There's a mighty judgment coming

Reflections for Tisha be-Av

There’s a mighty judgment coming but I may be wrong.

You see I hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song.

Leonard Cohen, “The Tower of Song.”

At sunset, August 2, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av — Tisha Be-Av — will begin. When I visited Israel fifty-eight years ago, in August 1967, at the age of 17, I saw a film entitled “Shisha Yamim la-Netzach” (Six Days to Victory) — the story of the June war. At its climax, Israeli troops reached the Western Wall of the Second Temple, known as the Wailing Wall for those who there lamented the destruction of the temple. Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the army, blew a ram’s horn — a shofar, as will the prophet Elijah, it is said, when he announces the return of the messiah, son of David.

The echoes of that blast have faded, and now I hear those voices of which Leonard Cohen sang. This newsletter takes its name from one of them, dating back over 2,700 years, when Jeremiah prophesied concerning the Kingdom of Judah (Jeremiah 8):

At that time — declares the Lord — the bones of the kings of Judah, of its officers, of the priests, of the prophets, and of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be taken out of their graves and exposed to the sun, moon, and all the host of heaven, which they loved and served and followed, to which they turned and bowed down. They shall not be gathered for reburial; they shall become dung upon the face of the earth. And death shall be preferable to life for all that are left of this wicked folk, in all the places to which I shall banish them.

Why is this people — Jerusalem— rebellious

With a persistent rebellion?

They cling to deceit.

They refuse to return.

They do not speak honestly.

No one regrets his wickedness

And says, “What have I done?”

Saying, “All is well, all is well,”

When nothing is well.

They have acted shamefully;

They have done abhorrent things —

Yet they do not feel shame,

They cannot be made to blush.

Assuredly, they shall fall among the falling,

They shall stumble at the time of their doom.

Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed times, but My people pay no heed to the law of the Lord.

The appointed time arrived on the ninth day of Av, 3174 of the Hebrew calendar, or 586 BCE, when the Babylonian forces of King Nebuchadnezzar breached the walls of Jerusalem, burned the city, destroyed the Temple of Solomon, and sent the people of Judah into exile across the Euphrates River. Jeremiah was a witness and later wrote the book called “Lamentations.” He did not blame the Babylonians or claim that they were antisemites or terrorists. He lamented (Jeremiah : 2:1 ff.):

Judah has gone into exile

Because of misery and harsh oppression;

When she settled among the nations,

She found no rest;

Her enemies are now the masters,

Her foes are at ease,

Because the Lord has afflicted her

For her many transgressions.

Alas!

The Lord in his wrath

Has shamed fair Zion,

Has cast down from heaven to earth

the majesty of Israel.

The Lord laid waste without pity

All the habitations of Jacob;

He has razed in his anger

Fair Judah’s strongholds.

He has brought low in dishonor

The kingdom and its leaders.

In blazing anger he has cut down

All the might of Israel.

He has withdrawn his right hand

In the presence of the foe;

He has ravaged Jacob like flaming fire,

Consuming on all sides.

These passages expressed a consensus of the prophets about the fall of the first temple and the Kingdom of Judah. Tractate Yoma of the Babylonian Talmud summarizes (p. 9b):

Why was the first Sanctuary destroyed? because of three evils that prevailed there: idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed….

No prophets ever remonstrated with the People of Israel for their insufficient loyalty to the state.

Less than a century later, Cyrus, the Shah of Persia, conquered Babylon. He authorized the Judean exiles to return to their land — not to establish a Jewish state, but to rebuild the Temple and the community of Israel, while living in peace with the other peoples of the land.

The Persian empire retreated before Alexander of Macedon, whose successors divided his Hellenistic empire. In 141 B.C.E. the revolt of the Macabees against the Hellenistic rulers of Syria established a new Jewish dynasty, the Hasmoneans. That state’s autonomy persisted for a few decades, but it ultimately had to come to terms with the rising power of Rome. In 37 B.C.E. Judea became a Roman client state under King Herod the Great and a province of Rome in 6 C.E.

