Built to Last: Spolia in Judaism

There are two kinds of people in this world. Newbies, who love that brand new feeling – the furniture still in its plastic, the car that smells like nothing has happened in it yet. 

And recyclers, who would rather take something worn and bring it back to life.

You already know which one I am. Except for clothes and shoes, almost everything in my house is secondhand, refinished, reclaimed. I am the embodiment of: One person’s junk is another’s treasure. 

New isn’t bad. Nobody wants a car with a hundred thousand miles and no maintenance history. But old isn’t bad either. We’ve lost that distinction.

Before there were vintage shops or old home flipping, there was Roman architecture.

ROMAN CHURCHES

Walk through Rome’s oldest churches and something unexpected is happening. 

Columns that don’t match. Marble slabs still bearing the ghost of an inscription meant for a different god, a different world. These stones lived one whole life before someone tore them out and gave them another.

It’s called spolia and it was a necessity. 

When Rome’s temples fell, there was suddenly beautiful marble sitting unused everywhere, and quarrying new stone was slow and expensive. So builders looted the ruins and set them into the bones of new churches. 

Some even carved tiny crosses into the old pagan stone as a quiet way of saying: your gods are gone, and what you built now serves something else.

I’ve stood in front of these ruins myself, in Rome, in Greece. Awe, certainly. But if I’m honest, it didn’t reach me the way Judaism does.

Because the ancient world mostly built stone. Extraordinary stone, but stone. Rome built roads. Athens built temples. Empire after empire poured its genius into structures meant to outlast them, monuments for eternity. 

And guess what, they failed. 

We ooh and ahh over ruins, but the culture and values behind those ruins are themselves now ruins.

WHAT JUDAISM BUILT INSTEAD OF BUILDINGS

Judaism didn’t build buildings. We had a Temple, briefly, twice, and both times it was destroyed – and both times we survived it, because a building for all eternity was never the goal. 

We built something else instead: a structure of mitzvot. 

Not columns and doorways, but responsibilities and practices –  a structure of life, of how we treat a stranger, how we mark a week, how we speak to the person across from us. 

It’s still architecture. It still has to hold weight, still has to be load-bearing enough to carry a whole people through exile and return, through destruction and rebuilding, for thousands of years. It just isn’t made of stone. It’s made of actions.

And then Judaism added something …we didn’t just build the structure, we said: build it beautifully. 

EXTRA BEAUTY

There’s a concept for this, hiddur mitzvah, the beautification of a commandment. Not the beautification of a temple, a gorgeous kiddush cup, an embroidered challah cover, a beautifully bound Haggadah. 

Rome decorated its buildings. We decorated our actions. 

We don’t strictly need a beautiful candlestick to light Shabbat candles. Hiddur mitzvah says: light them anyway. A beautiful object was never the point, it exists to make the doing of good more beautiful. The beauty is in the doing. 

Do the good, and then don’t stop there, do it beautifully.

What Judaism built, across those same centuries and more, we can’t photograph. 

And that makes it a little harder to access – there is no building, no central thing – of course we have Israel with its own amazing beauty but that’s also been destroyed and returned over the centuries. 

The one thing that lasted? Mitzvot.

The Mitzvah of Shabbat, the Mitzvah of Torah study, the Mitzvah of Tikkun Olam – and the mitzvah of having a mitzvah structure – of buying into an old system and making it new and beautiful for today – that is the Jewish version of Spolia. 

We built the practice of growing our souls in this lifetime, and then we insisted on doing it with beauty.

Judaism sometimes gets an unfair rap for being old, as if “old” means outdated. 

But it’s never worked that way. Every generation has rehabbed it, wrestled it, rebuilt it. It was never meant to sit behind glass. 

That rehabbing takes work – creativity, patience, an open heart. 

That work isn’t a flaw in Judaism, it is Judaism. 

And we’re about to be handed the biggest piece of Spolia of the year.

 In a few weeks, the shofar sounds, unchanged for thousands of years. 

Words of prayer written by people who lived lives we can’t imagine.

OLD & DEAD VS OLD & ALIVE

On the surface, none of it should work. Left untouched, it’s just an antique – maybe beautiful, easy to admire, easy to observe from the outside and still change nothing inside us.

That’s the purpose of the shofar, of Elul to engage in our practice of waking up, of evolving. High Holy Days are not meant for oohing an ahhing at a beautiful relic. 

They’re meant for us to wrestle and engage with.

That’s the whole difference between old and irrelevant, and old and alive. 

It’s about whether we show up willing to make it ours again.

A ruin, even a beautiful one, is finished. 

But this –  these prayers, these candles, this sunset over the water  – is not a ruin. This is our mitzvah structure that has outlasted and will outlast every building and piece of marble known to humankind.

So tonight, as the sun goes down over this water, and we say words our people have said entering this same Shabbat for thousands of years – maybe we can  feel both things at once. 

The friction of the unfamiliar. Judaism can be hard to connect to. I get it …  it’s old, it’s in a different language, and sometimes it’s hard and uncomfortable. 

But that is the beauty. It’s our mitzvah to take the old and make it alive. And it’s our mitzvah to make it beautiful.