Jeremy Rosen
Why the Temple was Destroyed
Jeremy Rosen | Why the Temple was Destroyed | 07.06.21
Okay.
[Wendy] Hi, Jeremy. How are you?
Very well, thank you. All the better for seeing you.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Likewise.
Otherwise, everything all right at your end? You’ve gone dead.
So I have a… The internet today is being very, very tricky. It’s playing up, so I’m going to see if I can, can you hear me?
Yeah. Yeah. Hear you very clearly.
Okay. Okay, that’s great. Good. Very good. How’s New York?
It’s steamy, hot and humid, but otherwise at least it’s not raining. It was pelting with rain last week. So.
Okay. Predictable.
Yeah, and you know, people are slowly getting back into the rhythm of things.
Right.
Lovely fireworks with July the 4th, but that’s it.
Family.
I have lots of people saying, “You celebrate July the 4th? We beat you.” And I said, “Yes, you did indeed.”
Good answer.
But then I come back with the answer, “Ah yes, but if the British would’ve won, remember the British abolished slavery much earlier than you do, it would’ve saved you a lot of trouble.”
A lot of aggravation. Well, we have to learn the lessons ourselves, don’t we?
We do, indeed.
That’s life.
That’s right. Yeah. And I guess that’s also the theme of today’s lecture, actually, when you think about it.
Exactly. Exactly. So whenever you’re ready, I’m going to hand over to you.
Okay. I’m ready when you are.
[Wendy] Thanks. Okay. Welcome, everybody. And thanks, Jeremy, for joining us again. Always a pleasure.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, today I want to talk about the 9th of Av, historically. I want to look at it Talmudically, and I want to look at it in terms of relevance to us at this moment. I should preface also by saying I hope to make this more entertaining than heavily academic, but for those of you who are interested in the academic side, I would heartily recommend two books to you. One of them is by Martin Goodman called “Rome and Jerusalem.” It’s a excellent overview of the interaction between the two cultures, spends a lot of time, of course, on the destruction of Jerusalem. And the other one more popular is by, is called “Jerusalem: A Biography.” And you know, for this moment, my mind has gone blank, and I’ll remember it in a minute. Let me just quickly get to my bookshelf and remind myself of it. It’s by Simon Sebag Montefiore. That’s a sign of my advanced age.
The first destruction of the temple took place in 586 Before the Common Era. And it was the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and nominally by Nebuchadnezzar, but also by the head of his military Nebuzaradan. And there’d been a series of attacks on Jerusalem. And all this is recorded in great detail by the prophets, particularly Jeremiah, with his famous book of Lamentations, which adds on to the book of Jeremiah, which talks about the buildup and the history of how it got that way from the books of Kings and Chronicles. So well documented from a Jewish traditional point of view. And what is clear, absolutely clear from this documentation is that there were two features that caused the destruction of the First Temple.
The first one was poor politics. Israel was caught, or Judea rather, was caught between the Babylonians-Assyrian and Babylonians in the north and the Egyptians in the south. And their kings try to play a double game, play one off against the other, expecting one to support against the other and the other against the other, always making the wrong political decisions. And as a result of these wrong political decisions and backing the wrong horse, so to speak, they incurred the rough of the Babylonian authorities and the Babylonian regime. And they were warned often enough. And after the first exile of the earlier king, they were given a second chance and they blew that a second time. So Jehoiachin was the first exile, the final one was Zidkijah, Zedekiah, and the pain, the agony, the horror, the exile of the destruction is graphically described.
It makes horrific reading to us. And of course this is something that we read on the 9th of Av, on Tisha B'Av, which records that destruction. But Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av also records the second destruction. And the second destruction has some things in common with the first. In the first destruction, apart from the the political mess that the leadership made, there was a moral vacuum. If you look at the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, you see Amos, Hosea, all the minor and major prophets talk about how corrupt the state was. There was no concern for the poor and for the weak. People were taking advantage of everybody. People were making fortunes and hoarding it and keeping it to themselves. There were a small handful of people who kept the faith and kept the values going.
But whether it was the priesthood or the kingship, the aristocracy, it was a corrupt state. It was not living up to the standards that the Torah had expected and has said time and time again, if you want to have a Jewish state, you’ve got to have a good state, you’ve got to have a spiritual, fair, just state, not just another one, like all the others. The Second Temple was reconstructed, thanks to Cyrus of Persia to begin with, followed by Darius grandson to follow it up with various blocks on the way, various impediments. But finally the temple went up, the Greeks, Alexander the Great, as we’ve mentioned before, came and invaded, passed through. There was a good relationship with the Judeans in Jerusalem and with Alexander.
When Alexander died, his empire was divided up between the Syrian Greeks and the Egyptian Greeks. When the Syrians were in charge, we had this bad Antiochus attempt to get rid of Judaism, or at least to get it to assimilate and integrate. And then Antiochus gave way, actually several times to Ptolemy. And what was Judea came under the control of Rome. The control of Rome really, final stage, was under Pompey the Great, roundabout 50 years Before the Common Era. And the policy of the Romans was always, when we conquer a state, we want them to run it. We want their upper classes to take control, run it under our supervision and make sure that they are keeping the peace.
That was the main things the Romans wanted. As they expanded their empire, they only fought where their borders were being threatened. They only fought if they had to. They didn’t really want to, although they were quite a warlike nation. And the Jewish people, the Judean people at this moment are split. Most of them are still in Babylonia. And so they’re on the side of the Persians. A lot of them are Alexandria. And so they’re on the side of the Greeks and the Romans. And you have those in Jerusalem. At this moment, Jerusalem was also one of the major cities of the Roman Empire. And it was so important that constantly the Romans was sending sacrifices to Jerusalem and they were being accepted and people were coming from all around the world to this amazing place.
After Rome and Alexandria, it was probably the third city of the Roman Empire. And not only were Jews coming there, but for the festivals from all around the Roman Empire, but also Roman non-Jews and others were coming to see this amazing event. Pompey put in charge of the Judean Empire, the house of Antipater. There’d been the Hasmoneans, the Hasmoneans had been in charge. But after the great Hasmonean Queen Salome Shlomtzion, who was the best monarch the Jews ever had, in my humble opinion, in the Second Temple, I’m not talking about the First Temple. She made the mistake of handing over to her two sons and they fought with each other, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus II. And the Romans got so fed up with them fighting with each other that they decided, look, we’re going to put our man in charge, who’s going to rule with strength. And this was Antipater’s son, Herod.
