What is the difference between a synagogue and a jewish temple

The word shul is unfamiliar for many modern Jews. Thus, nowadays the term is usually not used by anyone. A Tabernacle is a small, movable tent that was used as a place of worship by the ancient Israelites. Tabernacle is a term, which is mainly used by Christian groups. According to biblebrain. It was to be the centerpiece of Israel and would move wherever they camped in their journey to the Promised Land.

The tents of all of the tribes were arranged in a circle around the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle was not like churches today. It was not merely a place where people worshiped. Instead, it was a place where God visited the people and made his glory known. Image Courtesy: bbc. A Temple is the place of worship for those belonging to a number of religions. A church is a term that refers to Christian houses of worship. Mosque or Masjid is the place of worship in Islam; it is where the Islamic people directly pray to Allah, known as salah.

Shul is the other name for Synagogue. Tabernacle is another place of worship for Christian people. A Temple is the place of worship for those of number of religions. Sect and synagogue ministered to this need for individual self-expression and self-fulfillment. These ideas are the wave of the present and the future. Against all this stood the temple and the sacrificial cult, both based on the idea that the few perform the religion on behalf of the many.

Not only were these the waves of the past, but they were, even on their own terms, imperfect and blemished. In fact, few such visions emphasize or describe in detail the sacrificial cults of the future.

The temple scroll is a notable exception. However, the temple had one great advantage which neither the synagogue nor the school nor the sect nor prayer nor humility nor anything else could ever hope to duplicate. The temple was located on the one sacred place on Mount Moriah, where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, where Jacob saw a ladder reaching into heaven, and where the angel of the Lord commanded David to build an altar. Hence synagogues and sects, by their very nature, are impermanent and imperfect institutions which have no share in the world to come.

As a result, no one cared to talk much about sects or synagogues. The Rabbis inherited these ideas as part of their legacy from second temple Judaism, and they, too, maintained an ambivalent and complex attitude toward the sacrificial cult and the temple, both of which were destroyed in 70 C.

The entire Rabbinic enterprise is predicated on the democratic assumptions mentioned earlier which are diametrically opposed to those of the sacrificial cult. Rabbinic Jews find God through prayer, Torah study, mystical speculation, and the continuous performance of the commandments, notably the commandments of Shabbat and festivals, purity, tithing, food laws, and ethical behavior.

All of these are personal and unmediated, and all of them except mystical speculation were incumbent upon every male Jew. The relationship of this Rabbinic piety to the sacrificial cult, which most Rabbis believed would be restored in the Messianic era, was never worked out systematically. Nonetheless, they always held that Torah study was at least equal, if not superior, to the sacrificial cult. Prayer, however, is in a different category, and here we find three attitudes:.

We see in these three attitudes echoes of the views held by the Jews of the second temple period. The sole Rabbinic innovation, as far as I can see, was the elevation of Torah study and prayer to that prophetic list of equivalents or replacements for the sacrificial cult.

Just like their ancestors, the Rabbis did not endow the synagogue with an independent existence. They, too, regarded it as a poor surrogate for the temple and accorded it no role in the world to come.

For the Rabbis, prayer versus sacrifice and Torah study versus sacrifice were real issues. Synagogue versus temple was not. Having presented a summary of the Rabbinic position, I would like now to elaborate upon it briefly. This view is usually supported by the following two Rabbinic stories. Once as Rabban Johanan ben Zokkai was coming forth from Jerusalem, Rabbi Joshua followed after him and beheld the temple in ruins.

After the destruction of the temple, perushim ascetics or separatists who would neither eat meat nor drink wine became numerous in Israel. To mourn excessively is impossible. The historicity of these stories I do not wish to judge here. But even if they are historical as written, they do not indicate a widespread belief among the Jews of the time that they were at a loss how to proceed after the sacrificial cult had been removed. The second story is said explicitly to concern only the perushim , a small group separate from the main religious body of Israel.

