Jeremy Rosen
Yohanan ben Zakkai, Shimon bar Yochai, and Simon bar Kokhba

Jeremy Rosen | Yohanan ben Zakkai, Shimon bar Yochai, and Simon bar Kokhba | 08.29.22

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- Ladies and gentlemen, this is a lecture about a very crucial period in Jewish history when we clashed with Rome and where we went through the greatest upheaval we’ve ever been through in terms of Jewish culture and Jewish tradition. So I’m going to venture into the realms, a little bit of Roman history and then into Jewish history. But of course we know that you can’t always rely on historians, and much of what I’m going to talk about has not been verified, and those historians, whether they are Jewish or Roman, who have written about it, often contradict each other and very often say such ridiculous things such as, “Jews were cannibals.” And so it’s very difficult to know the true facts. We have some, we have some important dates that are definitely there. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to share my screen with you in order to be able to show you the timelines of some of these people that I’m going to be discussing in the course of today. But the real issue here is what is special about these leaders that I’ve chosen. Are they heroes? Not in a military sense, but I consider them to be absolutely crucial in terms of how the Judaism that we have today, developed. So I am going to share my screen with you at the moment and start looking at the Roman emperors of the Common Era.

Now, just a little background before we get to those, what I want to point out is that the first encounter between the Judean state during the time of the Maccabee dynasty was with Pompey the Great, Pompey the Great, the rival, of course, of Julius Caesar, who was assassinated in Egypt. But Pompey the Great was the general in charge of the Middle East, and the Middle East was a kind of a buffer zone between the Roman Mediterranean and the Persian, and later the Parthian Empire to the east. And in his campaigns, he came in 63 BC through Judea, and he was invited into Judea because the two rival brothers who were running the country at that time were involved in such an internecine battle between the two of them, Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II, that the country was in a state of chaos. Pompey comes through. He finds a country divided and out of control. He’s involved in trying to balance the different interests in the country, but he sees that he has to take a firm stand. He marches into Jerusalem. He actually enters the Temple and is so impressed by the Temple and by its treasures and by its wealth and by its drama that he leaves it alone, but he places Judea under Roman protectorship. And so from Pompey the Great, the Jews in a sense lost their independence. They became a client state, and certainly true that Pompey arranged, and the Greeks and the Romans arranged, for Jewish figureheads.

First of all, there was Herod, Herod I, II, and the Agrippas. They were nominally the kings. That was normal procedure for the Romans, to leave the hierarchy there. But as a general rule, the Romans did not want to impose themselves on the locals unless they had to. Now, I am relying very largely here on three sources, the Roman history, the Judean version of Josephus, written later on, but in fact, the book that I recommend to anybody who wants to understand what’s going on during this Roman period is by Martin Goodman, professor of history at Oxford University, and it’s called “Rome and Jerusalem.” So that book, “Rome and Jerusalem,” is really a must for anybody who wants to understand what was going on. Within the Jewish community, at this same time, under the Roman control, you had rival opinions. On the one hand, you had what became known as the Sadducees. They were the priestly classes, the wealthy ones, who inherited tithes and benefits from their position, which was a kind of a taxation system, and they were by and large pro-Greek, pro-Roman. As against those, you had what later became known as the Pharisees, or the rabbis, who were the popular party of the masses, who did not like the fact that the priests had a monopoly of the Temple, they were rivals, and they were responsible for innovation in Jewish law to meet the new circumstances of Greek and Roman culture. And in this, the Sadducees didn’t like them, because they were frightened they’d take away all their goodies.

So those were the two main religious positions. There was a third group, we know them now as the Dead Sea sects, who couldn’t stand this conflict between the two, and they withdrew from the society and went down to their caves and settlements, away from mainstream Jerusalem. Politically, there was a parallel system. There were those who totally identified with Rome and wanted to accept Roman power without any question. But you then had what we would call the nationalists. That’s to say, those who say, “We don’t like Roman interference. We don’t like non-Jewish interference in our affairs. We want to run our own affairs.” And those groups, the nationalists, divided into three sections. There was a moderate section. Then there was a section called the Zealots. The Zealots were all for fighting the Romans at all costs. And then you had a third group called the Sicarii, literally, the dagger people. These were the extremists who believed in assassinating anybody, Jew or non-Jew, who disagreed with them. So you can see that the country, as we get to the the turn of the millennium, is in a terribly mixed-up state. While Herod was alive, he managed to keep a measure of control.

Meanwhile, back at Rome, there’s been a change. There’s been the Julian dynasty of Julius Caesar, and Julius Caesar gave way to the man who became known as Augustus. Augustus became known, gave way to a man called Tiberius, and they held the position of emperors. And during this period, by and large, the Mediterranean flourished. The Jewish community set up powerful satellites in Alexandria, in Cyrene, which is Kairouan, which is Tunisia today, right across into Spain, throughout Italy, moving up indeed even into northern Europe. So the Jews were a very, very successful minority, and by and large, they were allowed freedom of religion without interference, so long as they didn’t mess with politics. But unfortunately, we Jews have always had a tendency to get involved in politics and make the wrong decisions. This happened when there was a clash between the Assyrians and the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, and then the Persians and the Egyptians. And each time our leaders seem to have successfully backed the wrong horses and made the wrong decisions, and that’s what led to the destruction of the first Temple, and it’s also what’s happening now to the destruction of the second Temple.

