The Homeless Host: Reflections on Tisha B’Av

Are we God’s guests in His world or do we need to be His hosts in ours? Both statements are true, and teach us about the paradoxical nature of the Holy Temple

Aug 12, 2024

At the heart of the Torah there stands a house.

The Torah opens with the story of creation, moves through the events of ancient humanity, unfolds the stories of the Patriarchs and their sons, describes the Exodus from Egypt and the wanderings in the wilderness, and enumerates the 613 commandments covering all aspects of life. But ultimately, everything revolves around, and aspires to, one thing: building the Temple.

That the entire Torah points at the Temple is hinted at in its very first letter. The Torah opens with the second letter of the alphabet, the letter Beit (ב), which literally means “house.” This suggests that the entire purpose of Creation is to evolve and be perfected until it itself becomes a kind of house, a vessel that contains the divine light from which it arose. This is how the Sages interpret the verse capping off the creation story, “which God created [bara] to do [la’asot]”:1 He “created” so that we may “do,” i.e. perfect the world through action.2

Twice we built a house for the Lord in this world, but twice were we also unworthy of it, and it was destroyed. The day we commemorate the absence of our divine home more than any other is Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of Av. On this day, we remember that in a sense, we are all homeless, mourning the loss of our Temple and yearning for a new home where we and God can dwell together forever.

What kind of home is the Temple supposed to be? On the most basic level, it is to be a physical house—a house of prayer, repentance, and offering sacrifices, to be established “in the place that the Lord will choose,”3 which later in history was revealed to be Jerusalem. This is the literal interpretation, and as a rule, “a scripture does not depart from its literal meaning.”

However, the external house is also a metaphor and garb for another house, an inner and spiritual one, to be established within us. The very verse that commands its construction hints at this from the start: “And let them make me a sanctuary,” it says, “that I may dwell within them.”4 The verse does not say “within it” but rather “within them,” referring to the hearts of its builders. Indeed, one of the main offences the prophets decried was the performance of the external service of the Temple without the inner service of the heart.

The question, of course, is how? How do we carve a space within the heart and bring our Creator into it?

Who’s the Host?

The command to build a house for the Lord is paradoxical. On one hand, it implies that we are the homeowners, He is the guest, and we invite Him into our home.5 On the other hand, who really hosts whom in this world? After all, the real situation is exactly the opposite: of the Holy Blessed One it is said that is “He is the place of the world, and the world is not His place,”6 and so we are but momentary guests—passing through His world, sipping a cup of tea, at best leaving a gift, at worst leaving a mess, and then bidding farewell and departing. How could we think of ourselves as homeowners hosting the Lord—in His own world?

An initial resolution of the paradox is provided by the Halachic (pertaining to Jewish law) distinction between the “private domain” and the “public domain.” At face value, “private domain” refers to a person’s home area, and “public domain” to the area between houses. But these terms are more than halachic. They also express two modes of understanding reality. From an earthly perspective, our world is a sort of “public domain”—an open space shared by a multitude of beings, each with a different experience, perspective, and opinion. However, from a more spiritual viewpoint, our world can also be seen as the “private domain” of The Holy Blessed One—an enormous private house that He manages, and whose rooms are all permeated by His spirit. This perspective may be far from our everyday experience, but it represents a higher truth.

Now notice, these two perceptions exactly reflect the two sides of our paradox. According to the perception that the world is a public domain, we are the homeowners while God, as it were, wanders the streets and knocks on our door asking us to be let in. If, on the other hand, our world is a private domain, God is the homeowner, and we are guests in His house. The hosting paradox is thus a product of two viewpoints: one seeing the world as The Holy Blessed One’s private domain and the other seeing it as a public domain.