The Master merely paraphrases Hosea: deeds of loving-kindness replace the sacrifices. Rabban Johanan leaves out the truly revolutionary Rabbinic response to the catastrophe of 70 C. Hence this isolated exchange is not real evidence for a deep-seated religious crisis among Rabbinic Jews after the destruction of the second temple. Presumably, the sacrificial cult had been supplemented or replaced for so long that its loss was not as devastating as it might have been.

The Rabbis of the Tannaitic period, of course, hoped and expected that the sacrificial cult would be restored-indeed, one-sixth of the Mishnah is devoted to the laws of the sacrificial cult-but they did not sense a need to find an immediate replacement for the cult.

Life could go on without sacrifices. It is even questionable whether the petition for the restoration of the sacrifices figures as prominently in the prayers of the Tannaim as it does in the liturgy of the following generation. The classic statement of this view is in the Tannaitic commentary to Deuteronomy This is Torah study. It was during the Amoraic period — C. Since the day the temple was destroyed an iron wall has separated Israel from their Father in Heaven.

Now, for the first time, the Rabbis disputed the origin of the statutory prayers. According to one school of thought, they were established by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that is, they have an independent existence, just as the Tannaim has assumed.

According to another school of thought, they correspond to, or derive from, the different offerings of the sacrificial cult. This view prevailed. Paradoxically enough, this attitude was enshrined in the liturgy, which explicitly declared itself to be a poor substitute for the real thing.

The last phrase of Hosea , a phrase which I cannot translate into English because it is woefully obscure and probably corrupt, was understood by the Rabbis to mean that prayer should be offered in lieu of sacrifice, and the phrase was inserted into the liturgy. Since the Rabbis declared that he who studies the scriptural passages concerning the sacrifices and meditates upon the laws of the sacrificial cult is regarded by God as if he had brought a burnt offering, these verses and laws were incorporated in the liturgy also.

I have fasted today, and through this fasting my blood and my fat have been decreased. Deign to look upon the part of my blood and my fat which I have lost through my fasting as if I had offered it to thee on the altar, and forgive my sins in return. According to this view, when the temple is rebuilt and the sacrificial cult restored in the Messianic era, prayer would have little function, although I doubt that the Rabbis imagined it would be eliminated completely any more than they imagined that Torah study and humility would disappear in the age to come.

For some Jews, however, Rabbinic piety was not only a replacement of the sacrificial cult-it was superior to the original. One Rabbi stated explicitly that prayer was greater than the sacrifices, greater, in fact, than good deeds. He arose and enacted that the Jews should pray three times a day because prayer is dearer to the Holy One, blessed be He, than are good deeds and all the sacrifices. After all, we already have something better. Sacrifices are practiced only in this world, while charity and the commandments are practiced in this world and in the world to come.

I have discussed here three different Rabbinic attitudes towards the relationship between the sacrificial cult on the one hand and prayer and Rabbinic piety generally on the other. We must not imagine that these attitudes were fully systematized and clearly articulated. Nor should we attempt to reconcile the contradictory attitudes. The same Rabbi might have preached in the synagogue one morning that Torah study was infinitely superior to the sacrificial cult, and then have proceeded to pray that the cult should be restored.

This ambivalence, the legacy of the second temple period, was sharpened by the interplay between the sense of loss caused by the destruction of the temple and the realization that the entire Rabbinic enterprise is antithetical to a sacrificial cult.

What is important for us here is that the Rabbis attempted to democratize the cult for both the present and the future.

According to two of the three views sketched here, Rabbinic piety is not a second-rate replacement for the sacrificial cult: it is an end in itself, a permanent and successful way of bridging the gap between man and God-so successful, in fact, that some Jews believe that it would replace the sacrificial cult in the age to come.

Missing from all this is the synagogue. Missing from this entire discussion of replacements for and supplements to the sacrificial cult is the very institution which houses prayer and Torah study.

Again, following the legacy of second temple times, the Rabbis do not bestow on the synagogue an independent ideology. The little sanctity which the synagogue has derives from two sources: the fact that it is a pale imitation of the temple, and the fact that sacred activities are conducted within its precincts. Let us examine these two points briefly. Synagogues obviously are a reflex of the temple in Jerusalem.