And so Herod the Great was put in place by the Romans to run Judea. And for as long as he ran Judea, he ran Judea on the part of the Romans, efficiently, effectively, strongly. And at the same time, tried to get on with the Jewish nation religiously. He started rebuilding the temple, which needed renovations, and he built the most magnificent temple in Jerusalem. the remains of which we still see today on the outer wall. He managed to negotiate all the changes in the Roman Empire. When Octavius and Mark Anthony were fighting, he managed, he initially supported Mark Anthony, literally supported Cleopatra. And then he switched to Octavius and he managed to navigate the waters of Roman politics extremely well.
Unfortunately, when he died, neither of his sons were up to the task. Archelaus another Herod, they were unable to control the Jewish people in Judea. Why were they unable to control the Jewish people in Judea? Well, for two reasons. Reason number one was politically the Judeans were divided, roughly speaking between the Sadducees, the priests who were pro-Roman, the Pharisees, who were the rabbis and the popular leaders of the masses who were more inclined to be nationalist but were moderate. But to the right of them, you had a group of people known as the zealots. The zealots were, I don’t like to give extreme examples from one era to another, but rather like in Israel today, where you have those extreme nationalists who believe we’ve got to fight at all costs no matter what and are in a sense, provocative.
These zealots were anti-Roman on principle, they did not want to be part of the Roman Empire, and they didn’t want to make any compromise. And then the other group again mentioned before, the Dead Sea sects had withdrawn. They said, you’re fighting amongst yourselves, we want to have nothing to do with you. And they withdrew to the desert, to down by the Dead Sea. So for the first time, you had in Judea chaos, political chaos in Judea, and you had religious chaos in Judea. And you had those Judeans with money who were spending it outside of Judea as opposed to those who cared about the welfare of the Jewish community who were spending their money within Judea.
The Romans, therefore in this state, felt that Jerusalem on the eastern outpost of the Roman Empire was a vulnerable spot, and therefore they had to take control of it. They kept the family of Agrippa nominally in charge, but they decided to place their men as procurators or governors. The trouble was that no top Roman administrator wanted to be in Judea, and therefore the quality of the administrators that they sent to Judea were very, very poor quality men. And they were only interested in milking, in getting whatever they could out of their new position. They had no concern really for the welfare. Some of them did, some of them were ambivalent and ambiguous. But in general, their rule began to agitate the feelings of the natives of Judea and it began to incite rebellion.
There was one occasion, for example, when a Roman soldier appeared above one of the walls of the temple and bared his bottom. He was mooning and everybody went berserk. The procurator at that moment happened to be a moderate, and he intervened and stopped a riot. But normally whenever there was any insurrection, the procurators sent their army in and there were regular massacres. So the Romans were not at all concerned with the theological debates that were going on. They were only concerned with keeping the peace and keeping the peace for Rome. As things got worse and worse, they became more and more concerned at the state of Israel, of Judea. The Judeans rose in revolt against the procurators.
Initially, the Romans didn’t take it very serious. They appointed a second-rate general Gaius to come in with a small legion and try to take control of the situation. But he made several military mistakes and he was roundly defeated. Now the defeat of a Roman army, even a second rate one and the defeat of the procurator here in Judea and also the Governor of Assyria, led to a serious problem. And the Romans decided, we have at this moment to take control. This is a serious problem and there are rebels everywhere. Rebels in the south, rebels in the north, rebels all over. In Jerusalem, they were desperate to keep these rebels under control, but they failed. And officially there was an insurrection and different people were appointed to take care of the Jewish Armies.
One of the most famous was a man called Josephus. And Josephus was put in charge. He was one of the upper crust in Jerusalem of the armies in the Galilee. And it’s to Josephus that we have the only documentation of what happened over this period of time. He is not 100% reliable. He contradicts himself. Josephus abandoned the, when they were surrounded by the Roman Empire in the Galilee, he managed to escape. There’s a story that they decided, the few soldiers left decided to commit suicide. He was the last one. He didn’t commit suicide. And he went over to the Romans. He was imprisoned initially. The Romans then found him useful. He became an ally of Vespasian. I’m going to come to him in a minute.
And he ended up going to Rome where he was given a pension, given a house, became a Roman citizen and he wrote several books. One of them is the “Wars of the Jews,” which we rely on for this history. He also wrote a history of Jewish life from the beginning right through. And there’s a lot of controversy about him. But nevertheless, and, of course, he was not very popular with the Jewish survivors. But nevertheless, he is the man we go to for a lot of our information about what happened. And Josephus says, look, it became so clear to me that this war, this rebellion was unnecessary and was certainly not going to survive, that we have to, I have to get out of here and advise everybody else to. And he tried to, but of course he was pelted and he was booed.
So you’ve got now a situation where Rome is sending its main army, it’s army under Vespasian, one of the generals, in order to take control. And he gets round Jerusalem, he surrounds it. And the Jews are encamped in Jerusalem in their various military quarters. Others, of course, on outpost outside Herodian, Masada, and to the north. And here for the first time, we have a serious attempt to stop the rebellion by offering peace terms. Vespasian offers peace terms, and there’s a debate about whether these should be accepted or not. And in general, the Jews, not the moderates, the extremists are pushing everybody to resist. The zealots are not prepared to make any concession.
A wing of the zealots called the Sicarri go around murdering anybody who resists or who preaches against resistance. And as a result, there is no option but to proceed with the war. Normally, the aim of the war would be simply to conquer Jerusalem and defeat the rebels. But circumstances put a different twist on this, and this is coming directly from Martin Goodman, but there are other areas and other examples that we can draw on to back this up. There’d been a series of failed emperors after Nero. When Nero died, there was a battle between three different generals as to who was going to succeed. Each one tried, ruled for about a year, was deposed. Each army of the different armies of the Roman empire put another man in charge. And at this moment, Vespasian, who had been a nondescript, not very successful general suddenly decides, Hey, I could be the next emperor.
