From Tent to Temple: Resurrection in Jerusalem

Abstract

Enshrining the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision into law, the Holocaust Remembrance and Heroism Law, Yad Vashem, 5713–1953, section 4 seeks to bestow upon Jews who were exterminated, and those who fell in the Holocaust and in uprising, commemorative citizenship of the State of Israel as a sign of their ingathering unto their nation.¹ This remarkable piece of legislation reverberates with the sacred archetype of resurrection, a theology that finds its roots in the Tenach, its fullest exposition in rabbinic literature and its continued expression in the recitation each day by observant Jews of the Amidah, Shmoneh Esreh, or Tefillah — the ‘Eighteen Benedictions’ that comprise the central prayer of the daily and Sabbath liturgy. The related concept of the ‘ingathering of the Exiles’, the national restoration of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland, also finds its beginnings in Ezekiel’s famous vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones. In the biblical context, the prophet’s vision points to the hoped-for end of the Babylonian exile and the actual, physical return of the Exiles to Jerusalem.² The Remembrance and Heroism Law speaks of another kind of resurrection — of those whose physical bodies will never be recovered — a resurrection of memory that will be achieved through the collection of documents, objects, photos and, most of all, names, the millions of names of Holocaust victims that it is Yad Vashem’s self-declared mission to collect and display. Both visions share a hope for national restoration. For the latter, though, this is not to occur through supernatural means but rather through the political and legal actions of the modern State of Israel.

I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil

(Ezekiel 37:14)

Remember what Amalek did to you…

(Deuteronomy 25:17)