Marc Gafni – RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

Marc Gafni
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Remember the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring Indiana Jones adventuring through the dusty Middle East in search of the Ark of the Covenant? Lives are lost, blood is let. One was tempted to ask why he shouldn’t just let the ark stay lost!

The answer: the ark, perhaps more than any other earthly object, is of overwhelming mystical significance. The ark was an elegant container which held the original tablets on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. Described in the sources as something akin to a spiritually creative, life giving nuclear reactor, it was lost when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed some 2,000 years ago (or perhaps we should say, 2400 years, since the ark was not in second temple) .

It has been sought after – physically and metaphysically – ever since. The search for the ark is the original grail quest of Biblical myth.

Jerusalem holds the secret. It is the cradle of three faiths, each today in its own way in desperate need of renewal and re-souling. At the center of Jerusalem stood the Temple built by Solomon and destroyed by the Greeks, then rebuilt by Ezra and destroyed by the Romans. A Temple that awaits rebuilding in our own inner lives, for the Temple in the Hebrew mystery tradition of the Kabbalah is not so much a place on earth as a powerful idea of the spirit
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Those who have lost touch with the mystery kill each other today in order to control the Temple’s geographical site, a sad betrayal of the spirit which the Temple incarnated.

The Temple myth is so powerful, so fertile and teeming with life, that it has given birth to virtually all the great systems of the spirit created by humanity. The essence of Hebrew mysticism lays hidden in the grain of the Temple’s wood and the folds of her curtains. The loss of the temple is considered by the biblical mystery tradition to be the greatest spiritual disaster in history. The re-building of the temple through the reclaiming of temple energy in our lives is the overarching goal of the entire biblical project. This is the desire which is expressed time and again in a thousand different ways in Hebrew ritual and liturgy.

It is the idea that shaped all of the spiritual offspring of Hebrew religion- that is to say virtually all of civilization as we know it.