Yishai Sarid’s 2015 novel The Third Temple provides a surreal reading experience in 2025. Nearly a decade after its publication in Hebrew, the timing of its translation into English feels almost “beshert” (Yiddish for “fated” or “meant to be”).
The Third Temple tells a cautionary tale of a dystopian near future. After the obliteration of Israel’s most liberal cities in a nuclear attack, the more conservative forces take over, founding the Kingdom of Judah. Riding the momentum of existential fear and a desperate search for meaning, a new leadership emerges, crowning a king and rebuilding Beit HaMikdash in Jerusalem.
Beit HaMikdash—Hebrew for “Temple”—is more pregnant with meaning than what an English-speaking audience would associate with the term. In English, a temple can be any house of worship; for Jews, it often used as an alternative to “synagogue” or “shul.” However, Beit HaMikdash is not just a temple. It is THE Temple. The House of Worship that God Himself ordered, in excruciatingly specific detail, to be constructed upon Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Beit HaMikdash is the Temple that was built, destroyed, built again, then destroyed again. It is the one upon which the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built; its sole remnant, the Western Wall, is the holiest pilgrimage site in Judaism. For many Jewish people, the dream of constructing Beit HaMikdash for the third time (thus the title of the book) is the epitome of their aspirations, the thing that they wish for and yearn for the most. Sarid’s book gives them their wish.
The citizens of Judah believe that “The Evaporation,” as they call the destruction of the liberal cities and the subsequent fall of the State of Israel, happened because people strayed too far from the path of the Lord. They had been living in sin—eating treif, showing off their skin on the beaches—and had brought this calamity upon themselves. This new kingdom, dead set on avoiding the wrath of God, was founded on a return to the customs of old, restoring ancient Torah practices and rituals, including animal sacrifices.
The story is told by Jonathan, third son of King Jehoaz. Once a priest in the Temple, he is writing his memoirs from prison; his homeland has been destroyed by Amalek (never officially named thus, but heavily hinted as being Arabs). The Kingdom of Judah is no more and Prince Jonathan is the last of his line, indeed the last trace of his entire people.
Sarid’s choice to chart this story not chronologically but in retrospect is a weighty and meaningful choice. The reader is acutely aware from the very start where this is leading to. There is no Happy Ending, no rosy future for the Kingdom of Judah. We are learning of this civilization after it has already been erased from this world.
Prince Jonathan is looking back with a sense of duty, reporting to us with a stoic determination only occasionally broken by his sense of grief, loss, and religious devotion. Like Flavius Josephus before him, Jonathan has witnessed the demise of his society and of their fervent faith in the Almighty. But unlike Josephus, a real figure from history, the fictional Jonathan gets to interact with his God. Not directly per se, but through two of his channels: the Shekhina (translated here as “Divine Spirit”), a feminine extension of God that dwells in the inner sanctum of the Temple, attempting to reconcile a wrathful God with his fearful followers; and a nameless Angel of God, a strange messenger with the face of an eagle, possessing a near nihilistic attitude occasionally laced with wry humor and existential wit.
The Kingdom of Judah, as seen through Jonathan’s eyes, is a picture-perfect painting of the redemption of the Jewish people. Nevertheless, even he cannot help but occasionally point out the flaws in this supposedly idyllic existence. Their line of defense is lagging years behind, unable to rejuvenate itself with the latest technological developments because the wider world has cut off ties with the kingdom. The priestly caste insists on purity in all their actions: yet, when a wealthy donor arrives at the temple with his shiksa girlfriend, their wish to visit the Holiest of Holies is granted, in blatant violation of God’s laws.
The Angel of God comes to Jonathan to task him with a message. He must deliver this message to his father, the King, and the King must act upon it or else… But Jonathan is a meek, insecure, cowardly man. The very thought of approaching his father, be it on a mission from God or simply to ask for fatherly attention, terrifies him. Thus, like Moses before him, Jonathan tries to argue with the Angel, protesting that he is not the right man for the job and that someone else ought to do it. But the Angel insists that it must be him.
Corruption, insularity, poverty, famine—the Kingdom of Judah is plagued by many troubles bubbling under the surface. But for the Jonathan of the Temple, these are but blips in an otherwise pure and devout civilization. He puts them out of his mind, all the better to focus on his manual priestly tasks.
But as time passes, Jonathan himself begins to crack. After being entirely devoted to his father throughout his life, at some point he realizes: “They idolized him like a God. A human cannot handle such admiration. He believed what he saw in their eyes. One cannot argue with an all-knowing God, and so he stopped listening.” It is these moments of doubt that reveal Jonathan’s humanity, in the most fascinating yet heartbreaking way.
As readers, we get to be spectators of a high-and-mighty empire disintegrating into ruins: slowly at first, then faster. Tragically, it is not inevitable. The Angel of God had offered him an exit, again and again. But Jonathan did not take it until it is too late.
Every character in this novel—from Jonathan to his siblings, from the King to the Sanhedrin (judicial court)—is too self-involved, too wrapped up in their own ambitions, their own small world, to consider that there might be other elements at play. It is an inflexible world, a rigid existence adhering to laws written thousands of years ago; a world where anything and anyone outside of these laws is rendered invisible.
Many will die, predicts the Angel of God. I find myself fuming at the thought of all this unnecessary death, at the thought of so many men, women, and children sacrificed at the altar of hubris, stubbornness, and love of power. What might have happened if but one of them looked beyond their own nose? Ironically yet unsurprisingly, as an Israeli watching my country’s government, I ask myself this question constantly.