So if you look at this little screen that I’ve shared, in which I’ve got the Roman emperors of the Common Era, we have Caligula, 37 to 24. That can’t make sense in terms of the date. He’s really 37 to 41. Don’t know how that word got there. But Caligula, as you know, was a mercurial, out of control, crazy guy, but actually was very friendly with the House of Herod, and the House of Herod, the Agrippas, were on good terms, and he was on good terms with the Jews. Claudius, who succeeded him, was also very pro-Jewish, and there was constant interaction between the Jewish communities around the world and the Roman community, which built up to be a very strong, powerful community in Rome itself under Claudius, Claudius gave way to Nero, who gets very bad press, but there’s some revisionism going on, that Nero didn’t fiddle while Rome burnt.

But nevertheless, during the period of Nero, too, things were good. Things began to change when Nero died, and there was a scrabble of people to take over from him, because by this time, it was the army and the Praetorian Guard that had a say in who was going to be an emperor. It was no longer a descendant of Julius Caesar and the Julian dynasty. And there were three generals who in the course of a year were fighting each other and at one stage declared themselves emperor. The army in the east, in Spain, declared Galba the emperor, but Otho had his supporters in Europe, and Vitellius, too, and these three generals were jockeying with each other. In the background was a general called Vespasian, and Vespasian was not known as a particularly powerful man. He was mainly involved in looking after Roman interests in the Middle East. And it was during this period that there is a rebellion in Judea against Roman authority, and Vespasian is sent to put it down, and he has a problem putting it down, and he has to bring in reinforcements.

In the end, we know that Vespasian is called back in a rush to Rome in order to ensure his position as the new emperor and leaves his son Titus to carry out the work. Now, there’s difference of opinion as to whether Titus decided to destroy the Temple and Jerusalem or not, and Martin Goodman makes the valid point that Vespasian had not distinguished himself, and in order to press his position as a possible contender, he had to achieve a massive victory, and this explains why, in effect, he asked Titus to really put down this rebellion with excessive force, and to some extent, that is what Titus did. There are difference of opinions as to whether the destruction of the Temple was accidental, whether it was even set alight by Jewish rebels within, but whatever happens, the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed. And in order to show that this was a massive achievement, vast numbers of the Judean population were captured, taken back, sold as slaves, taken in procession in Rome, and the Jewish community, in effect, in Judea, had to move up to the north of the Galilee because Jerusalem was all but done. There are others who say, “No, it wasn’t so dramatic. Don’t exaggerate, you’re making an exaggeration of this.”

Then what happened was, under two generals, emperors, first of all Titus, who actually had an affair with a daughter of one of the Agrippas, a sister of Agrippa II, who was king of Jerusalem, and so there were good terms between Titus and the Judeans, and Domitian, a bit of a non-entity, but he was fine, and Nerva was fine, and things carried on with Jewish communities surviving around the Mediterranean and in Persia, even though the Jewish community in Judea had been seriously depleted. But then there were two emperors, there was Trajan and there was Hadrian, and these two emperors had problems with the Jews. First of all, there were anti-Jewish riots during Trajan’s time all around the Mediterranean, and there were anti-Roman riots in Persia, supported by the Persian Jews, and Trajan had to deal with those, and so all of a sudden the Jews become a problem.

Added to that, at the same time, the Christians, who at that early stage were kind of identified as a bit like the Jews in religious terms, they were beginning to assert themselves and they were initially a bigger problem than the Jews, ‘cause the Jews weren’t interested in converting everybody, the Christians were, and they represented a challenge to the authorities. And so what happened was these anti riots, which were put down with force, also involved attacking Jewish communities in places like Alexandria and Rome and North Africa and Persia. And those riots spurred on a series of anti-Jewish laws that Trajan introduced, and things got worse under Hadrian, and Hadrian imposed a ban on Jewish studies, a ban on circumcision, a ban on this, taxes on the Jews everywhere, and there was uprising, which led to the famous Bar Kokhba uprising of 134 to '7, in which, initially, the Roman armies were defeated, but then with reinforcements they came back and they completely decimated the whole structure. The Jewish community, then again, up in the north, in Galilee, Tiberias, and other places like that.

So this explains why there was such a crisis in the Jewish world during this particular period, and why, for example, it’s probably true to say that until this moment, the Jews genuinely believed there’d be a chance of rebuilding the Temple, and hoped there would be, but by the time we get to Trajan and Hadrian, it is over. Jerusalem is completely smashed, sewn with salt, no way of coming back from that, and the Jews have to adjust to this new reality. Interestingly enough, the next two emperors, Antoninus Pius, and more importantly, Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic emperor, had very good relationships with rabbinic leaders, particularly Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, the president of the Jewish community. And they are both mentioned, we don’t know exactly who was who and which was which and what dates were what, but mentioned in the Talmud with a lot of legends. Now, this is all, if you like, what we would call historical fact. When we come to the Jewish point of view, everything now has to be seen through different spectacles, through a Jewish perspective, which has a specific Jewish agenda. And the Jewish agenda is how are we going to deal with this situation we find ourselves in? And if you look down to my list of dates, you’ll find the great Judean Rabbi Hillel, 90 BCE to about 10 CE.

