During prayers, I find my mind wanders- or rather focuses. It sees things it otherwise wouldn’t.
The details of the space I am in suddenly interest me in new ways. I, who live in a world of words, suddenly find myself in a world of space: physical and embodied.
Look around: what do you see?
Perhaps a more pertinent question is: how do you see it? In a synagogue, walls are not just walls. Ceilings are not just ceilings. Curtains are not just curtains.
Every inch of space buzzes with meaning, crying out for interpretation.
For months, we have looked at this space with a certain set of eyes. For the Council, commissioning a new sanctuary, they have looked at the room with eyes of possibility. For the team responsible for the redesign, they have been looking at the space with the eyes of architects, artists and technicians. Those who were accustomed to this space have perhaps looked at it with nostalgic loss, knowing that their familiar sanctuary would be transformed.
I want to invite you now to look at this space anew: through the eyes of a believer.
In 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple, which had been destroyed in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. A generation of exiled elites returned and remade their holy space.
The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are dedicated to explaining what happened in those formative years.
Ezra recounts the dramatic unveiling ceremony for the new Temple. He says that, when the elders of the generation saw the new Temple, they began to cry, while the young cheered out in jubilation.
Seventy years they had been held captive. Seventy years they had not seen their holy mountain.
For the old, this was a place they never dreamed they would see again, certainly not within their own lifetimes. For the young, this was a place that had only existed in myth and psalm.
What a moving experience it must have been to witness it.
So, I invite you to come to this building with the eyes of exiles. True, our four weeks in the next door hall do not quite compare to the seventy years the Jews spent in Babylon.
Nevertheless, soak it up, because it is a marvel to enter after a period away. Absence surely makes the heart grow fonder, and I know I had missed the beautiful serenity of this synagogue.
Yet the commentaries on the book of Ezra believe that the elders were not shedding tears of joy. Rashi says they were, in fact, crying for the Temple they had lost. The First Temple, he says, was even bigger. Solomon’s Temple was enormous by comparison.
This is an interesting proposition, because it is almost certainly not true. We do not have any archaeological evidence to suggest there was a First Temple, still less a bigger one with wider foundations. By all accounts, it is far more likely that the First Temple was smaller and more frail.
Yet, Rashi is right that the elders could truly have believed the old Temple was bigger and grander. When they last saw it, they would all have been infants.
My primary school’s doors were enormous wooden structures that towered over all who entered them… until I returned as an adult and realised they were just doors.
There may be a part of you that looks back with wistful nostalgia at the old sanctuary, dilapidated though it was. This is natural: in our synagogues we find safe spaces that ground us in our youth. Adjusting can be hard.
So, this is an invitation: try to look at this space through the eyes of a child. Try to feel the comfort and wonderment that you did in your youth.
When Ezra returned and rebuilt the Temple, he sought to recreate all that was best in the one that had stood before.
Like us, the Jews dedicated and blessed their Second Temple in the month of Adar, between the festivals of Purim and Pesach.
They brought in what they had preserved from the last Temple: cleansing bowls and musicals instruments. Where they could not repeat, they replicated, weaving curtains and priestly garments.
In Solomon’s Temple, there had been a permanently lit flame above the altar, symbolising God’s eternal presence with the Israelites.
When the exiles returned with Ezra, they relit the pyre, to show that, while they had left the Temple, God had never left them.
After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews installed in their synagogues a ner tamid, an everlasting light. Through this emblem, the flames showed that God’s light was not only in every time, but also in every space.
So, look at our light, with its memorial to the Shoah, and see how this same flame has burned for 3,000 years, linking us to hundreds of generations of worshippers.
But do not stop there, or you may be tempted by conservatism.
After the Temple, our rabbis reinvented every ritual item so that they could have new homes in the synagogues.
The Ark that contained the Two Tablets of the Law became the ark that holds our Torah scroll. The breastplate and crown that the priests wore became adornments for Torah. The sacrificial altar became the bimah from which Torah was read.
In every object, you can see the theological creativity of our people. You witness the myriad ways in which we constantly reinvent and reanimate our traditions.
So, look at the details of this sanctuary and embrace all the ways that our artists and architects have participated in that great tradition of innovation.
Everything contains the holy sparks of what went before. Every spark is breathed new life by the creatives who recreate it.
You, too, can fill this space with life, as you bring your own meanings to it.
Come to this sanctuary. Come with the eyes of an exile; the eyes of an elder; the eyes of a child. Come with eyes that are ancient and new. Come with eyes that have seen thousands of years and still look to the future.
Then bring those eyes back out into the world – and see what needs to be done.
Shabbat shalom.
Sim Lev 