Deviant Inversion: The Holocaust as a Reverse Temple Service…

In the Temple of old, the service was exacting.

Animals brought as korbanot (sacrifices) were handled with reverence. Their eyes examined for blemish. Their limbs arranged with care. The salt, the fire, the blood — all offered according to sacred law. A priestly choreography of holiness and elevation. Nothing was random. Every step was infused with kavana (intent), for the goal was to draw near to God — not to destroy, but to transform. To sublimate the physical into spiritual.

But what if we witnessed a perverse mirror of this system — not elevating animals to the holy, but degrading human beings to the level of animals?

What if the Jews of Europe — stripped, shaved, numbered, burned — became korbanot in reverse?

This is not metaphor. It is theology forced into nightmare.

The Nazis did not murder chaotically. They constructed a regime that mimicked the structure and rigor of a religious system — but inverted every value. It was not a descent into madness; it was a descent into method.

They followed their own perverse halacha — a set of iron-clad, detailed laws that governed every step of the destruction. Everything had its “order.” Procedures, protocols, rituals. There were official instructions for transporting Jews, for selecting them upon arrival, for shaving heads, for confiscating belongings, for gassing, for burning, for disposing of ashes. Each stage was defined, documented, rehearsed.

Their “priests” were SS officers — disciplined, uniformed, trained in cruelty.
Their “temples” were the gas chambers — designed with chilling efficiency.
Their “offerings” were Jewish men, women, and children — selected with the precision once reserved for unblemished sacrifices.

And just like actual animals, the Jews were “rounded up,” “herded,” placed into holding areas called “ghettos,” marked, tattooed and branded, shaved, stripped of their possessions — all in the name of this inverted sacred service. Every detail was ritualized in degradation.

There were regulations for how to pack human beings into cattle cars, how many breaths they would have left before suffocating. Rules for how many corpses could fit in a crematorium, how much Zyklon B to drop for maximum lethality. Like priests preparing a sacrifice, they removed shoes, jewelry, hair. Every part of the victim was considered for its use — nothing was “wasted.” Gold teeth, skin, bones, ashes. Even the ashes were measured and dumped according to plan.

It was avodah zara — foreign worship — in its darkest form. A ritual of desecration. A black mass masquerading as order. What had once been divine service was twisted into a theology of annihilation. They followed this anti-halacha not with hesitation, but with zeal. They believed in it.

This is what made the Holocaust more than genocide.
It was a structured, codified inversion of sacred law — the construction of a death-religion with its own twisted commandments.

And its ultimate blasphemy?
It wasn’t just the murder of Jews.
It was the attempt to erase the image of God from the earth.

Instead of fire on the altar, fire poured from chimneys.
Instead of elevation, there was desecration.

The Nazis operated with the kind of obsessive attention once reserved for sacred ritual. Train schedules, manifests, documentation — everything catalogued, calculated, engineered. The banality of evil was also its precise devotion to its hellish cause.

But the horror is deeper still.

In Isaiah 53, the prophet speaks of a “Suffering Servant,” traditionally interpreted by our sages as Klal Yisrael — the Jewish people — who “was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering… like a lamb led to the slaughter.” He bore the sins of the world not by choice, but by fate. Hasidic masters saw in this a redemptive mystery: that Jewish suffering, undeserved and silent, carried a cosmic weight. The Holocaust made this vision almost unbearable.

Auschwitz was the reverse Temple.
Not God’s presence, but His absence.
Not korbanot that elevate, but human beings crushed under the boots of a nation gone mad — a nation that once prided itself on philosophy, music, and science.

From Berlin to Boca: A Prophetic Failure

Before the Holocaust, German Reform Jews believed history had arrived at its enlightened destination. Berlin was their “Jerusalem.” The yearning for Zion was viewed as outdated. They renamed their synagogues “Temples,” a deliberate theological statement: There would be no rebuilding of the Beit HaMikdash.

They were wrong. So tragically wrong.

And yet today, that same mistake echoes in different accents.

Too many Jews — from New York to Los Angeles, from Montreal to Toronto, from Chicago to Boca Raton — continue to treat the exile as if it were home. Beautiful homes, prestigious schools, stable careers — all good things. But they have become our new Jerusalems. We build synagogues and call them “temples.” We build neighborhoods and call them “communities.” But we forget: Galut is not home. It never was.

The Torah had already warned us.

In Numbers 33:56, God declares:
“And it shall come to pass, that that which I had thought to do unto them, I will do unto you.”

This isn’t a cruel curse. It’s a spiritual law: When the Jewish people try to become like their enemies — to be accepted by them, to worship their gods, to trust their morality — they become vulnerable to the very fate they were meant to escape.

Germany did not love the Jews for becoming like Germans.
It turned on them for doing so.

And so, in the land they believed would save them, they were marched naked into hell. The Temple of Reason collapsed into ashes. The belief in man’s progress was drowned in the blood of a million children.

We must stop pretending. Toronto is not Zion. Boca is not Beit El. Los Angeles is not Yerushalayim. If we forget this — if we convince ourselves that exile can be permanent, that comfort is covenant — then we risk repeating the mistake of Berlin.

The Echo of October 7th

Fast forward to October 7th, 2023 — Simchat Torah.

Again, Jewish bodies desecrated. Again, women raped — this time in front of their own children, or live-streamed for their captors’ delight. Bodies mutilated, burned together in bomb shelters, flesh fused to metal. Parents decapitated in front of their children, the ancient rage repeating itself with modern tools.

And again, the world watched — and some cheered. Some justified it. Some called it “resistance.”

But it’s important to note: the war did not begin in Gaza. Despite the geographical setting, this war was never about Gaza. The name Hamas gave to the attack was “The Flood of Al Aqsa,” a clear declaration of intent: it was about Jerusalem. Always. Gaza was simply the launchpad for an attack on the heart of Judaism, an attack on the Jewish people’s spiritual center.

Just like before, it’s not just about land — it’s about erasing the very sacred identity that Jerusalem represents. The playbook has not changed. Only the slogans.

The goal is the same: to dehumanize the Jew, to invert holiness into horror. And this is why the image of the Temple — and its reversal — remains hauntingly relevant. The Temple is the place where God and man meet. The Holocaust and October 7th are what happen when man tries to become God by erasing the presence of the Divine from the world — by destroying those who carry it.

Remembering to Reclaim

So what do we do?

We do not understand. But we remember.
Not to wallow in trauma, but to reclaim the sacred from the ashes.
To rebuild the Temple — not only of stone, but of meaning.
To declare: We are not victims.
We are not offerings.
We are not sacrifices to death, but bearers of light.

The korban was never about destruction.
It was about coming close to the Divine.

When our enemies try to strip us of that closeness, we respond not by hiding — but by doubling down.

We return to Jerusalem. We rebuild the dream.

We stop calling exile home.
Not in Berlin. Not in Paris. Not in Boca or New York or Toronto.
Not anymore.

We stop trading holiness for comfort.

We hold fast to the truth that the fire on the altar still burns, even in darkness. That from the smoke of Auschwitz and the blood of Sderot, we rise — again and again — to become what we were always meant to be:

A nation of priests. A light unto nations.
And above all — a people who remember, so the world will not forget.