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I never liked mitzvah-brick charts. Was it the oversimplification? The way they reduced 2000 years of estrangement — and the ultimate renewal of a glorious spiritual epicenter — to a numbers game? To a camel-colored oaktag on the wall? I wasn’t sure.

When five-year-old Dahlia came home from school bright-eyed cheerfully outlining her solution to the exile problem (“we just need to do a few more mitzvos lay a few more bricks!”) the feelings of unease resurfaced.

Was my child the only black-and-white thinker in the class who would be devastated when a gold-laden structure failed to descend from Heaven?

I understood the rationale. Brick metaphors are a good way to concretize the abstract to empower kids to remedy centuries of sorrow in a practical way.

But something gnawed.

Two weeks later: “Ugh! Ima how big is the Beis Hamikdash already?” Dahlia squinted her eyes did some hazy arithmetic. “We’ve been doing mitzvos for so long — even Zeidy’s Zeidy! It can’t be there aren’t enough!”

What do I say now?

Absurd kindergarten imagery popped into my head: a luminescent angel enveloped by clouds looking ruefully at skyscraping towers of bricks cramming an endless landfill. “Not enough Creator!” the angel clucked. “Sruli’s still got to share his truck!”

I shooed the vision away. How ridiculous. Is this the manner of an infinite G-d?

Maybe not but the concept is there my inner voice chided. Contemplate it on a more sophisticated plane if you wish but the truth remains: Every good deed builds every bad deed destroys.