We don’t know exactly what the dates were, but he is the man whose agenda is almost identical with the agenda that was attributed to Jesus by Paul in terms of loving everybody, being kind, a straight link to God, and hating hypocrisy and hating materialism, domination in that sense, and generally, Hillel was a peacemaker. He believed, together with his schools, of making peace, trying to reduce tension. But when he died, the lid came off. His successor, Yohanan ben Zakkai, is the first of my three great figures of whom there are lots of myths and stories. The Talmud says this about Yohanan ben Zakkai, that during the siege of Jerusalem, which he opposed, he decided he had to find a way of getting out of Jerusalem to approach Vespasian and see if he could negotiate a deal. The trouble was the extremists. The religious nationalists and the nationalists did not want any peace and would not let him out of the city. He had a nephew or a cousin who was head of the biryonim, who were called the Zealots, and he was on good terms with him.

And he said to him, “Look, I would like to go out of the city to negotiate a deal.” And the leader of the Zealots turn to him and says, “I can’t let you do it. My people will kill me. The Zealots, the Sicarii, will kill me if I make any concession.” They were so bad that they actually burnt the supplies of food in Jerusalem so that people would have to fight to get something and wouldn’t sort of drag out this siege and would bring it to a speedy end. And so according to the Talmud, is advice he took was to pretend he was dead, get all the pupils to come and gather and then to mourn him, to put something smelly under his body lying there so that they would think he was decomposing, and this way they would be able to take him out of the city. When they got to the city, the Zealots said, “How do we know he is alive? Let’s stab him,” and they can’t. What will the opposition out there say if they see you’re stabbing a religious leader? So, “Let’s push him a little bit to see if he falls out or not.” And they said, “Come on, you can’t treat him with this disrespect.” Whatever it was, they managed to get him out of the city and he approached Vespasian. Vespasian gave him an audience. After all, they were prepared to accept the leadership of the Israelites, of the Judeans.

He said, “Why didn’t you come to me before if you come seeking some sort of arrangement?” He says, “'Cause I couldn’t, they wouldn’t let me out.” So he said, “Okay, fair enough. So what can I do for you?” To which Yohanan ben Zakkai, instead of saying, “Can you free us from this oppression here,” said to him, “Look, I know Jerusalem is lost. I know I have no control. I have to cut my losses. I want our culture to continue, even if our nation is destroyed. And so I would like you to allow me to set up an academy and a religious centre in Yavne. In addition, I have a couple of other small requests,” which he threw in. Later on, the rabbis are going to be furious, those who are nationalists. Why didn’t he ask for the city to be freed completely? And to which the answer was, you know, “If you can see there’s no hope, then go for what you can achieve.” So Yohanan ben Zakkai represented the peace camp, the person who was prepared to see if it was possible to make concessions. And Yavne, for a while, did become a centre of Jewish study and carried on the rabbinic tradition, even after the Temple was destroyed. But due to the later oppression, they had to move, and move to the north, to the Galilee, where Jewish life continued.

The biggest opponent of Yohanan ben Zakkai’s position here was the famous Rabbi Akiva, and Rabbi Akiva, and you can see there’s something funny in the date there, it’s roughly to 113, but some people say it’s to later than that, it’s during the Bar Kokhba Revolution, which was 132, Rabbi Akiva was a great leader, but he was a strong nationalist, and he was a great messianist. He believed that a messiah would come and get rid of the Roman oppressors and change Jewish life and bring it back to the ideal. And he had large numbers of pupils, and these large numbers of pupils also followed this extreme nationalism. And if you can see parallels between then and Israel today, there are, and I will come to those in due course. Akiva was the man who was going to support the great Bar Kokhba Revolution. Bar Kokhba Revolution, 132 to 135, but it extended to 137, was initially, for two years, a tremendous success, and Bar Kokhba was declared the Messiah, 'cause he was bringing, in those days, they understood the Messiah as somebody who would get rid of oppression, and he got rid of Roman oppression for a couple of years.

There was no other apocalyptic idea of Messianism at all, just who’d be a leader who’d get rid of the opposition. So Akiva supported Bar Kokhba, and there are different traditions about Akiva, who Akiva was, was he really a poor shepherd? And he married the daughter of the wealthiest man in the town, and he was so furious that he cut her off completely, and she made the condition that although he was an ignorant shepherd, if he would go and learn, he should go and study, and for 12 years he went to study, leaving her alone as a poor girl, a woman living in rags. After 12 years he came back, and before he got in, he heard her saying how proud she was to her neighbours of her husband who was studying, and she wouldn’t mind if he went back for another 12 years, and so he turned around and went back for another 12 years. And then after 24 years, he comes as this great leader of all Israel, and his poor old wife comes forward to greet him and the pupils want to push her away, and he says, “No, without her I’d be nothing. She gets all the reward.”