Both perceptions are true and reflect real aspects of reality, but if they are separated and disconnected, they create an irreconcilable rift between Godliness and life. An ancient example of such a dualistic perspective is Gnosticism, the pagan theology that believed in the existence of two divine beings, one evil who governs this world and one good who governs the world beyond. Indeed, the Talmudic term used to describe the Gnostics’ faith refers to two rashuyot, “domains,”7 thus directly alluding to the concepts of private vs. public domains, which are also called rashuyot.

Hosting the Host

The solution is, of course, to integrate the two perspectives—to acknowledge the fact that we are God’s guests with the command to be His hosts. The two experiences complement one another, as each has its benefits and drawbacks, as follows:

If we are only guests, we are full of humility and gratitude, free from any sense of ownership or dominance over this world; but no matter how much God invites us to “make ourselves at home”, we will feel rootless and detached in this world, like nomads finding shelter unders the auspices of a distant master. This experience is devoid of a feeling of belonging, a feeling that the host dwells within us and loves us.

What about the alternative, that of being only hosts, with God as our guest of honor? In this is the case then we feel how God fills the chambers of our heart, how He enters and illuminates every detail of our personal lives; but we run the risk of feeling too comfortable, developing a haughty sense of homeownership (to the possible extent of deifying ourselves), and forget that it is because of our “guest” that we have a home in the first place, as everything really belongs to Him!

Combining these two experiences is exactly what the vision of the Temple invites us to strive for. The first stage is remembering that we are God’s guests, residing in His vast mansion called Creation. But the mansion is so rich and expansive, so full of a multitude of rooms, that we tend to lose ourselves in and utterly forget the homeowner. Therefore, we must move to the second stage: to find a suitable corner within the mansion, set up our own little home there, and then invite Him into it.

These two stages are beautifully manifested in the life of Abraham, our forefather. According to the Midrash,8 God first revealed Himself to Abraham when the latter realized that there must exist a “landlord” running the world. By virtue of this feeling that he was God’s guest, Abraham later merited the great commandment of hosting the angels, God’s representatives in the world. Through being God’s guest he was able to become, in a way, His host.

It is interesting to note that both the Hebrew word for “guest,” oreach (אוֹרֵחַ), and that for “host,” me’are’ach (מְאָרֵחַ), derive from the word orach (אֹרַח), meaning “road”. Indeed, we may regard the host and the guest as situated on two ends of a dual-axis road: on one end stands the guest, walking towards the house, and on the other stands the host, opening the door for him. When we think of God as existing in His private domain and of ourselves as inhabiting the public domain, the road becomes the channel by which the soul descends into this world from its source and ascends back at the time of its departure.

Who Will Build the Third Temple?

Let’s examine the subject from another angle. There is a fundamental disagreement among the commentators regarding the manner in which the future Temple is supposed to be built. According to Maimonides,9 the third Temple will be built by us huamns in an entirely natural manner. According to Rashi, however,10 it is destined to miraculously descend from the heavens, completely built and perfected.

From a spiritual perspective, the two opinions reflect two opposing modes of spiritual development, i.e. of building a sanctuary in our hearts. The opinion according to which the Temple will be built in a mundane manner represents gradual self growth, perfecting ourselves until we attain higher knowledge. The opinion according to which the Temple descends miraculously from the heavens, on the other hand, describes receiving divine inspiration from above, allowing us to leap to a new spiritual level at once.

Here too, we can identify a benefit and a drawback in each vision. Receiving inspiration from above is a wonderful thing, but it could also go over our heads and fail to take root in our hearts. Conversely, when we do everything ourselves, although the insights we arrive at grow from within us and are connected to us, we lack the element of divine revelation, and there is a danger that, being so immersed in our world, we’ll forget the purpose for which it was created.

These two opinions parallel exactly the two experiences described above, that of being guests and that of being hosts. The Temple that descends from the heavens corresponds to the feeling that we are guests, waiting in the living room until everything is prepared and served to us; and the Temple that is built from the earth corresponds to the experience that we are hosts, who labor and prepare everything and then wait for the guest to enter.

