Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 50, No. 29, Ed. 1 Thursday, July 18, 1996 Page: 8 of 24
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TEXAS JEWISH POST, DALLAS, THURSDAY, JULY 18, 1996 - IN OUR 50TH YEAR!
Forgotten hero of lisha b'flv used conservation, creativity
By Rabbi Irving Greenberg
Now that the nation of Israel ap-
proaches the end of its fifth decade
and the prospect of peace opens up,
we can begin to say with greater and
greater confidence that Jewry has
survived the exile.
The time has come — on Tisha
b’Av — to speak about the people who
made this possible. This column high-
lights the forgotten man — perhaps
more aptly described as the hero of
Tisha b’Av — Rabban Yochanan ben
Zakkai
The catastrophe of destruction
could have terminated the Jewish
people and religion through mass de-
fection and spiritual despair
Judaism was saved by the emer-
gence of a new leadership, soon to be
called the rabbis, which developed a
program to enable the Jewish people
to go on with its religious calling in a
new situation of powerlessness.
Only a leadership that deeply
shared the lives of its people, giving it
credibility, and at the same time
showed great imagination and bold-
ness in going beyond the present con-
dition could have accomplished this
miracle
Rabban Yochanan deserves partic-
ular credit for the combination of con-
servation and creativity that saved the
day.
The Talmud teaches us — with a
touch of tongue in cheek — that Rab-
ban Yochanan was the least of the 80
leading pupils of the Elder Hillel.
This is a refreshing contrast to to-
day, when followers of the leading
rabbis of our time feel confident to tell
us that they are the greatest of the
generation or of many generations or
even of messianic stature
I think the Talmud meant to say
that a pre-war observer would not
have necessarily detected Rabban
Yochanan’s stature. He rose to the oc-
casion of the crisis
Like most Israelites, Rabban
Yochanan apparently supported the
great rebellion of 66-70 C.E Yet he
came to see that the bitter civil war
spelled defeat in the face of the over-
whelming might of Rome
His first insight was this: As sa-
cred as Jerusalem was and as central
as the Temple was, Judaism tran-
scended any particular location or in-
stitution. He determined not to “go
down with the ship" but to provide a
setting and a saving remnant to en-
able Jewish life to go on.
Because Rabban Yochanan had
been involved in sharing Jewish fate
in besieged Jerusalem, his action to
carry on was perceived as loyal to
Jewish purpose
Rabban Yochanan was smuggled
out of the embattled city. He was able
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THE REBUILDING OE THE TEMPLE
to establish contact with the Roman
leadership and gain permission to set-
tle in Yavneh with a group of refugee
rabbis.
(The Romans were looking to
damp down the revolution and sought
— by granting autonomy — to end the
constant fighting with the Jews.)
In Yavneh, he established an acad-
emy and a study center to guide the
community through Jewish law
Yochanan and his
colleagues taught
that God had not
abandoned the
Jewish people
(the Christian
claim) and that
God had not been
mastered by the
Roman gods (the
Roman claim).
God had be-
come more “hid-
was noHIIH^HI^H
longer available
through the sacramental Holy Tem-
ple. This was a divine call to the Jew-
ish people to take more responsibility
in the covenant When God is hidden,
then the people must be trained to de-
tect the divine presence everywhere.
Thus, learning and teaching be-
came the key religious enterprise.
And if God no longer spoke through
prophets and priestly oracles, then
people should speak to God through
prayer, and discern what God asked of
them by studying Torah, the past
record of divine revelation and com-
munication.
Further, the power of learning
Torah is such that one who studies the
laws of a particular sacrifice, it is as if
the person actually brought that sacri-
fice.
These interpretations meant that
the people of Israel could live on with-
out the Temple
The vision of rest ora-
continuity, Rab-
ban Yochanan es-
tablished cus-
toms and prayers
that kept the
memory of the
Temple alive and
vivid.
Fhr example, on
Sukkot, the lulav
and esrog — pre-
viously carried
only in
be brought and
tion and rebuilding the
Holy Temple kept Ju-
daism on its path as a
future-oriented religion
of hope throughout the
exile. ’
in a world of reduced revelation Je»
ish leadership could nevertheless an
ply the law with full authority. ^
The oral Torah was expanded
enormously through the Talmud. Yet
he rejected the amnesia and rootless
ness that follows outright dismissal of
the past.
Instead, he placed the longing to
return to Jerusalem as a dynamic cen-
ter for Jewish life. The vision of
restoration and rebuilding the Holy
Temple kept Judaism on its path as a
future-oriented religion of hope
throughout the exile. t
Rabban Yochanan had a wide vari-
ety of pupils who expanded and artic-
ulated the Talmudic tradition. Some
were radical followers of messianism,
others were skeptical of these claims;
some were active in the later armed
revolt against Rome, others insisted
that only submission would preserve
Jewish existence.
There is some evidence that Rab-
ban Yochanan later “exiled” himself
from Yavneh as his leadership poli-
cies outran the ability of his genera-
tion to respond to the drastic changes
that were testing Judaism to its limits.
Rabban Yochanan's life is told by
the rabbis in the Talmud as a para-
digm of how to respond to catastro-
phe. (As Jewish scholar Jacob
Neusner has shown, this story should
be read as an interpretative narrative,
a theology of Jewish survival, not as
literal history.)
The lessons of Rabban Yochanan’s
life are powerful. Historic leadership
should: 1) share the life experience of
its people; 2) create newly needed in-
stitutions and ideas with vision and
boldness; 3) bring the past with it
holistically and faithfully; 4) be ready
to stretch people to the limit while en-
couraging and nurturing a wide range
of viewpoints and policies; and 5)
bring a variety of people into leader-
ship roles and train them to be senous
leaders without taking themselves too
seriously.
The new era of Jewish history now
unfolding will need no less.
Irving Greenberg is president of
CLAL — the National Jewish Center
for Learning and Leadership and au-
thor of "The Jewish Wayn (New York:
Summit Books).
Jerusalei
were
waved everywhere that Jew
memory of the Temple
'*h.' "lfe *“»Pected of infidelity
“remon,y of ,he broke°
By stopping these ceremonies he
asserted that, notwithstanding living
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Wisch, J. A. & Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 50, No. 29, Ed. 1 Thursday, July 18, 1996, newspaper, July 18, 1996; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth754865/m1/8/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .