By Ranen Omer-Sherman
Guest Columnist
Yishai Sarid is renowned for his startling portraits of contemporary Israeli society, such as The Memory Monster, a disquieting work about the uses of Holocaust remembrance and pedagogy. Sarid’s latest novel, The Third Temple, won the Bernstein Prize and has received accolades for its unflinching portrait of a postapocalyptic, monarchic Jewish society still at odds with its enemies. A masterful indictment of fundamentalist and messianic ideologies, and a probing meditation on Jewish power and powerlessness over time, the book is written with a great deal of integrity and soul — and is perhaps the most essential Israeli novel in recent memory.
In an indeterminate future, after the monarchic “Kingdom of Judah” has been conquered by the “Amalekites,” Prince Jonathan, the youngest son of self-anointed King Jehoaz, is taken prisoner and compelled by his captors to write the chronicles of what has transpired. Sexually disabled since childhood by a terrorist’s grenade, he has never been allowed to bask in the public glory of Judean royalty as his older brothers do. Until the kingdom’s collapse, he supervised the priests of the Third Temple, whose lives are dedicated to the sacrificial butchery of an extravagant number of lambs, rams, bulls, and other hapless creatures on the bloody altar — all while the population begins to starve. For Prince Jonathan, his royal father has become as remote a figure as God himself, yet he still dotes on him, despite being embittered by the fact that after his mother’s death, the king married the decades-younger woman Jonathan has loved obsessively since childhood. From his dank prison cell, Jonathan narrates his struggles to stay resolute as rumors of military disasters increasingly unsettle the kingdom, and even as he receives tormenting visitations from an angel of the Lord who commands him to challenge the king’s authority (that angelic messenger is terri-fying in some scenes and a source of the novel’s rare moments of comic relief in others, and turns out to be as vulnerable to human cruelty as the rest of God’s creations).
Throughout, Sarid casts a steady gaze on the foibles of Israeli society in the present, not least when it comes to the corruption and lawlessness of the insulated monarch who rules over the suffering masses as if he were truly God’s gift to the Jews — even when events prove otherwise. Originally published in Hebrew in 2015, the novel feels all the more urgent and timely now, even with its indulgent soupçons of the supernatural. In the tradition of the most powerful dystopian novels, it is a mirror of our own time, reflecting both the ticking time bomb of Israel’s growing internal struggle with religious extremists and the relentless hostility of its external enemies. Viewed through the prism of the present moment, it reads like a tender paean to all the vulnerable victims of the violent politics of the Middle East. Yardenne Greenspan’s nimble translation captures the wry wit, and tense drama of Sarid’s language. An audacious novel fully conversant with Hebrew literary traditions going back to Jeremiah, as well as with contemporary postapocalyptic narratives, The Third Temple is not the most uplifting read of the season but it seems like the most essential.
Ranen Omer-Sherman
Ranen Omer-Sherman is Professor of Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville, where he holds the Jewish Heritage Fund Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies and directs the school’s Jewish Studies program.