These are the myths and the stories about Akiva, and we don’t know how true they were, but they are making certain important points about his significance. When under the Roman oppression, Jews were forbidden to teach, he went on teaching, he went on preaching, and the result was he was captured, he was tortured. Some people say they raked the skin off him alive, and he said the Shema as he was dying. There are other narratives, there are several of them, in different volumes of the two Talmuds that contradict each other, but that doesn’t matter. Everybody agrees that he was one of the great figures, and by the great figures we mean people whose teachings are going to be recorded in what we call the Talmud, the Mishnah first and the Gemara afterwards. So these are great giants of our literature. They span the Talmud like colossuses, Yohanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiva. There’s another one in this triumvirate. This triumvirate is a man called Shimon bar Yochai. Shimon bar Yochai was also one of these great rabbinic scholars, but he was a mystic, and he is considered to be the founder of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah.

Now, whether this is true or not, we can argue about it to kingdom come, and academics do, but whereas, if you like, the other two were more rationalists, this man, Shimon bar Yochai, was indeed the mystic, and the myths and stories about him in the Talmud are legion. They are that he had to run away from the Romans for teaching Torah, and he hid in a cave, one version says alone, another version says with his son. For 12 years, he was fed by carob tree and a spring and by people coming to give him support, and he sat there without clothes on in the dust, studying up to the throat so his clothes wouldn’t wither, and as a result, he was smitten with all kinds of diseases, and he suffered through this agony for 12 years. And after the 12 years, he heard a voice, or Elijah appeared at his door, and says, “Those who want to kill you, are finished. You may go out.” And he came out of the caves, having studied mysticism and the secrets of the Kabbalah, and he saw ordinary people out in the streets and in the fields doing ordinary work, and he says, “How can you do this? The real truth lies in involving yourself in Kabbalah completely, not in working, in mundane matters.”

And he tried to burn into a cinder, and a voice came out of heaven and said, “Listen, Shimon bar Yochai, you’re ruining my world. My world isn’t made up only of mystics but of ordinary human beings who have to earn a living. You better go back into the cave until you know how to behave yourself,” and he had to go back for another year. And there was this whole debate, is he right or is he wrong? And according to the Talmud, those who disagreed with him took the view that you’ve got to combine Torah with oppression and the work. They were successful, more than those who said you have to study all the time. Well, you can see nowadays which one of those opinions has gained the upper hand, in one sense. So Shimon bar Yochai represents the mystical tradition. There’s one other name that deserves mentioning, but I didn’t put him in my original list of these three great founders, because he was a political leader of the Jewish community in Judea at the time of the Roman emperors, and got on with them, and he had two main achievements.

His one achievement was representing the Jewish people to the Roman authorities, and the other was the compilation of the Mishnah, and the Mishnah consisted of all these laws that had developed since the biblical period but had not been written down, and the reason was, they believed that it was important not to write stuff down because it become too fossilised. And so there was the Torah that was written, the five books of Moses, and what we call the Tanach, and then there there was this oral law, the Torah Sheba'al Peh, the oral law that was not written down. But when the Roman oppression got so great and people were being scattered and so many Jews were taken away to slavery and there was a fear of the tradition being lost, he took this dramatic initiative of deciding to write things down. And although there were other people who wrote collections down, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi is the man who compiled this oral law that we call the Mishnah, that we’ve turned into the Talmud, which has become, in effect, the primary source of Jewish tradition, whether it is religion or folklore or indeed even historic in that sense.

So he is a giant, but, and the other rabbis I’ve mentioned contributed to the Mishnah, and they’re mentioned in it, in the Talmud. But nevertheless, the three I picked are the three because they represent three different trends that we see even today in the Jewish world, and they were able, in a sense, to adapt Judaism to meet a world without a temple, a world in which most Jews were no longer living in the land of Israel but in the diaspora outside, and circumstances have changed dramatically. So to go back, I’m now going to close my screen and remove it, let’s un-share screen. There we are. I hope it’s gone now. And we’re back. So I now want to deal with why I regard these three people as being so important. Judaism, up until this moment, it was essentially a religion of the sanctuary, that you went to church, so to speak, or to the temple, so to speak, to be religious. You kept certain things at home. The constitution, if you like, the general laws were very much concerned with how you behave, how humans behave to each other. That’s why there are so many laws about this in the Torah. But when it came to relating to God, the Torah is not a book of theology. It’s basically a book that says the primary way to relate to God is through the temple, is through appearing at a location and through the sacrificial system.

Now, it’s true that when the Temple was destroyed, it looked, for the second time, it looked as there’d be a chance to rebuild it, the way there was last time, after a period of 50 years, and so initially they kept all these laws going because they thought they were going to be put back into practise, and some people say even continued sacrificing. But there became a moment in the second century where two things happened. One thing that happened was that it became clear that there was no way the Romans were ever going to allow the Jews to rebuild the Temple, and secondly, the rise of Christianity, which, under Constantine, became the religion of the Roman Empire, was definitely not going to allow the Jews to do anything, because they believed they were now the chosen people who’d taken over and the Jews were wrong for not accepting this new reality, and the new reality was that Jesus was the last sacrifice. There wouldn’t be any other sacrifices afterwards. In response to that, of course, the Jews, stubborn as we are, anybody who tells us we’re wrong, we say, “You’re wrong,” we said, “No, sacrifices are still going to come back, even though we are not practically doing it at the moment. But we agree that we now have to find a replacement for the sacrifices.”

And the sacrifices have gone. Maimonides, for example, the great philosopher, takes the view that they were only a temporary stage in the evolution of Judaism, but today many ultra-Orthodox Jews, Haredi Jews, believe the Temple will be brought back, even though, one day, they like to think that maybe there’ll only be vegetarian sacrifices and not meaty ones. But as you will see, there are, and I consciously call them a bunch of extremist nutcases, who are interested in trying to pull down the Temple today and rebuild it there, and want to go up onto the Temple Mount and sacrifice on there, and fortunately, the secular authorities of Israel are preventing them from carrying this out. But there are still places that are training priests in order to perform in case the Messiah comes tomorrow, rebuilds the Temple, and they will be back in full-time employment. So this new development then, without a temple, focus on two important principles. Principle number one was the way to engage with God is through public prayer. There was always the idea of private prayer, and private prayer is clear from the Torah, but it’s not structured in any way. The idea of having services already began in Babylon, but it wasn’t a formal part of the structure.

It’s with the destruction of the Temple and with the authority of men like Yohanan ben Zakkai that you have the establishment of three services a day with a set routine, with a menu, with a menu that gives you some ideas to think about, to get you to focus on spiritual ideas as opposed to mundane ideas, but essentially to get you talking about God matters. And that was the purpose of communal prayer, but it was also a way of getting people to come together, because if you don’t have a temple, what else gets you together? Your religion is only at home, important as that is. And so the idea of the synagogue, which initially started off as a community centre, and a community centre in a male society was for the men. The women were in the home. This community centre then turns into a synagogue, a place where we gather. But parallel with that, there were the colleges, the academics, the place where we study, and this beit midrash, the place of study, was the other institution that the rabbis of this generation initiated, which became the kingpin of the religion as we have it today. And there is a debate in the Talmud, what’s more important, prayer or study?

Some people said study’s the real way. Intellectually it keeps you with the tradition, it gets you involved in behaviourism. And on the other point of view, you had the idea that, no, it is prayer, it’s meditation. And so you can see why the mystics veer towards the meditational side and the rationalists moved towards the academic side. But it was the development of these two fundamental principles, these two new vehicles, that really became the reason we survived, the focus on study, the focus on community, of coming together, and keeping the memory of the past alive even though we look forward to a better future at some unknown date. And it’s why, for example, we were able to preserve a separate identity when the world around us, first Christianity and then Islam, were so much more successful in making converts in vast numbers, even though, at this time, Jews were interested in converting, and there were many synagogues that were open to converts. And in fact, as Paul, the founder of Christianity, says, the first place he went to were the synagogues where there was lots of people who wanted to get involved but weren’t so certain they wanted to keep all the commandments of Judaism, and so he was able to offer a lighter, if you like, more reform option that appeal to more people.

But nevertheless, a lot of Romans found a great appeal in the Jewish tradition, and, in Rome, we know there were a lot of converts, a lot of Romans who were very favourably inclined towards the Israelites. So this is the first wing, the wing of Yohanan ben Zakkai, who says, “We have to adapt, and we adapt by negotiation, and it’s negotiation that matters, not violent aggression, because we’re outnumbered. Violent aggression is not going to get us anywhere.” And so this is what he is known for, as the middle-of-the-road peacemaker who was able to establish a popular version of strict Judaism. Meanwhile, down at the Dead Sea sects, they were getting stricter and stricter with all kinds of additional things and without removing any of those aspects that were dependent on the Temple, purity, impurity, tithes and so forth, that they felt they wanted to keep on maintaining. But then also this idea of mysticism, this idea that somehow an individual has to find a way of relating to God. The Bible is not a book of theology, and what we get from the Bible is more that Judaism is a lived experience, but it doesn’t lay down how in that lived experience we find ways of relating to God. The Romans and the Greeks related to their gods in one of two ways, either blindly accepting or, alternatively, rationally rejecting.

And so you have the Greek tradition of rationalism entering the Roman world, and in fact, entering Christianity, and rationalism tries to find a rational explanation for things. And that’s why, in essence, Christianity became a theological religion in which you had to be able to attest to certain ideas, whereas in Judaism, the primary idea was behave, a behavioural religion. And that was another reason why it was able to survive. Because the Roman religion, the Roman religions and culture absorbed and spread right across the known world at that stage, and they included so many different cultures, so many different ideas, so many different backgrounds, and each one of these backgrounds had their own particular customs, their own particular rules, their own particular way of music, of dance, and everything like that. And the result of that was that each part of the Christian world adopted some of the local religious customs and traditions, and absorbed different ideas, whereas Judaism was more concerned with, “How are you behaving?” And the difference is this, those people who think differently, don’t agree with others who think differently.

