Temples destroyed / Opinions from the Jerusalem Post
July 29, 2004
It has
been 1,934 years since Rome's legions set fire to Jerusalem's Temple, and sent
the Jewish people into centuries of wanderings, humiliation, and bleeding.
Why this calamity happened, and how it could have been avoided, remains
debatable. The Sages assumed the Temple was lost due to divine action, which
stemmed in turn from the Jews' loss of respect for God, and for each other.
Historians focus on the Jews' lack of social cohesion and political realism.
We have no sagelike pretensions. But it is important to think carefully and
responsibly about Jewish action, then and now.
First, let there be no doubt about what happened two millennia ago. The Jews,
faced with the Roman Empire's advance eastward, initially tolerated it, but
ultimately tried to resist it, and failed. In challenging the Romans, the Jews
generally failed to enlist the Jews of the Diaspora, who already comprised the
majority of the nation.
The Jews of Judea themselves were also far from united about the cause, which
many, particularly among the elite, opposed. Some, like Galilee commander
Josephus Flavius, defected, and ended up resented by subsequent generations.
Others, most notably Rabbi Yohanan Ben-Zakai, left the cause at later stages,
when they soberly figured it was lost. They were later instrumental in preparing
the Jews for a future of religious observance without political sovereignty.
Still, the bottom line of the war was that Judea blundered fatally: first, by
picking a fight with an enemy it could not possibly defeat; second, by failing
to muster the kind of solidarity that is indispensable for any national victory.
The fact that Jerusalem's zealots and moderates were fighting each other even
while they were being besieged by the Romans is mind-boggling. Judea had become
awash with a kind of messianic zeal that made many ignore the military balance
of power that was so obviously against them. During the Roman siege the Sicarii
zealots knifed moderates and torched strategic food stocks that could have saved
lives in the besieged city.
In recent years, Israel has been threatened by two kinds of zealotry. There was
the messianic zealotry of Oslo, which held not only that a new and wondrous
dispensation was at hand, but that the prudent reservations of half the country
could be dismissed and indeed scorned as so much reactionary guff. More
recently, we have seen another brand of zealots, who seek to impose their vision
on a country that is in many ways ambivalent about (and often hostile to) the
Greater Israel project. Reports – hopefully baseless – about present-day
fanatics seeking to attack our elected leaders in order to stop the move toward
disengagement bring to mind our forefathers' self-destructive excesses.
Lurking behind all this is all too often a mentality that insists on blurring
the lines between religious and national idealism, and the actual wishes of the
people and their elected leaders. It is a mentality that characterizes
fundamentalists like former convict and Jewish underground activist Yehuda
Etzion, who this week openly called for the removal of the mosques from the
Temple Mount.
By contrast, the way Isaiah the prophet saw it, the "mountain of the Lord's
house" was not to be any faith's exclusive province, but "shall be
established in the top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills,
and all the nations shall flow unto it." Even Jews who currently find it
difficult to accept Judaism's universal message will surely be happy to see God
"judge among the nations and decide among many peoples," as the Bible
promises us He ultimately will do, from Jerusalem.
Surely, it would be easier to think in such ways had those flocking to
Jerusalem's mosques been themselves more tolerant and pluralistic. Yet the very
fact that some Muslims have given themselves over to zealotry ought to remind us
of the perils of repeating the worst mistakes of our past. We tried zealotry
once before. The terrible history we commemorate today is proof enough that we
should not try it again.
SOURCE: Jerusalem Post