The Descender Who Heard God Mourn His Ruined Temple

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The Descent From the Throne

Rabbi Ishmael came down from the highest palace with the hymn still burning in his mouth. He had stood where the descenders to the chariot are set among the singing ones, close enough to the Throne that the light had weight. Now the gate behind him sealed. The brightness thinned to something a man could carry. His feet found the lower halls, and the praise cooled on his tongue, and before he had crossed a single chamber a voice reached him from the heights above his head.

It was not singing. It spoke in Aramaic, the plain tongue of the streets of Jerusalem, the words a mother used with her child and a seller used at his stall. Nothing in the palaces spoke that way. The angels praised in a speech of fire. This voice used the language of home, and it used it to grieve.

A Voice Mourning in Aramaic

"The holy shrine shall be a ruin," the voice said, "and the Temple, a fire burning."

Ishmael stopped on the stair. He had just come from the courts of heaven, and here was a sentence about a house of stone below, spoken as if the ruin were already smoking.

"And the dwelling of the king, desolation," the voice went on, "and she in whom the king rejoiced shall mourn as a widow. And the virgins and the youths shall be carried off, and the servants of the king killed. And the pure altar polluted, and the table that was set before the Lord taken as spoil by the enemy."

He knew that table. He knew the altar and the loaves laid out in their rows. The voice was naming them one by one the way a man counts his dead. Then it reached the end.

"And Jerusalem shall be desolation, and the land of Israel trembling."

The cold went through him. He put a hand to the wall of the palace and found it warm, humming, alive with song, while the words in his ears buried a city.

The One Breath He Loved More Than the World

He waited for the heights to answer the grief with anger. What came instead was quieter, and it was the King's own voice, and it was not speaking about vengeance. It was speaking about love.

"I have no pleasure in all the world that I have made," the voice said, "like the hour when your eyes are lifted up to Mine and My eyes are lifted up to yours, when you stand before Me and say, 'Holy.' For the breath that goes out of your mouths in that hour rises up before Me as a pleasant savor."

Ishmael held still. Above him lay every wheel and river and flame of creation, the whole furniture of the heavens, and the One who owned all of it had just set a single human breath above the rest. Not the sacrifices. Not the smoke of the altar the enemy had defiled. The breath of a person on the earth, lifting his face and saying the one word, holy. That, the King loved more than the world.

And that was the house the Aramaic voice had watched burn. The place where Israel had lifted its eyes and said the word. The two things would not fit together in his chest. The breath God treasured, and the room where it had risen, thrown down into ash.

The King of Many Names Who Waits

Then the titles came, one climbing onto the next, until the whole palace stood built out of them. King just, King faithful, King beloved, King lovely, King lowly, King humble, King righteous, King holy, King pure, King mighty, King gracious, King merciful, King of Kings of Kings and Lord of the Crowns. Ishmael had sung many of these names on the way up. He had not heard what the last of them wanted.

For the voice named itself Totrosi'ai, the Lord God of Israel, and it said that it desired and it waited. It waited for the redemption and the season of salvation laid up for Israel, waited for the day of reckoning after the destruction of the last Temple, and it waited in the same measure that a man waits for the one thing he cannot live without.

And it asked. "When shall he that goes down to the chariot go down? When shall he see the loftiness of the height? When shall he see the end that brings salvation? When shall he go up and tell it to the seed of Abraham who loved Me?"

The Descender Carries the Answer Down

The questions were about him. He was the descender the King had been waiting for, the one who could climb to the loftiness of the height, look on the end, and come back to the children of Abraham with what he had seen. The One who had made the wheels and the fire leaned toward the earth like a man at a window, and He asked when.

Ishmael went down the last stairs and out through the lowest gate. Behind him the palaces went on singing. Above them, higher than the song, the God of Israel kept His two griefs side by side, the widow in the burned city and the breath He could not stop loving. He held the power of every crown, and He was aching for someone to come up, see the day of rebuilding, and carry the word back down to the sons of the one who had loved Him.

So Ishmael carried it. The Temple was ash. The King wanted it back more than a mourner wants the dead returned, and He had said so in the plain words of home.