But if we all behave, it’s behaviour that counts. It’s behaviour that is able to link a Jew from Morocco to a Jew from Persia to a Jew from India to a Jew from Russia to a Jew from France to a Jew from Africa, and later on Australia and all these other places, even though culturally we are so different. Look in Israel, the difference between Arab Jews, if you like, and Western Jews in choice of music and dress and other elements like that. So the fact that it focused on behaviourism, and this behaviourism also involved the idea of trying, through these rituals, to get through to God is one of the major contributions that enabled Judaism to survive. So this is why I consider these three rabbis, who represent these three different approaches to the same problem of how can Judaism go forward and survive, were so remarkable. But also because we now find ourselves in a situation where the debates that they had on to fight or not to fight have become even more significant, because the issue of violence is something that goes back to the Bible.

If you look at the story of Dinah, Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, when he comes back to the land of Israel, goes out to visit the city of Shechem, she gets raped, and the sons of Jacob then have to decide how do we deal with this situation? And they deal with the situation by violently negotiating, dishonestly, with the citizens of the Shechem, getting them to circumcise themselves, and when they are in a state of pain, going in and killing the lot of them. Jacob is horrified by this. He says to Shimon and Levi, “You have besmirched my reputation. Now everybody is going to come and gang up against us.” To which Shimon and Levi replied, “But we can’t let people get away with this. If people think that they can attack us and we won’t respond, or humiliate us and we won’t respond, then we are going to lose any sense of deterrence in the world in which we live, 'cause we live in a very violent world.” Now, this debate is a debate that went on in the Bible, and Jacob, in the end, condemns his brothers, and takes that point of view.

But the issue became one of can we take aggressive action to protect ourselves, even if ideally we have to avoid aggression? And one of the reasons why there was no metal in the Temple was to say, we don’t want anything that reminds us of metal, of source of violence, and yet we have to defend ourselves. And the Torah makes it very clear that the Israelites had to defend themselves against not only the tribes they were coming into, but also against their paganism. Although it does look as though the commands in the Torah is to get rid of them, the fact is, they never did, and they went on coexisting with them for the next 500 years until the Assyrians came and mixed up all the tribes of the Middle East and their identity was lost and the laws didn’t apply. But even if the laws applied beforehand, you can see from the Torah they were not being carried out. So they were regarded more as symbolic than actual practical obligations. And yet here we are today, a situation in the land of Israel where we have those people who want to negotiate peace. You have those people who say, “No, we want to get rid of everybody, clear everybody out who doesn’t agree with us. This is our land, it’s our heritage. We’re not prepared to accept them.” And you have a range of positions in the middle.

You have those, for example, in the black-hatted Haredi community who don’t want to get involved in this kind of political debate, who believe in principle that it is legitimate to make concessions in the interest of peace, because that was the position Yohanan ben Zakkai took at the time of the Temple. He was prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of peace, and he regarded that as the right thing to do, and that is the dominant opinion in the black hat Haredi community. And so ironically, the more Haredi you get in Jewish life, the less violent you become. They might be violent against other people in Israel who they see as attacking their religious position, but not when it comes to attacking Palestinians or anybody else who disagrees with them outside of Judaism. Their zealotry is an internal one, not an external one. We don’t have any Haredi jihadis. On the other hand, we do have the religious nationalists who are more moderate, in one sense, religiously, but on the other hand, believe, “This is our heritage, this is our land, promised by God. We are happy to coexist with people who want to coexist with us, but there should be no limitation on where we settle, how we settle, and where we’re going to go. This is our land and we don’t care who says no. This is what matters to us.”

Then of course you move to the other side. You have those people who are trying very hard to make peace, to coexist, and put tremendous efforts towards this. Much of it does not get attention in the world press 'cause the world press likes black and whites, goodies and baddies. We’re the baddies, no matter what we do, they’re the goodies, no matter what they do, and they’re not interested in the vast amount of good that people are trying to put in to adopt, to bring the sides together. I know from many members of my own family how much is being done in that. And then you have Israelis who are on the extreme secular side, saying, “We don’t need this. Who needs a Jewish homeland? We don’t like nationalism. Let’s move wherever we are and stop with all this nonsense.” And so just as in those days we were divided, so today we are divided in the same way, and each one of us chooses the ideology or the political standpoint that we favour. And those of us who stand in the middle tend to be disliked by those on the right and those on the left, but that is the fate of all moderates everywhere.

So these three rabbis are symptomatic of the situation, because also in the religious world, we’re divided between those who are rationalists, who like to think rationally, who follow the Halakhah and the constitution in a rational way, and those who are mystics, and these mystics are very often highly superstitious, and superstition plays a very important part, and yet at the same time they are dynamic and they offer an experience of Judaism that the dull, rigid synagogues that most of us were brought up in, in the diaspora, in our youth, failed to achieve, and they are much more successful, whether it’s through Hasidism or the other kinds of the mystical traditions that exist within Judaism. So mysticism seems to be winning the battle of the character of Judaism, both in the diaspora and in Israel.

And when we talk about the future of Judaism, we see what’s happening, that we are splitting very quickly into two very different communities, those with a passionate commitment, whether it’s to religion or to the nation, and those with a less passionate commitment, largely because they’ve never experienced it, they haven’t been taught about it, they just know they’re Jews by birth and by accident, and they, unfortunately, are moving in a different way. Meanwhile, thanks to the internet, we have so many areas in which we can study and expand our knowledge and explore our identity. And so for all of the problems that we have, I think we’ve never been in such a wonderful position as we are today, and so, no matter how bad things may appear, don’t give up. And that is my message for today. So with that, I’ll now turn to the questions, and let’s see what they are.