But to be the next emperor, I need to do something to show that I’m worthy of it. And so from a position where his job was only to suppress the rebellion, suddenly he realises if I can make a huge big victory out of this and lead a massive victory parade in Rome, this will certainly help my chances. And so he appointed his son, Titus, to pursue the campaign in Jerusalem, and he hurried back to Rome to try and plead his case to become the next emperor. So the battle was now carried on by Titus with instructions from his father. Pull the whole place to pieces, make sure this is massive, massive and serious. Which is why Titus pursued the war against the Jews in a way that no other rebellion, wherever, whether it was in the north in Germany, whether it was in North Africa, whether it was in Asia Minor, Mithridates, any of these others, was treated in such a devastating way.
Now, some people argue that this devastation was for religious reasons, but that doesn’t make sense because religion was never an issue, not at this stage. It became one later, but it wasn’t. The Greeks and the Romans were happy for people to pursue their own religion. And as we know, they sent sacrifices to the temple and would go and visit the temple. So it wasn’t a religious issue, it was a political issue, which also explains to a large extent what the Christian story was. Because if there was anybody who was a crucified or who was killed, it will have been for political reasons and certainly not for religious reasons at that particular moment. The war proceeded, the walls of Jerusalem were breached. And then there’s a debate about this as to who set fire to the temple. Some say it was the Romans and some say it was the Jews trying to keep the Romans out.
Either way, the temple was burnt to a cinder. A lot of the priests in it died in the fire. And they set about essentially massacring as many people as they could. According to Josephus, 110,000 people were actually killed in the campaign, most of the citizens of Jerusalem. And in addition, 97,000 were sent away as captives to become slaves in the brothels and in the circuses of Rome. It was a massive destruction. Still the battle carried on in Masada and other places, but that too ended very soon, a couple of years later, and there were other rebellions again after that. The destruction of Jerusalem, therefore, and the exile in a sense could be said to be almost accidental in the sense that it was Roman political issues that made this the battle that it was.
But also it is clear it was a failure on the part of the Judeans, on the part of the Judean aristocracy that the Romans would’ve been happy to take control of things, but simply couldn’t. And of the division within the Jews themselves politically of the sort we see in Israel today, very, very, very similar. So that is the historical background to the exile. The question then is what were the other sources we have? And for this next part, I’m going to turn to the Talmud and I’m going to go through a series of narratives that the Talmud tells us about the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.
To this day, we celebrate Tisha B'Av, the 9th day of Av, it’s a day of fasting. One of the things normally that you would expect orthodox rabbis to do would be to study Torah on the day. But there is an embargo of studying Torah on Tisha B'Av because studying Torah gives us pleasure and we shouldn’t derive any pleasure. However, there is one section of the Talmud in tractate Gittin from 56 onwards, which talks about specifically the destruction of the temple. And that’s the one part of the Talmud you’re allowed to study on the 9th day of Av on Tisha B'Av. And the story of the destruction of the temple begins with the famous narrative of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, again, I’ve mentioned this on a previous lecture.
And the story, no idea whether it’s true or not true, goes like this. There was a man in Jerusalem, a wealthy man, and he had a friend called Kamtza, but he hated a man called Bar Kamtza. One day he’s having a party and so he asks his secretary to go invite Kamtza. For some reason, his secretary goes and invites Bar Kamtza, we don’t know whether it’s intentional or accidental, trying to make peace. Bar Kamtza is sitting at the feast and Kamtza comes in and sees, no, no, no, no, the host comes in and he sees this man sitting there and he says, “What the hell are you doing here? Get out!” Bar Kamtza says, “Look, I’m sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding. I’m sorry, I’ll pay for my food.” “No,” he says, “Get out.” He says, “Look, I’ll pay for half of the meal.” “No,” he says, “Get out.” He says, “I’ll pay for the whole of the meal!” “No,” he says, and he threw him out.
Bar Kamtza turns around, he says, “Look, I was sitting there peacefully. There were all these rabbis sitting around there peacefully. Not one of them said anything. Not one of them did anything.” Why not? Probably because all their yeshivas had been getting money from this guy. And so they didn’t want to put their financial resources in danger, whatever it was, they didn’t say anything. If this is the quality of religious leadership, I’m getting out of here. Now one would’ve understood that at that stage. But unfortunately he then decides I’m going to take revenge. And so what he does is he goes along to the Romans and he says to the Romans, “The Jews have rebelled against you. They’re up in arms.”
According to Talmud, the Romans replied, “No, not true. We see they’re accepting our sacrifices all the time so they can’t be up in arms against us.” He says, “I’ll prove to you what they are. Just send them a sacrifice now and see if they will accept it.” So they said, “Okay, fair enough.” So they give him one of their best sheep and ask him to take it to the sacrifice. The guy, Bar Kamtza, makes a little blemish in the sheep. Now, for the temple all sacrifices had to be perfect. If there’s a blemish, you’re not allowed to sacrifice it. You use it for something else. He put a blemish in a place where the Romans wouldn’t notice it, but the Jews would. Some say it was in the mouth inside, some say it was in the eye, whatever it was, he made a blemish. So when this sheep comes to the temple, they’ve got to decide, are we going to sacrifice it or not? We can’t.
Some people said, “Look for the sake of peace, don’t start a rebellion, sacrifice it. Make an exception.” “Oh no,” said the rabbis. “We can’t make an exception. The law is the law. We have to do it the right way. You know, once you start giving in on one issue, who knows where it may end up. Might end up with mixed dancing or something. So you’ve got certainly not going to allow that.” “Okay,” they said, “Well then let’s kill Kamtza. What’s one life, Bar Kamtza, what’s one life compared to everybody else?” “No,” they said, I’m sorry, we can’t do that because according to Jewish law, you can’t put a man to death just because you think that one man’s life is dispensable. It’s not. We can’t agree to that.“ And so finally the rabbis decided we have to stand by and we cannot offer this sacrifice.” A man calls was the man who did it.
And the consequence says Talmud was that because this man was so reluctant to break the law, that was why Jerusalem was destroyed. Because what happened was as soon as the Romans heard this, they began to attack. And that was the beginning of the end. The Gemara then goes on to say something else. It goes on to say that in Jerusalem at this particular time, there was the leader of the zealots, a man called Abba Sikra, who actually was the brother-in-law of the head of the moderate rabbis, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai. Johanan ben Zakkai was a moderate. And he called in Abba Sikra, who was in charge of the extremists. There was another one called Gugoria, but won’t mention him at this moment.