During the Roman Empire, Jews migrated around the Mediterranean, to Alexandria, Rome, and the Iberian provinces, and along the trade routes linking the Mediterranean to China and India, to Aleppo, Babylon and then Baghdad, Persia, Samarkand, and Bukhara. By the time of King Herod, a majority of Jews lived outside of the Land of Israel. They still do, despite the Holocaust’s destruction of the world’s largest Jewish diaspora.

Misrule under the emperor Nero, who ruled from 54 to 68 C.E., provoked the Great Revolt of the Jews of Palestine that began in 66. Four years later, in 70 C.E., Titus laid waste to Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple.

We have no prophesies about the Second Temple; prophesy had ended with Malachi in the fifth century B.C.E. Under the Second Temple there had been two cadres of leaders, the priests who performed the Temple sacrifices (Saducees), and the rabbis, who expounded on and taught the sacred texts (Pharisees). Now there was only the rabbis — and their relation to the revolt that led to the temple’s destruction was ambiguous.

The fighters who resisted the Romans were remembered in Jewish history mainly for their factionalism, internecine fighting, and zealotry, which opened the way for the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. Among the factions were the Sicarii, named after the short dagger they hid under their cloaks to assassinate their enemies. The Sicarii fled Jerusalem to the palace fortified by Herod by the Dead Sea, Masada, which the State of Israel has made into a symbol of its aggressive martial spirit.

In lieu of prophesy, we have the account of Flavius Josephus, a former leader of the revolt, a historian who ended his days in Rome. Here is his account of the defenders of Masada:

There was a fortress of very great strength not far from Jerusalem, which had been built by our ancient kings, . . . It is called Masada. Those who were called Sicarii had taken possession of it formerly; but at this time they overran the neighboring countries, aiming only to procure to themselves necessities; . . .and at the feast of unleavened bread, which the Jews celebrate in memory of their deliverance from Egyptian bondage, . . . they came down by night … and overran a certain small city called Engaddi; —They … cast [those who could fight them] out of the city. As for such as could not run away, being women and children, they slew of them above seven hundred. . . . And indeed these men laid all the villages that were about the fortress waste, and made the whole country desolate; while there came to them every day from all parts not a few men who were as corrupt as themselves.³

In a single incident, the Sicarii of Masada, without benefit of the firepower of modern weaponry, killed more than half the number of Jewish civilians that Hamas and its allies did on October 7, 2023. Finally they committed an organized mass suicide rather than surrender to Rome’s Tenth Legion, led by Lucius Flavius Silva.

After this calamity Jewish religion and identity had to adapt to a new situation. The man who did the most to save Jewish religion, culture, and identity at the time of the fall of the Second Temple was Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai, the President of the Great Sanhedrin and the leading scholar of the age. The story of Ben Zakkai has come down to us in The Fathers of Rabbi Natan (Avot de-Rabbi Natan), a commentary on Pirkei Avot, The Chapters of the Fathers, which was probably compiled in the Babylonian academies during 700-900 C.E.

The account of the destruction of the Second Temple given in Avot de-Rabbi Natan supports the judgment of the redactors of Tractate Yoma. Neither mentions hatred of the Jews, let alone antisemitism, as the reason for the destruction of Jerusalem. It is instead ascribed to the factional militancy and unwillingness to compromise of the Zealots in Jerusalem:In Yavne Ben Zakkai laid the basis for Judaism without a temple, a religion based on study, law, and prayer, without animal sacrifice.

When Vespasian came to destroy Jerusalem, he said to the inhabitants, “Fools, why are you asking me to destroy this city? And why do you seek to destroy this city and why do you seek to burn the Temple? For what do I ask of you but that you send me one bow or one arrow [tokens of submission], and I shall go off from you.”

They said to him: “Just as we went forth against the first two who were before you [⁠Cestius Gallus and ⁠Gessius Florus] and slew them, so shall we go forth against you and slay you.”

When Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai heard this, he sent for the men of Jerusalem, and said to them, “My children, why do you want to destroy this city and why do you seek to burn the Temple? For what is it that he asks of you? Verily he asks naught of you save one bow or one arrow, and he will go off from you.”