Q&A and Comments

The music that I started off was by Gounod, which was a beautiful piece of music which is known under the general name of “Mors et Vita,” “Death and Life.” So next question, if we come to there, if I may get back to it, is, Sheila says, “I don’t think Julius Caesar was assassinated in Egypt. He was assassinated in Rome.” I didn’t say Julius Caesar. I said Pompey. Pompey the Great was assassinated in Egypt. You’re right, Julius Caesar was killed in the Ides of March in BCE.

Q: Shelly Shapiro, “Did the nationalists believe that if the Maccabees could defeat Antiochus, they would defeat the Romans?” A: Some of them did, yes. They thought, “Listen, we did it against Greece, why can’t we do it again?” And particularly because for large parts of the time, remember, Rome was divided amongst itself. There were warring factions. And just think of Anthony and Cleopatra and Augustus, they sided at different sides. Herod, very carefully, first of all sided with Anthony and Cleopatra when he thought he was going to win, and then sided with Augustus when he thought he was going to win.

Q: Pamela says, “Were the early dispersed Jews the beginnings of Ashkenaz?” A: Yes, because Jews were dispersed in the Roman Empire. Many of them went to Italy. From Italy they moved up into southern France. But other Jews moved from Spain into southern France, and southern France up into the north. Jews came with Julius Caesar, and later on with Claudius. Jews came as business partners with the Romans to Britain, and there’s remains of a mikvah to be found in Britain at that stage.

Q: “Could slides be distributed to interested participants?” A: Yes, there’s no problem. Anybody ask me for any information, I’m happy to pass it on. Thank you, Stephen.

Q: “Were Sadducees Kohanim?” A: Yes, primarily they were. The Kohanim and the Leviim made up the priestly families and their dynasties.

“Josephus describes corruption of Roman emperors in Judea.” No, the Roman procurators. The emperors didn’t live in Judea, but after Pompey the Great, they sent governors, procurators, and the procurators, by and large, were terrible people. They didn’t like to be sent to Judea. They saw it as a fringe of the empire. They were there to make a fortune, and so they taxed everybody and stole as much as they could. And yes, it was the procurators who stirred up feeling amongst the Jews against Roman authority. Romaine, “Informative.” Thank you.

Q: “Did Hillel live for 100 years?” A: Well, those who say he did, yes, he did live for 100 years, but the trouble is, we don’t know the dates. Calendars were different and we can’t rely on those dates at all. So that’s why I said at the beginning, a lot of these dates are not absolutely reliable.

“Without the land, there’s the law. Without the law, there is the land.” Yes, they both play an important part. Judaism functions both as a religion independent of the land and as a community living on the land. That’s why it’s so difficult to define us. We’re not just a religion. We’re a nation and we’re a people, and we span those categories that artificially came in with the emergence of Christianity.

Q: “Why do you think Jewish people were regarded more as a nation than a people if they never had a country? Even if they destroy them, they don’t receive a country or much else.” A: Well, that’s precisely why the other peoples of the world have great difficulty understanding us, understanding why we have survived. Arnold Toynbee, the historian, couldn’t understand how the Jews have survived. They made no sense. They didn’t fit into any category.

Q: “Does Islam agree with your historical perspective of the era discussed today?” A: Yes, by and large they do. They, of course, didn’t appear until about 600 to 700 after the Common Era, and they didn’t agree with the text that we had of the Torah, but the historical perspective, there’s no disagreement about, largely because it’s echoed by most of the non-Jewish Roman historians and Persian historians as well.

Q: “What’s the difference between ben and bar?” A: Ben is the Hebrew. Bar is the Aramaic. They’re the same thing, but in Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Talmud is written in both Hebrew and Aramaic. The Mishnah is in Hebrew, but the Gemara is Aramaic.

Q: “I have Christian friends from Shefa-Amr in Galilee. What did the town play for Jews after the destruction of the second Temple? There are only Christians and Muslims there now.” A: Because after the destruction of the Temple, Galilee was the major centre of Jewish life and there were Jews living in Galilee throughout the whole period. Now parts of Galilee are Arab or Druze, as you say, and there’re Jewish towns and non-Jewish towns. But Galilee was the centre, right through the period of exile, Safed, Tiberias were always inhabited by Jews, some more often, some less often, some in greater number when the economic conditions allowed for it. They were always there, mainly in Galilee. But of course the same was true in Jerusalem, except Jerusalem, far fewer, living under much more difficult conditions.

Q: “Do you think Rabbi Akiva’s students died fighting for the Bar Kokhba revolt?” A: Well, that is one possibility. The Talmud talks about the students of Rabbi Akiva dying of the plague, and dying because they didn’t treat each other with respect, which sounds a little farfetched. So here you have a different example of where the rabbis want to emphasise the religious reason and whereas historians want to emphasise a more historical reason. I tend to agree on this with the historical point of view, but who knows? There’ve been lots of plagues, plagues that you go through Europe, the Romans had plagues at that time. Everybody had plagues. So plagues as well as war were the two main reasons why people died.