And he said, “Look,” he says, “You’re destroying us. Let us make peace, otherwise everybody’s going to die. And Abba Sikra said, "Well, I’m sorry my party won’t let me. I’ve got to do what the party says. They’re holding me hostage.” So he said, “Okay, look, if you can’t let me at least go out and approach the Romans and see if I can make peace in some way.” He says, “I can’t let you do that. The zealots won’t let me because once they see you go out, they’ll see you’re betraying us and you’ll be tell everybody where our strengths and our weaknesses are. We can’t allow you to do that.” He said, “Look, however, you’re my kind of relative, I’m close to you. Find a way and I’ll tell you what you do. Pretend you are dead. Pretend you are dead. Put something under you that smells. Let all your followers come in to mourn your death and then I’ll be able to smuggle you out of the city.”
And that’s what he did. And as they got to the gates, the zealot said, “Listen, we better stick a dagger into this to make sure the guy’s really dead, ‘cause how do you know you’re not smuggling a live guy out?” And they said, “Look, if the Romans see that you are prepared to stab at the of the body of the greatest rabbi of the generation, they will know that you’re morally bankrupt, that you fear you’re never going to get anywhere.” “All right,” they said, “Let’s shove it again. Shove it just to see if it falls over or not.” “No, no,” they said, you know, “You can’t do this.” And in the end, they let the body go out.
Johanan ben Zakkai went out and he went as the story says actually to Vespasian, except that Vespasian at this moment has already gone back to Rome. But the story goes like this, that when he got to Vespasian, he said to Vespasian, “My Emperor, you’re going to be the emperor. I want you to help me deal with this situation that I have.” The emperor was very impressed by this 'cause he wasn’t emperor yet. Vespasian hadn’t gone home. But the fact that he had predicted it apparently helped Vespasian.
And Vespasian says, “Okay, you’re a good man. I can see that. What can I do?” And he said, “Look, I know that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, but I don’t want it to be the end of the Jewish people or the people of Israel. So I want you to allow me to escape and set up a centre of Jewish life in Yavne down by the coast. "I despair, I can’t change these fanatics in the city. I want to go. And it happens, I also would like some expert medical advice from your top surgeons 'cause I’ve got some major important rabbis who’ve been sick during this long siege and suffering.”
And that is what happened. He escaped and he was able to set up this centre in Yavne. The Talmus is ambiguous about it, particularly Rabbi Akiva who was in fact on the zealot side, he was very keen with fighting the Romans. He ended up supporting Bar Kochba in the next rebellion against the Romans. He said, “What went wrong with his mind? Why did he not ask for the city?” And there’s a nice little page in which, a narrative, in which Vespasian is asked, “Why did you have to destroy the city? Can’t you let the city off? Can’t you find some other way of dealing with this?” And to which he replied, “The straight answer is this, if you’ve got a piece of pottery and round the pottery you’ve got this poisonous snake and you want to get rid of the poisonous snake, you might have to smash the pot.”
Rabbi Akiva said that was a bad argument. The argument should have been, you could find another way of removing the snake. So you can see that there was disagreement politically all the time about this issue of peace or not peace. But either way, whichever way it went, the Talmud is full of stories as to why Jerusalem was destroyed. And the Talmud never once mentions the political side. It only mentions the fact that in Jerusalem there were bad people, there were wicked people. That Jerusalem was destroyed through unnecessary hatred, of arrogance, of an inability to think of the welfare of the majority and to think only of the welfare of the few. To say, I am right and you are wrong, and to refuse any kind of negotiation.
This is how the Talmud understands it. So it’s not to the Talmud that we would go for historical record, but it is to the Talmud we will go to get some idea of how the rabbis and the Jews at the time understood this massive controversy and this catastrophe that broke down the Second Temple. And which for 2,000 years we had to manage without. And Lord knows how many years it’s going to be before or if there’ll be a third temple. But meanwhile we do have a land of our own. And therefore one of the big questions we are bound to ask nowadays is why do we still need to go on fasting? Not only that, but there are also some minor fasts.
There’s the Fast of Gedaliah that we fast, which is in September after Rosh Hashanah, which records during the First Temple, the fact that those few Jews that the Babylonians left behind to make sure things were not falling apart, were put in the charge of Gedaliah. Gedaliah was assassinated by another rival, Ishmael. And as a result the Jews fled down to Egypt. And so for the first time, and probably the only time there were no Jews in the land of Israel, which is why the Fast of Gedaliah is considered so significant. And then there’s Asara B'Tevet in the wintertime, Asara B'Tevet when the siege begins on Jerusalem. And there was a chance, possibly, still to avoid the catastrophe.
And then the 17th of Tammuz, a couple of two weeks ago when we marked the breach of the wall of Jerusalem, so Jerusalem is beginning to fall down. And then the 9th of Av when the temple was destroyed. And that was the end of everything. And after that, as the story goes, they just razed Jerusalem to the ground. Later on, another Roman emperor is said to have sown it with salt so that nothing would ever be put there again. But the arguments range in two different levels. There’s an argument in favour of scrapping these minor fasts. And after all, in the book of Zechariah, Zechariah is a prophet who lived after the First Temple. He said that the time is going to come in the future when these fasts will be turned into occasions of joy, they’ll be occasions of joy and happiness. And the Talmud then goes on to discuss, well if that’s so, why do we still have all these mini fasts?
Talmud asked that soon after the temple. And the Talmud replies because there are two important factors here. There is what is called shamad and that’s what’s called shalom, peace or destruction. And for as long as one of them is still going on, the world is still not at peace or there is still destruction, we have to carry on with these fasts. But we will concede that the minor fasts are not as important as Tisha B'Av. So the minor fasts start early in the morning on the same day and end in the evening. Whereas Tisha B'Av, the main fast, starts the evening before like Yom Kippur and runs through until it gets dark, which makes it because of the time of the year, the longest fast and the most serious of all the fasts. Different communities have had different customs.
The Ashkenazi communities kept three weeks of mourning from Shivah Asar B'Tammuz the 17th of Tummaz to Tisha B'Av. Even though in the Talmud it only says the week of Tisha B'Av. The Sephardic communities tended not to celebrate the three weeks, but they did tend to think in terms of what we call the nine days, nine days before from the new month of Av, before the 9th of Av. But there are these different, but everybody within the world, within the Jewish world still accepts Tisha B'Av but accepts it in different degrees and different levels. Now this has become a major issue nowadays because having a state of our own as we do, maybe the whole question of mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of Judea is no longer relevant.