They said to him, “Even as we went forth against the two before him and slew them, so shall we go forth against him and slay him.”When Ben Zakkai repeated this advice for three days, and the fighters did not listen, he instructed his students to carry him out of the city hidden in a coffin. On his instructions, they took him to Vespasian. When Vespasian asked what he wanted, He said “Yavne [a town on the coast about 30 miles west of Jerusalem], where I might go and teach my disciples.” Vespasian answered, “Go; and whatever you wish to do, do.”

The First and Second Temples were the foci of national identity and state power. The periods when they existed are sometimes called in English the first and second Commonwealths. After nearly two millennia of exile, the establishment of the State of Israel inaugurated a Third Commonwealth. Established after the Nazi Holocaust, the State filled a need to give meaning to that disaster. which in retrospect seemed to be the birth pains that Jeremiah had prophesied would precede redemption. The State could not have been established, however, without the support of the Western world led by the British empire and then the United States, and it emerged just as the colonies of European empires were gaining their independence. Many of the participants in the colonies’ liberation struggles saw Israel not as the redemption of the Jews but as the displacement and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians by the West’s last colonial outpost.

Israel came to play a predominant role in Jewish identity, often substituting for the religion that early Zionists identified with the shame of exile. But there were always dissenters: some of the orthodox believed that exile had been decreed by God, who alone could end it. Substituting political efforts for the divine will was a form of idolatry. On the secular left some continued to argue that Jewish nationalism constituted not liberation, but the ultimate form of assimilation, as the Jewish state took on all the characteristics of other ethno-states, including their crimes.

Hannah Arendt offered a version of prophecy about the Third Commonwealth just as the state declared its independence. In her article, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” published in the May 1948 issue of Commentary magazine, she wrote that even if the Zionists in Palestine won the war that was then raging:

The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war. And all this would be the fate of a nation that—no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)—would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.

Under such circumstances the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.

Now that Israel has responded to the attack of October 7, 2023, with what a growing chorus of scholars, human rights organizations, and states have called a genocide, implemented in part through the enforced starvation of Gaza, there are many more such voices. The news site Zeteo has catalogued those who have called it a genocide: 10 U.S. politicians; 39 nations; 5 major human rights organizations, including the two main such organizations in Israel; and 12 of the most prominent scholars of genocide, at least half of whom are Jewish.

Increasingly denunciations of Israel resemble the voices of the prophets and rabbis speaking of the destruction of the first and second temples, with charges of idolatry — worship of the State and Land rather than respect for human life and baseless hatred and racism. It is not only respected scholars and writers like Omer Bartov, Raz Segal, Lee Mordechai; Amos Goldberg; Shmuel Lederman; and Naomi Klein; the voice of actor and singer Mandy Patinkin is now one of the “voices in the Tower of Song”:

To these old charges a new one has been added: desecration of God’s Name, from more than one source. Whether or not God exists, his Name exists as a powerful symbol of the source of justice; that Name can be defiled whether it designates an entity or a concept. Leonard Cohen again:

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
They're going to hear from me

Is a mighty judgment coming in the form of the self-destruction of the Third Commonwealth? Israel has elevated the fortress of Masada into a shrine and held up the Sicarii, who committed mass murder and then mass suicide, as models for emulation. It may be that the only difference is that the leaders of today’s Israel do not even realize that they are committing suicide. Shaul Magid even asks if we are witnessing the end not just of the state but of Jewish peoplehood.

Such a prospect would fill many Jews with terror. Who will protect us if not the State of Israel? The Avot de-Rabbi Natan recounts that Ben Zakkai’s student, Rabbi Joshua, mourning over the destruction of the second temple, asked, “What will now atone for the sins of Israel?” Ben Zakkai said, “We have another atonement, effective as this, And what is it? It is deeds of lovingkindness (gemilut hasadim), as it is said (Hosea 6:6), ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’”⁴

The state that was supposed to guarantee Jewish independence and safety depends more than ever on the arms, money, and political protection of a whimsical foreign power verging on fascism, the United States, and it has become the most dangerous place on earth to be a Jew. How can gemilut hasadim replace the State of Israel? What are gemilut hasadim but equality, justice, and mutual respect for all, whether in one state or two?