The ever-present Temple

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: In the Talmud’s Timeless Laws, a Vast Temple of the Mind: Long after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed, Talmudic rabbis kept it alive in their imaginations, and ours.

All of this is remarkable, not just for its attention to detail, but because of the way the rabbis of the Talmud think about the Temple. There is no acknowledgment, in the cases of the bandage, the wart, and the hinge, that these rules apply to a Temple that does not exist. At the time the Gemara was being composed, the Temple had been gone for three centuries; most of the sages of Babylonia had never even seen the spot where it stood. Yet they continued to legislate for the Temple, to reconcile their own rules with the Temple’s rules, as if it existed in the present tense.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.