We should recognise now that with the state times have changed and there’s no question that they have. We’ve never been in such a better position ever since the destruction of the Second Temple. And yet the argument goes, nevertheless, we are still at war. There is no shalom, we don’t have it yet. We have to defend ourselves. We are are still under threat. Threat not only from the enemies who want to destroy us militarily, but from antisemitism and hatred. And so there might not be in that sense, we might not be as bad as we’ve been some other times when we, times of the crusades, under certain times of Muslim emperors and others, under different oppressors.
But, nevertheless, we don’t have peace and we are still under threat and therefore we should keep this going. And this is certainly the universal opinion of the vast majority of observant Jews, that the 9th of Av should be recorded and should be recorded partially because of external circumstances and partially because of the fact that we are still divided amongst ourselves. The Sinat Hinam, unnecessary hatred, that we experienced that led to the destruction of the First and Second Temple, the amount of corruption that led to this, the First and Second Temple, even in our own state today, the amount of crime, the amount of social problems, all these issues still remain issues. And these are not so much religious issues as they are, if you like, social issues.
So whereas Yom Kippur is entirely a matter of spiritual fasting, Tisha B'Av is a matter of what we would call civil fasting. And we also have this issue, very important issue, the issue of the Holocaust and where does the Holocaust fit in to this? And as you know, when it comes to the Holocaust, there are different opinions because in fact there are different Holocaust memorial days. The United Nations has decided that January the 27th is the Holocaust Memorial Day, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz. Israel has decided that, the Knesset has decided the 27th of Nissan, April May, is Holocaust Day in Israel.
The Chief Rabbinate of Israel decided that the 10th day of Tevet, that is the non-Haredi Rabbinate in its day, decided the 10th of Tevet when there’s a fast for the beginning of the destruction of Jerusalem should be the Holocaust Memorial Day. And there are very orthodox rabbis and very non-orthodox rabbis who say, let’s make the 9th of Av the Holocaust Day. Because just as the 9th of Av has absorbed within it all the earlier catastrophes of the First Temple, all the destruction of Jerusalem, destruction of Beitar, of Jewish holdouts, other situations, we roll 'em all into one instead of adding another religious day, let’s roll everything into one. And there are many people within the Orthodox world who adhere to this, but sadly Israel and Judaism being what it is, instead of people being able to say, you know what? Let’s compromise. Let’s try to work together. Let’s try and find a solution.
The ultra, ultra Orthodox don’t want to compromise either with the Rabbinate or indeed with the Knesset and don’t want to adopt their days. And that’s why you will find within the Orthodox world, people not adhering to either of those days, any of them. Some of them don’t even want to stand in silence when we record the deaths of those who fought and died to save the state. This is part of this ideological battle that goes on that still divides us, which is very sad. But there is still another way of looking at it. And the other way of looking at it is this, when you speak to a lot of Haride people, they will say, you know, we think of the Holocaust every single day in our prayers. Everything we do, having lots of children, studying Torah is predicated on not giving Hitler a posthumous victory, of keeping Judaism alive to avenge the Holocaust.
So absolutely everything we do, every time we have a festival, every time we call somebody up from the Torah, in our prayers on Shabbat, we remember the martyrs, we remember the Holocaust. So don’t just because there’s a special day that we don’t adhere to this special day say that we’re useless and we’re wrong and we’re ignoring the Holocaust. We’re not. And I have some sympathy with this. Not all, some sympathy, because as we’ve seen for all the Holocaust days, memorial days around the world that we have today in all those countries, not in the Muslim world of course, but in all those Western and other countries, we have all these Holocaust days.
Is it stopping people wanting to say, “Oh no, let’s not make it for the Jews, let’s make it for everybody and everybody else.” And I’m not against having it for all the genocides that go on elsewhere except they seem to pick on the Jews alone and accuse the Jews of genocide, don’t seem to bother too much about the others. So the Holocaust Day as it’s celebrated, in fact, is a bit of a farce in most places. It’s just paying lip service. The United Nations normally does that. But you know what happens in the United Nations, they’re still calling for the destruction of Jerusalem and Israel and they don’t say anything about it.
So you know, although I think it is important to have these memorials and I’m not opposed to having memorial days, I’m under no illusion that that is reducing the hatred of Judaism or that it is actually saying in practise, not in theory, it will never happen again. I have no doubt if there was the horrific prospect of Israel being overrun and put to death, I do not believe that people will be prepared from the outside to come in and stop it happening. I just don’t believe it. I hope I’m wrong, please God, I am. But please God, it’ll never come to that because we’ll take care of our own situation. And so for all these reasons, I do make Tisha B'Av an important day in which I do think about the Holocaust, in which I do think about what happened and how we can prevent it. And which is why I do think that for all that I’m against fasting and I don’t like fasting and there are lots of other fasts as well.
Nevertheless, I do think that there is an argument to be said that definitely we keep Tisha B'Av and even on the other fasts, maybe go without breakfast, maybe go without lunch, or maybe just drink and don’t eat. But being aware, zacar, to remember is part of our tradition. So there I’ve got that off my chest.
Q&A and Comments
We’ll now go on to questions and start with what we have on my list. We can have other ones like the reference to the almonds branch that takes 21 days to change from flower to almonds 21 days of Tammuz to the 9th of Av. Yes, there are lots and lots of different reasons that are given for fasting, that are given for each day. For example, 17th of Tammuz is also the day when The Ten Commandments were broken, when a guy called Apostomus managed to burn a sacred Torah, when all kinds of, each one of them, if you look in the the sources, there are thousands of different reasons given for each fast, which only go to reinforce the idea that you roll from one previous event onto another.
Q: Lawrence Kelvin, I understand there are wishes, prayers for the temple to be rebuilt. If this ever comes about would there be reintroduction of animal sacrifice and polygamy and keeping slaves? A: Lawrence, good question. Not a cat’s chance. Look, the prayers for rebuilding the temple are prayers that are seeking to achieve the highest possible level of spirituality that’s important to achieve. And the temple in a sense, rebuilding the temple represents this. It’s a goal for the future. And most people realise that it is not at all practical and therefore they mutate this idea of rebuilding the temple into the idea of a messiah, a wonderful era unlike any other will come about when the temple will be rebuilt.
