of priestly ideology.

Fossilized theology,

which prioritized the Temple,

would have caused them to resemble

Samaritans upon Mount Gerizim,

and the inevitable schism

between the Jews and Christians would

have happened sooner had it stood,

but of course it was destroyed,

and thankfully Jews filled the void

created by its absence with

abandonment not of the myth

surrounding it, but its own need,

replaced by Christians by a creed,

and by the rabbis by an Oral

Law which made them moral. Moral:

The tragedy that Jews still mourn

enabled them to be reborn

as Jews, as Christians think that Christ

made them by being sacrificed,

a ritual strangely looking back

at Temple rituals whose lack

provides a paradox, relief

of grief in their unshared belief.