THE BEGINNING and end of the liturgical sequence covered in this chapter imply that the Temple is actually in existence, yet the description of the sacrificial order itself and the texts inserted in it are tinged with sadness. Despite the desire to flee daily reality by any means available, the speaker is aware of the limited power of words and of the imagination to override the here and now. As a result it is acknowledged that the Temple, whose restoration would bring God's proximity and protectiveness, is irredeemably absent. This section completes the first part of the morning liturgy.

EXTRACT 34. The Daily Morning Sacrifice

The prophecy of ingathering that ended the previous chapter appeared to blend scriptural study with petition in a conventional way, but the present passage shows it to have been a turning point. It opens a subsection of the preliminary part of the morning service being analysed in this book, known as korbanot, ‘offerings’. The previous citation at first seemed to be a polemical device for persuading God to fulfil his promise to redeem his people. However, it now becomes clear that the speaker's words had the power, if not actually to change reality, then at least to modify the worshipper's state of mind in such a way that the Temple and the sacrificial cult almost appear to be materially and actually present. At first the attention directed to the sacrifices is merely narrative in quality, as though the speaker were recounting nostalgically what had once occurred while remaining aware that this is located in the remote past. But such is the intensity of the focus generated by this depiction that, after a few paragraphs, it begins to seem less a matter of recollection than of observation, as though either the cult had never been destroyed or the promised return had finally come about. The liturgical turning point between petition and at least imaginary fulfilment seems to be the previous prophetic citation in which God promised return. This apparently carried the speaker from the here and now of the synagogue into the there and then of pre-exilic Jerusalem, if only in the mind.