When sacred institutions lose their meaning

The biblical regime allows for maximum flexibility around the type of government or economic structure Israel's sons would adopt. The prime minister's job is therefore hardly specified at all. The institutions for the promotion of national unity however are specified in exacting detail. These are the institutions of shabbat and miqdash – God's sacred institutions.

The unity of the people has at its core the non-material office of the divine. God is not the prime minister but He is the president. The essential measure of the health of Israel's sacred institutions is their ability to maintain national unity and solidarity. When the Talmud says the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinom it is really, though inadvertently, pointing, toward the end of the Second Temple period in the national life of Judea, to the degeneracy of the institutions of shabbat and miqdash. Miqdash bureaucracy had lost its bearings and lost its connection with the people, and so was unable to sustain national unity and solidarity; and Shabbos had become an empty relic, no longer able to set the nation's sova point or to define the nation’s business cycles. Altogether, by the time the Temple was finally dismantled, the meaning of both these fundamental sacred institutions had, for all intents and purposes, simply evaporated.