THE THIRD TEMPLE

Yehoshua amusedly hides behind the scenes of this dialogic novella and leaves us to our own devices with the characters, but not before concocting a peppered plot of tangled rabbinic villains, in Paris and Tel Aviv, a plot that he pulls on the colorful strings and robs Paris of materials from his Italian novel, 'The Only Daughter', To finally put them, many years later, on their heads in Tel Aviv. The three characters at the forefront of the story are Esther Azoulai, a deeply religious Jewish woman who grew up in Paris and proselytized without need, whose revered father is an Algerian Jew, but who has "Catholic genes" from her French mother who converted to Judaism; Rabbi Shasnik Nissim Shoshani, in whose rabbinate office in Tel Aviv a picture of Rabbi Kook hangs next to that of Ovadia Yosef, and who is sometimes capable of wild thoughts; and his secretary, the Ashkenazi convert Yehiel Berkowitz, whom the rabbi chose in order to surprise him in a way that a Sephardi would not dare , th