And then they ask in the Talmud, well how do we know what we’re going to do? And the Talmud says, “Don’t worry, Elijah will come and he will tell you what to do before it comes.” We might not have sacrifices, we might only have vegetarian sacrifices, we might have nothing at all. We don’t know. And this is in the Talmud that Elijah will tell us what to do. So nobody believes that we will go back to an earlier position as it actually was in this physical world we live in now. Maybe in some other world in the future it’s a possibility, but even so, I can’t see animal sacrifices coming back. I can’t see polygamy or keeping slaves coming back because we’d all accept the law of the land is the law. This is a principle in Jewish law. And so if the law of the land is the law, then there’s no way we are going to allow breaking the universal law of the lands wherever we are.
And apart from the fact that, to be perfectly honest, we are so divided that, A, I can’t see any Orthodox Jews agreeing as to who would be the priests in the temple. I can’t see one Hasidic group agreeing to allow the other Hasidic group to be the only guys in the temple. I can’t see the Jews agreeing on who the architect’s going to be or who the contractors are going to be. So this is such a, shall we say, an unrealistic metaphorical symbolical concept that I don’t think you have anything to worry about it turning up in this future. What will happen at some later date? Maybe it’s possible that there will be an atomic explosion which will knock us back into history and back into primitivism and we will want to sacrifice animals again. Who knows? But I’m not betting on it and I’m not worrying about it.
Q: What was the population of the previous kingdom of Israel? A: Well, that’s a very good question. When we look at the figures given for the first kingdom of Judea, we’re talking about casualties that range in the 10,000s, the 20,000s. But some say that there were 940,000 Jews living in Jerusalem at that time. I think that’s very unlikely. I think it’s more likely to think of a figure somewhere in the hundreds of thousands when they were sent into exile in Babylon. But we don’t know. We have the figures for Rome and Jerusalem, which Josephus has given us, which would give a population of something in the region of 2 million. And there are some people who say that at the time when the Roman Empire was, in Roman Empire of 100 million, Jews were 10 million. And people dispute this, but there’s a very serious argument that says they were 10 million. Now if they were 10 million, then the question is why today are we barely above that? There’s only one simple answer, two simple answers. One of them is so many of us assimilated, but the other is so many of us were killed. Over thousands of years, we were killed off at a massive rate all around the world.
So, Romaine, doesn’t seem there’s much spiritual, religious going on.
Q: Were the rabbis doing with this power struggle? A: Well, yes, there was. Meanwhile, the rabbis were trying to hold the middle ground. They were trying to keep moderate balanced religion, which was aimed at dealing with popular problems, the problems of the ordinary person, that was flexible, they were inventive and creative. They did things that no rabbis nowadays seem to have the guts to do. They made new laws, they modified new laws, they were very much concerned and they were very, very spiritual. There was also within them a very powerful mystical group. And at the same time you had other mystics going down to the Red Sea, all over the place. So it was the most fertile religious, halachic, mystical, spiritual period. The problem was the bloody politicians, that was the problem.
Q: Now, John Winlow, given we believe God revealed himself to the Jews and brought them out of the land through Moses and made a covenant with the Israelites, complete with T’s and C’s, what are your thoughts as to why God sent the prophets to warn the people that judgement was coming? A: Well, because the Torah was given, the covenant was given to human beings. And as we see from the very beginning, human beings, regardless of what miracles went on, regardless of what Moses did, are very, very changeable, superstitious, worship all kinds of different gods and go off the tracks all the time. The whole of the Bible is a record of people going off the tracks, of people misbehaving, of corruption. And I have to say, here we are thousands of years later and that’s still true of so much of the universe in which we are in.
So the fact that there is a covenant that God revealed himself and said, “Guys, look, I’d like you to behave this way,” that’s very nice. But we haven’t, and you know, this is a subject I’m going to come back to because in a couple of weeks time I’m going to talk about the whole concept of the Chosen People and what that means and that’s going to bring back this sort of subject.
Okay, Susan, and the Second Temple was built of stone, must have been difficult to burn to the ground. Answer is the superstructure was built out of stone. But there were wooden beams, there was wooden lining, there was wooden panels, there was a lot, a lot of wood, cedars of Lebanon, the roofs and everything like that. So the superstructure was stone. But there are plenty of stone buildings that do burn because of what’s inside.
Jonna and Alfred, why not mention chronology of Gittin is at least two centuries after destruction as contrasted with Joseph’s synoptic. Yes, that’s quite true. That’s precisely what I said, that the Josephus is the only contemporary historical record. The rabbis look back and they look back and say, “What are the lessons we can learn from this?” And so what they put into the Talmud is the lessons they want to learn. And that’s why they do get some of their characters mixed up. Was this Vespasian Caesar? Was he not? Was Titus the Caesar? Was he not? And that happens right through, for example, round about the first century, Rabbi Jonathan ben Uzziel the head of the Jewish community in Israel has, according to the Talmud, we know he went on diplomatic missions to Rome. But he had lots of discussions with a man called Antoninus. And he was supposed to be the Roman emperor.
Who was Antoninus. We don’t know because Antoninus was quite a common name amongst other emperors. Some people said it was Marcus Aurelius. People have a whole list of who they were. So you don’t go to the Torah, in my humble opinion, for accurate historicity because anyway, we are constantly changing what we know historically and the facts and the details. And we know even the Roman historians were not reliable, can’t rely on them. So yes, the Talmud is not looking at this from a historical point of view as much as from what are the spiritual moral lessons we learn from this. Let me go onto the next one. Why can’t I go down to the next one? Ah, here we’re, yes.
What about the Fast of Esther, that’s interesting. Fast of Esther is a fast, but it’s not mentioned as one of the major or minor fasts. It’s does not appear to have been a fast until much, much later. And again, I suggest it was introduced as a fast, largely at a time when there was tremendous oppression of Jews. They wanted to add fast as indeed Jewish law allows. And in fact throughout Europe there were hundreds, almost hundreds, lots of different Holocaust days, fast days that were made for different cities, different towns that were destroyed. So it was common whenever anything happened, you remembered it with a fast. Nowadays most of those we don’t adhere to, although some do. There’s a fast after every festival, every Monday and Thursday because maybe we had too much to eat. So there are fast for dreams, bad dreams, but these don’t have the authority of the ones we’ve been talking about.