Reading “The Third Temple” in the circumstances of the moment, I find it impossible to remove my Israeli glasses. The story frequently corresponds with the Israeli national psyche and cultural references of the moment, constantly challenging me as I struggle to regain my balance on the shaky ground between a multi-narrative, multi-perspective past and an uncertain, forming-as-we-speak future.
At one point, for example, a leftist activist is blamed for a crime that he did not commit. He is a refugee from the destroyed liberal city; his mother too had been a staunch leftist, and both were once known for their activism. The familial relationship immediately made me think of a real-life mother-son leftist activist duo, and I realized that the mother and her fictional counterpart have the same first name. I found myself wondering—is this intentional or coincidental?
On the other hand, the corrupt and indulgent priests, forever chasing their next meal, instantly remind me of a sketch from the popular Israeli TV comedy show “HaYehudim Baim” (“The Jews Are Coming”). In the sketch, the priests of the First Temple are attempting to persuade a righteous man that he has, actually, sinned—so that the excellent meat he had brought to offer to God at the altar can, instead, be consumed by the priests themselves as penance for his misdeeds. My mind makes this connection, but this sketch did not air on national TV until two years after the novel was published. Must be coincidence, then.
Some of the connections that my brain made, however, ring too true to be coincidence. Prince Jonathan tells of a family bakery run by a father and his two sons, originally from Haifa. Their wives, children, and grandchildren were all killed by the bomb; now, they bake the most wonderful bread for the Temple. “They stood by the oven […], sliding the bread into the oven with a long wooden shovel,” Sarid (translated by Yardenne Greenspan) writes through the voice of Jonathan. “[…] Thus every week they erected a monument of fragrance to their murdered wives and children.”
This combination of murdered women and children, an oven, and a monument, all in a single phrase, immediately throws me back to when I visited Majdanek, a Nazi concentration camp in Poland, at the age of 16. The monument there holds the ashes of thousands of men, women, and children, whose bodies were burned in the camp’s crematoriums. This, I conclude, cannot be coincidence. Sarid knows just how intrinsically the memory of the Shoah rises in the minds of Israeli Jewish readers.
But what is coincidence, really? Is it coincidence that this book was written in 2015 yet feels even more potent post October 7? Is it coincidence that the novel writes, nearly a decade ago, of Israeli elite brains escaping en masse, as Israel is experiencing a higher rate of emigration than any year before? Is it coincidental that the novel tells of a dystopian future where most of the world’s democracies have severed ties with the Kingdom of Judah, at a time when multiple countries have enacted sanctions upon Israel and/or its citizens?
Or, rather, is it a high level of alert? Maybe coincidence is really just a matter of having one’s ears open and reading the signs, learning from history, analyzing slow and small changes as pieces of a bigger picture?
What would it feel like to read this novel as a non-Jew (and/or as a non-Israeli), I wonder. Without this intricate, bleeding web of references—how would a reader experience this tale? Even though we the readers know that the Kingdom of Judah is no more from the very start, there is still plenty of room for surprises, and the novel frequently departs from the trajectory that one expects. For an “uninvolved” reader, one whose heart and heritage isn’t linked to this blood-soaked land, would this book merely serve as a curious moral fable? As yet another dystopian novel? Science fiction? As an entirely theoretical take on the dangers of religious fanaticism?
I find myself almost envying a reader who can enjoy this novel without any of the baggage, who can read this as an entirely theoretical, amusing novelty of a novel—dark yet witty, ominous yet entertaining.
For me, so much of Sarid’s novel feels… well, familiar. As if it is not a potential, warped future, but rather an assured past. As an Israeli, I feel that there is something almost “Black Mirror”-esque about this novel, portraying as it does a nauseating tale of a future Israel that had slipped down the proverbial slippery slope—in this case, a slope which threatens a people held within the clutches of religious zealous fanatics, for whom God, Torah, and Land hold a higher value than human life. Many people would find Sarid’s vision blood-curdling and terrifying to imagine, a possibility that must be avoided, But for others, it is a realization of their wildest hopes, their wettest dream come true.
As I’m writing this review, today’s (19/12/24) Instagram post from the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz quotes Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir during a tour of the Gaza “Envelope,” the Israeli communities bordering the Gaza Strip: “We will return the hostages [….] by settling all parts of the Gaza Strip.” In the comment section, an Israeli woman responds: “He’s practically saying that the hostages ought to serve as sacrificial offerings upon the altar.”
Less than a week before, on my Facebook feed, a photo popped up from the Sabbath anti-government protest, staged weekly since November 2022. In this photo, a bearded protester carries a sign declaring, in Hebrew: “In the Third Temple the High Priest Netanyahu is practicing human sacrifice!”
These anecdotes might appear irrelevant to a book review, but it feels nigh on impossible—especially as an Israeli reader watching her homeland from the diaspora—not to make these connections. Perhaps it is not only impossible, but undeniable. Perhaps the purpose of books such as these is to alert its readers, to ring the alarm about horrifying processes that are consuming a society. Like Samuel or Ezekiel before him, albeit much less religiously observant, Sarid serves us sinister and ominous prophetic visions. Or perhaps, like Jonah, he does not wish to be a prophet, but has no choice other than to serve us this vision before it is too late.
The Third Temple by Yishai Sarid (translated by Yardenne Greenspan). Restless Books, 2024, pp. 320.