A Small Request - a Colossal Effect

The city of Jerusalem was under siege.  It was around the year 70 CE and the Romans wanted to control Israel from the river to the sea.  The prize was Jerusalem and the Holy Temple.  The sages and Torah leaders knew that all attempts at resistance were futile and would lead to total disaster.  They wanted to surrender to the Romans and save the people from the disaster that ended up happening.

There were young Jewish militants who knew better.  No way were they going to allow themselves to be controlled by a foreign power.  They would stand up and fight regardless of what the sages said.  In the interest of protecting the people from the Roman onslaught, they burned down the massive storehouses of grain, oil and firewood that three philanthropists had donated.  Now the supplies that could have fed the city for 21 years were gone, and there was a deep famine.

The great leader Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai knew that the end was near.  He had to get out of the city and speak to the Roman leader Vespasian, as cruel and vicious an anti-Semite that he was, at least to preserve the future of his people.  The militants, in the interests of protecting their interests, did not allow anyone living to leave the city.  Rabbi Yochanan feigned death and was carried out by his students in a coffin. 

The story of Rabbi Yochanan’s encounter with Vespasian is recounted in the Talmud.   The narrative is remarkable and moving.  Vespasian was, to put it mildly, impressed by the saintly Rabbi and his wisdom and prophecy, and promised to grant him any wish.  Rabbi Yochanan knew that the city and the Temple were doomed, so he made three “small” requests.  He asked that a doctor tend to Rabbi Tzadok, a sage who was sick from 40 years of fasting and prayer to try to avert the destruction of the Temple.  He requested that the family of Rabban Gamliel, the remnants of the House of David, be spared.  And he asked that the city of Yavneh and its scholars be spared.

Vespasian must have laughed at this request.  A small college town 12 miles away from the great city of Jerusalem, sure, who cares?  But it was that fateful request that ensured the continuity of the Jewish people.  Rabbi Yochanan understood then, and in hindsight we see how brilliant this was, that more than the land and the Temple, it is the Torah that keeps us alive.  The center of Torah study had moved from Jerusalem to Yavneh.  The people could no longer rely on the Temple to hold them together.  The daily offerings would be no more.  The great city of Jerusalem that was the gathering place for all Jews three times a year was about to be destroyed.  The Jews would not even have a country to define their nation and their culture.  No civilization has ever survived that.

Yet here we are.  2,000 years later on Tisha B’av we sit low to the ground and mourn the destruction of our Temple as if it happened yesterday.  We still put on Tefillin the way Moses did, light Shabbat candles the way Sarah did, and teach the same ethics that the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem taught thousands of years ago.  Because Judaism is not a culture or a location.  Judaism is not a history or a nostalgic past.  Judaism is a way of life that brings light into the darkness of the world through the observance of Mitzvot that binds us to the will of Hashem.  That is not limited to any particular location, it applies wherever we are and in all cultures and in all eras.  This was the wisdom of Rabbi Yochanan, and why his request was so central to the survival of the Jewish people.  

Nevertheless, observing Torah without the Temple and without our entire nation on our homeland is not the ideal.  We yearn constantly for that great day when our slogging through the long bitter years of exile will finally bear its fruits and we will see how each Mitzvah we observe has been refining the world and preparing it for revelation.

On Tisha B’av we mourn the destruction of two Temples and thousands of years of exile and all the bitter suffering we have endured through the generations.  But as our sages have taught us, the destruction has made way for the great, eternal third Temple, built by Hashem and therefore never to be destroyed.  When it is built we will see the value of all our hard work in exile, overcoming challenges and remaining faithful to our G-d and His Torah.  And we will celebrate this day as the greatest festival of the year.  There is still time for it to happen, today.