So the Talmud started to be compiled 200 years after the destruction of the temple. Where did the rabbis get their facts from to ignore historical novel and justify . Well first of all, there were rabbis alive at the time of the temple. There were certainly rabbis alive and recording it. And there was Johanan ben Zakkai who went from the temple in Jerusalem in order to set up the centre in Yavne. And from Yavne they moved north. There were lots of other documents that we have lost. There were documents that come under the rubric of the Maccabees, not the first two, but other ones that are supposed to record this.
There were lots of other records from other different places and as I say, there were rabbis at the time in Babylonia, there were rabbis at the time in Alexandria, there was a big Jewish community with rabbis in Rome. So there were plenty of rabbis around at the time. They selected what to go into the Talmud to make the points they wanted to make. That doesn’t mean to say everything in it was wrong. On the contrary, it’s clear from Josephus that the fighting was terrible, infighting all the time, everybody. So everything they said was dead right.
Q: How many Jews remained in Judea and Samaria after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, were the expelled, sent to Rome, were some sent to Alexandria? A: Jews did remain. They remained down on the coastal plain, they remained in Galilee in the north. There were Jewish centres in Tzipori and Sepphoris near Sepharad, in Tiberius, there was always a Jewish community right up at the north of Peki'in, it is estimated there were thousands of Jews still living in Israel after the destruction, people hiding in caves, people going abroad, you can go out to the country, it’s easy enough to walk across the River Jordan to get away from it if you don’t want it and then come back again afterwards.
So there were lots of Jews living there, but the vast majority were taken out and were either, as I say, sent into slavery and where they will have disappeared, either killed in the, by the gladiators or raped to death by their masters or destroyed and everything like that and scattered all around the empire. And many of them, of course, will have wanted to disappear. And then there of course there were Christians, there were Christian Jews at that time. They weren’t that separated, that separation didn’t come until much later. They were also there and and a lot of them also moved out and went to live to the north in Syria while the fighting was going on and came back afterwards.
Thank you very much, Carla. That’s really sweet of you. Let’s go on to the next one. David Sefton.
Q: Do you think rabbis didn’t mention destruction of the temple in the Talmud because they were in the midst of public relations campaign and they didn’t want to turn off those Jews who were not sure they wanted to follow rabbis? A: They mentioned it all of the time. They mentioned the destruction all the time. They did, throughout the Talmud, throughout the Mishnah. It is the most important recurring single phenomenon feature of the Talmud. Every day we remember it. They even, that’s one of the reasons why they carried on talking about priests in order to remember the temple. That’s why we have priests today still to remember the temple. So they certainly mentioned the destruction of the temple. They didn’t go into great details of how many were killed and many of the narratives leave out other factors that we now have more historical evidence about. I don’t think they wanted to turn off Jews. I think that what happened is one of the reasons why Christianity grew was because a lot of Jews said we want some of the good things of Judaism, but we want to detach ourselves from the infighting that was going on. I think that was a feature.
Q: I’ve heard meat is not meant to be eaten in the week of Av, is this true? And why? A: Yes, that is true. There are those who keep the three weeks, don’t eat meat for three weeks, right through to Tisha B'Av. They don’t drink wine, they don’t buy new clothes. Some people don’t do any business during that period because they think it’s a bad time to do business. But the Talmud really talks about this from in the month of Av, not in the three weeks. Some people have this custom of not eating meat and drinking wine in the nine days. So yes, and this is because these are signs of luxury and we want, when we are suffering, we want to suffer with those people who suffered and therefore we reduce our joy. And so you have the famous statement, when the month of Adar starts, We start enjoying ourselves 'cause that’s the month of Purim and we start enjoying ourself beforehand. We don’t wait to Purim. We start enjoying because joy is joy. But on the other hand, when Av begins, comes in, we start increasing pain and mourning because we lead up to it. This is all to do, if you like, with how we regard time. Do we regard time as just being encapsulated in one day or can we regard time as spilling over both previously and after? It’s a different way of looking at time in a mystical way.
Very good point. Includes the Holocaust. There’s only one Holocaust aimed at destruction of the Jewish people. Well, that’s what there should be. And I agree with you.
Danny Walston, the Arabs often maintained that they were ones escaped from the Jews in ancient Israel who remained in Palestine after the Romans left, and that it was their own policy to exile nations from their land. Whereas Jews say most of the Jews of ancient Israel were indeed expelled from the land or exiled or enslaved by the Romans and this spurred, eventually, Jewish communities all over the world and Middle East. Look, there were other people living in Judea at that time. There were people like the Nabateans, there weren’t Canaanites anymore, of course, but there were other people, there were people in the Greek Empire. There were lots of Greeks, lots of Greek cities at the time. And sometimes there was competition between the Greeks and the Judeans. And therefore it’s possible that these might be descendants from the Greek locals living in that area.
Initially, Pompey called it Judea, then afterwards Vespasian changed it to, I think it was Vespasian who changed it to Palestinia. So there were people living there all the time. But the point is that just as you can say that the Jews left or moved out, so you can say there were constant invasions and conquests long before Islam coming in and out of that area and people were moving. And many of the people who count as Palestinians today moved there during the Ottoman Empire when there was employment and they moved from the north and they moved from the south. People were constantly moving in and out. But what is clear is that, genetically, it is clear that Jews came from that part of the world.
And don’t forget all those Jews who went to, were living in Babylon and in Persia and all these other places, and their genes show where they came from and they came from that part of the world. So to try to make any political mileage out of where the Jews went to and where they were slaved and where they were not enslaved and how not, the record shows that the Jewish traditions roots are in that part of the world and have been for thousands of years. And therefore, if anywhere is going to be a state for Jews, it would have to be in a place where they have roots. And nobody could argue that they don’t have roots. We can argue the others have roots too, and they should have a state too. And I’m all in favour of that if they could only agree to it.