This analogy is strengthened when we realize that the two opinions on the nature of the third Temple reflect something of the Temples that already were: the Tabernacle, which was directly divinely inspired and accompanied the people of Israel in the wilderness, was akin to a Temple descending from heaven, while the two stationary Temples built in the land of Israel by royal command were akin to an earthly Temple built by man.

Indeed, the wilderness generation and the generations that lived in the land perfectly correspond to the experience of guest and host, respectively: wandering in the wilderness is an experience of being a homeless guest in a world that belongs entirely to God, even receiving our meals prepared from heaven, but on the other hand feeling alienation and struggling to appreciate the magnitude of the kindness shown to us; whereas settling in the land and controlling it is a feeling of being homeowners, inviting the guest to stay with them, but on the other hand developing a sense of haughty ownership that could lead to spiritual apathy, and as a result, to the houses’ destruction.11

A Toiling Host, a Grateful Guest

The two opinions regarding the manner in which the Third Temple appears can help us better understand how to build a divine sanctuary within us. Just as we explained above that we need to combine the experiences of being host and being guest, here too we must somehow merge the images of a Temple built from the ground up and a Temple descending from heaven.

So, picture in your mind an active and diligent person, rising to his daily labor and working hard all day, but doing so gratefully, without complaining, as if this is exactly what is expected of him. This person works hard but seeks neither publicity nor recognition, and when praised for his deeds, he has nothing to say but Baruch Hashem, “Blessed be God,” for his experience is that what he did was not by his own strength but by the strength given to him as a free gift from above. Such a person is simultaneously both host and guest: he toils on building his home, but does so as a grateful guest, feeling that he is not the one working here, but that a higher power is working through him.

Similarly, we can imagine ourselves toiling on building the Temple in a completely earthly manner, without any supernatural help, but with such a lack of self-awareness and arrogance, that in our handiwork is manifested its descent from heaven.

To Build and Be Built

What we are discussing here is deeply related to the question that has been occupying our people for the last hundred years—what kind of Judaism should exist in our generation, in particular in the Land of Israel?

Two thousand years of exile, after the Temple we built with our own hands was destroyed, accustomed us to a state of mind akin to that of our forefathers who wandered in the wilderness: we are merely guests in this world, living by the grace of God and receiving only what descends upon us from heaven. This way of life greatly refined us and enhanced our sense of God’s presence; but to the same extent, it also weakened our active involvement in shaping our fate.

In response to this, many Jews in recent generations decided that no longer should we feel like guests subject to the grace of a hidden Creator, and instead become masters of our own fates. This movement led to great waves of immigration to the Land of Israel, the establishment of public institutions, and finally the founding of an independent Jewish state. However, this “national home” does not show much interest in hosting its Creator, to whom it owes its establishment, and is only willing to provide Him with a small and side guest room. God was barely even mentioned in the Israeli declaration of independence, and the mention that was made (tzur Israel, “rock of Israel”) was deliberately ambiguous so that it could be interpreted as referring back to the Jewish people.

These two polar-opposite approaches are reflected today in the rift within our people, between those who seek to see the establishment of God’s Temple, yet expect it to descend from heaven without any practical effort on our part, and those who seek to build the Temple with their own hands, but not for the sake of God but for themselves.

The idea that building the Temple means to host our Host offers us a vision by which this chasm can be bridged. A true and complete Israeli culture would combine both “guest” consciousness and “host” consciousness: at first, it would cautiously and respectfully step back into the halls of traditional Judaism, without ownership, like a guest learning to know his host’s home and careful not to change anything lest he would break it. Afterwards, it would begin “hosting” the Jewish tradition within it—studying and incorporating it into the chambers of its heart, and also feeding and nourishing it so that it continues to grow and flourish.

May we be blessed this Tisha b’Av to build a divine Home to our Host, to let Him into the chambers of our hearts and so be let into His.

This essay was translated through the kind help of my Patreon supporters:

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