The ancient names for the synagogue include many which originally applied to the temple. The Rabbis also legislated that synagogues must be built on the highest point of the city, presumably to mimic the temple, which was built on the highest mountain of Jerusalem. Congregational prayer in the synagogue was declared akin to offering a sacrifice. In sum, the Rabbis had good reason to mistranslate Ezekiel On the contrary, the transference of temple imagery and terminology to the synagogue indicates that the latter is an imperfect representation of the former.

The temple is the ideal. Thus, according to Rabbinic legislation the doors of the synagogue face east, but when one prays he orients himself toward Jerusalem irrespective of the doors. Because he faces the one holy site, the ideal center, oblivious to the fact that the imperfect but necessary structure which protects him from the rays of the sun is oriented in a different direction.

Indeed, according to one opinion in the Mishna, it could even be converted into a bathhouse. When such use ceases, so does the sanctity. Hence, many Rabbinic passages which speak of the shekhinah the divine presence in the synagogue do so while referring to the prayer and the study conducted by the Jews.

These actions, not the building or the place or the institution, confer sanctity. Like their ancestors in the second temple period, the Rabbis speak of a heavenly temple, a heavenly Jerusalem, a heavenly court, and a heavenly Sanhedrin. To this list they add a heavenly altar, a heavenly academy, and a heavenly school. But nowhere, neither in their mystical speculations nor in their musings about the end of days nor in the apocalyptic texts of the sixth and seventh centuries, do the Rabbis refer to a heavenly synagogue.

In one stray passage a Rabbi declares that in the future all the synagogues and academies of Babylonia will be picked up and established in the land of Israel. What happens then he does not say. Even this isolated but somewhat well-known passage does not ascribe to synagogues any important role in the Messianic future. The explanation for this phenomenon should be clear.

The Rabbis attempted to democratize Judaism. Whether prayer and Torah study were legitimate supplements to or replacements for the sacrificial cult was a serious question which provoked much thought and speculation. In a choice between aristocracy and democracy, elitism and populism, Rabbinic ideology would support the latter. But between the one and the many, between monism and pluralism, there could be no choice. They knew that the temple was the cosmic center, that it was a symbol of the entire world, that it was the place where heaven and earth meet.

For how could there be more than one cosmic center? How could there be more than one divine throne? The Rabbis, at least, ignored these attempts and did not attribute any cosmic significance to their synagogues. In fact, they attributed very little ideological significance to the synagogue. They looked forward instead to a time when they would have the monism of the temple and the democratic cult of the synagogue, an uneasy union of dissimilar ideals. However, the Rabbis tell us that contradictions are tolerated in the world of the divine.

Even two contradictory statements can be the words of the living God. Joseph Gutmann. On the sacred center see Ezekiel On the metropolis or mother city see Philo, Against Flaccus Isaiah and, 1 Kings 8, and Josephus, Against Apion 2. This is not the place to discuss the rabbinic institution of mishmarot and maamadot M. Taanit 4. Theophrastus c.

Wolfson, Philo Cambridge: Harvard University, ; reprinted. An example of the radical Jews is Stephen in Acts 7. Josephus, Jewish Wars 5. The orthodox Jews believe that only the Messiah can build a new Temple.

When the Temple was there, Jews were carrying out more traditions such as sacrifices. Also, during the prayer in the Temple, music was used. Now, since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, a synagogue is the house of worship for the Jews. On the other hand, a synagogue was nothing but a Town Hall in the olden days.

At that time, it did not have a great connection with worship. The purpose of constructing a synagogue also was different when compared to the purpose for which a temple was constructed. The primary purpose behind the construction of synagogue was to carry on discussions related to business.

In fact, community business was conducted by the Jewish community in a synagogue. This was the situation as long as the Temple was there.

However, now the synagogue is built for the primary purpose of worshipping. As a way of honoring the memory of the Temple, the worship style in synagogues has also gone through some changes.