Q: Where did Jesus fit into this? A: Well, Jesus is another story. First of all, as you know, I think sort of the person who is called Jesus is a creation of Paul drawn on earlier characters and he turned this character into the figure that we have of Jesus today. As I mentioned the Romans problems with not, would not have been, they wouldn’t have killed the Jesus Christ of the New Testament for religious reasons. The Sadducees wouldn’t have want to put him on trial for heresy because there’s nothing heretical in saying, “I’m the son of God.” If he did that, we don’t know if he said that. The only reason a man would’ve been crucified, which was a Roman death, would’ve been for political reasons. There were hundreds of preachers and teachers going round at that time who were fed up with the situation in Judea who did want peace and preached peace. Hundreds and hundreds of them, lots of them, as were in the Dead Sea sects. So they weren’t all put to death. The people who were put to death were political rebels.
Growing up, Mum lentils the night before 9th of Av to start the fast, delicious brown lentil soup. That’s interesting. Lentils do have a special place as do eggs in mourning because they are round and they symbolise the cycle of life that might be up one moment, down the next. There’s birth and death, but death leads to birth and that’s the symbolism of it.
Mike Dahan, can we tell if he was having dementia, knowing he could be executed by teaching the Torah, forecasting 6,000 coming Messiah. We knew we know in general Messiah knowing, look, if you want to accuse him of suffering dementia, accuse all the Christians of suffering dementia. They also believe in a messiah coming. So you know, that can’t be grounds for dementia. It might be for political miscalculation and similarly forecasting of years. These forecasts are not that we don’t even know what calendar they use. We don’t even know what numeral system they use. And as the Talmud says, don’t waste your time trying to make these calculations when temples will or will not be built. Now let’s go down to, thank you, Romaine.
Q: Would you touch on some of the Kinot we’re citing on Tisha B'av? A: Well, on Tisha B'Av the custom, of course, is to read primarily the book of Lamentations. We sit on the floor, in many companies, synagogues, we light candles and we don’t wear shoes. I forgot to mention that before in the custom we had, and we sit on the floor of mourning and we read the book of Lamentations. That is a universal custom. The Kinot, which is literally these dirges and these poems of mourning emerge in mediaeval times. There were different ones in the Ashkenazi world, different ones in the Sephardi world. In those days, they were composed by, in a particular style, which strung together quotations one after another and which made up poetries drawing on these earlier biblical and post-biblical Talmudic sources to string together what were really, in a sense, academic exercises and ways of keeping people busy when they couldn’t study and letting, enabling time to pass.
It’s also because very often they wanted to keep people in the synagogue and they wanted to keep people in the synagogue 'cause they were living in mediaeval hovels, which were overcrowded, unpleasant, ghastly places. And the synagogues were often the only open spaces where people could gather. And instead of them talking all the time, they wanted to have them reading or learning something or improving their command of the Hebrew text. And that’s where the Kinot came. When you look at the translations, it’s very subjective. There are translations, there are Artscroll and other translations of them. And you know, you choose anyway, I believe strongly, choosing poetry is so subjective. You choose what works for you.
Q: Is this when women determined the religion? A: Well, I don’t think women ever determined the religion. I think it’s certainly a time when the rabbis took much more, took the role of women more seriously. Still haven’t taken it seriously enough. But that’s a different matter. Women determined the religion of the Jews because of the womb in a sense. And males determined the tribe you belong to. And that dual system has existed since Bible times.
Jewish captives take to Rome built the coliseum, find site of the temple vessels. Yes, that’s quite true. They did. They’re recorded as building the, they were taken into slavery. That’s what slaves did. Very interesting. Thank you, Adele.
Q: Early Christians, did early Christians mourn the temple of, hold on, the destruction of the temple? A: Yes, I gather they did. I gather their sources. I can’t recall them to mind, but I think there was definitely in the early Christian before the complete break. The complete break that happened, ultimately, of course with Constantine in the third century when he made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. But before that, there were many Jewish Christian churches and they did mourn the destruction of the temple.
Q: If the events of the destruction of the temple were not religious but political in nature, when did the persecuted Jews become religious in nature? A: Well, the persecution of Jews religiously began with the, in one sense, you could say it began with Haman in Persia, but that wasn’t persecution. It was a failed attempt. But there was constant rivalry between the Greeks and the Jews, particularly in Alexandria where there was rivalry commercially. And there was constant battle between the two. But the first real persecution came with Bishop Cyril of Alexandria in the second century. He began persecuting Jews because they were the enemy of Christ. And then once Constantine made that the religion of the Roman Empire, that’s when it really began to start and get worse and worse and lead to the horrific history of persecution that we know of today.
Q: Does it not seem as much spiritual, religious going on? A: Yes, there was tremendous amount, tremendous amount. It was the most, probably, the most productive, spiritual, religious time of the Jewish people. This was a political issue fundamentally. And remember there was a lot going on in Babylon, a lot going on in Alexandria too and in Rome.
Given that we believe God revealed himself to the Jews and brought them out of Egypt and made a covenant with the Israelites completing what are your thoughts about God sending the prophets to warn the people that the judgement was coming and we’ve dealt with that already.
We’re now going back to earlier ones again. So, I think, unless I’m wrong, there aren’t any other questions. If I missed anything, let me just see once more. We do the Kinots, Colin. Ronnie Tagger did the early Christians. Yes. Robbie Seeger, I understand. Adrian Banks. Let me just try and see if there are any other questions that I’ve missed. I’ve missed. The Kinots. Mike Dean, Mike Dean, Colin, Adele. The recorded fragments of history and thanks. The Romans targeted, did the early Christians mourn? Yes, I’ve dealt with that one. were not religiously but when did the persecutions, all right.
Ellie Strauss, addition to my knowledge of the Second Temple, heard scientifically why the stone temple burnt, too long to explain here, but they had a lot of wood stored. They did because they had to keep the fires burning to make the sacrifices all the time on the temple. So we certainly had a lot of storing.
Press the temple to be rebuilt. Oh no. Now we’re going back on the same thing. Population. Ali. Ali, thank you, John. Adrian, thank you.
[Host] And Jeremy?
Yeah?
Wendy had to run to a meeting, so if you could just wrap up then I think that’ll be it for today. Thank you.
Okay, lovely. Thank you very much. So goodbye, everybody. I don’t know what to wish you. Shouldn’t wish you a happy fast. That’s not what I want to do. But anyway, I’ll see you again in two weeks time when I’m changing the subject to talk about the Chosen People. Bye, everybody.