Q: “What is the immortality status of the martyrs?” A: Well, we don’t actually have martyrs in the sense that Christianity talks about martyrs, but we remember people who have died, and particularly if they have died defending Judaism, with great respect, and we mention them every single Shabbat in the synagogue and we mention them on days of the year when we remember the dead and remember the past in our various festivals, like Tisha B'Av and the other fasts we have. So we remember those who died for the cause, but we focus on the living. We spend more time focusing on the living and the present.

Shelly, “I’m a senior, grew up, I was taught oral law is the the law of the rabbis. Now, in the Orthodox world, I’m continually told the oral law is given by God on Mount Sinai. What do you think?” Look, there are two kinds of oral law. There’s when Moses comes off the mountain and he says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” How did they understand it at the time? What happens when somebody without any teeth takes out the tooth of an ordinary person, or somebody bruises more than other people? How did people understand that at the time, or when Moses said at the festival of Sukkot, “Take the fruit of a nice tree,” what fruit did they take? So there must have been a parallel law with the Torah at the time that was called the oral law, which was not written down. It was tradition, how they understood it at the time. This oral law continued to expand, and when we talk about the oral law now, it includes both the oral law from the time of the Bible and those laws that were developed in Babylon afterwards, that were developed in the land of Israel afterwards, such as, can you light fire on Shabbat or before Shabbat, or can you defend yourself on Shabbat, laws that came out during the Maccabean period that were then written down in what we call the Mishnah, which is the oral law as written down, part two. So there are two oral laws, the oral law of the Torah, the oral law of the rabbis, and they are part of one process. Thank you so much, Adrian.

Q: “Talmud Torah k'neged kulam, can k'neged mean in opposition rather in replacement for?” A: Excellent point. It can be, but the rabbis say Talmud Torah is better than all of them, because if you study Torah, it will teach you the law is that you have to pray. But basically, yes, there were some rabbis who took the view that Torah is the way to get to God, and who sees studying Torah as a religious experience, not just as an academic experience. And that is why they teach studying Torah is so important, because it isn’t just academic.

Q: “Isn’t essence of Judaism the values it promotes, not only the rituals?” A: Yes, of course the values are part of the Torah and part of the Talmud. You can’t differentiate them. The Torah talks about doing the right thing, tzedek, tzedek tirdof, pursue rightness. It talks about adhering to the law, mishpat, but also doing the right thing, which is what values. The Torah is full of values. The Bible is full of values. We have values, but a value is an abstraction. You’ve got to get into a routine that encourages action, that encourage you to give charity, that encourage you to keep an atmosphere on the Shabbat, to think about your food. So values are fine, but by themselves, our values are almost identical to Islamic values and to Christian values. It’s the way we translate them into practise that makes them specifically Jewish.

“There was metal in the Temples.” You’re quite right, Ruth. There was metal and gold that come into the Temples as decoration, but it was on the altar that they were not allowed to use anything metallic, and they were not allowed to bring arms into the Temple. They were frisked before they got in, not for security, but to make sure they had no arms. Thank you, Mimi. Thank you very much, Hannah. Nanette, thank you. Thank you, Susan. Michael, “Rabbi Akiva support Bar Kokhba in loss of Judea, loss of over 1 million Jews.” Yes, he did, and the rabbis turned to Bar Kokhba and said, “Bar Kokhba, if you think this guy is going to be the Messiah, you’re wrong. Grass will grow out of your cheek or grass will grow out of the palm of your hand if this is the way.” So most rabbis disagreed with Rabbi Akiva. Thank you for a wonderful… Barbara, thank you very much. Jerry, “I understand there were houses throughout Judea and Galilee during the Second Temple times.” Yes, this began to happen in Babylon. It’s in Babylon that you begin to get this new development, but it was relatively minor. It coexisted with still the Temple.

Q: “To what do you attribute change of Roman attitude towards the Jews?” A: Well, very often partially politics, but the real reason, of course, was the rise of Christianity, which turned the Empire… I mean, until Constantine in the fourth century, Judaism was recognised as a religion in the Roman Empire. It was with the rise of Constantine that we were made outlaw and banned, and that was fundamentally what changed the attitude towards Jews.

“Sorry to correct slip of tongue. You did not say Pompey. You said Julius Caesar.” Oh, well, I’m sorry. Obviously it wasn’t Julius Caesar, it was Pompey, and I’m sorry if I did slip tongue. Not unusual for me.

Q: “Since Levi was violent and duplicitous after the rape of Dinah, how was his tribe chosen as the Levite keepers of the Temple ritual?” A: Excellent question. And so one of the answers that’s given is that Jacob said, “I must divide the tribes of Shimon and Levi. I must harness their aggression in different ways,” and one of them is by taking the priests and making them the upholders of non-violence. So it was channelling that aggression into something more peaceful.

Ralph says, “The concept of the future restoration of the Temple is removed from a return to Zion as an eternal idea. Could it facilitate a peaceful in Israel?” I don’t understand. “The concept of the restoration of the Temple facilitate peace,” I think it’s very unlikely to facilitate peace given that at the moment the Temple is on land which is considered holy by the Muslims, and there are more of them than there are of us. The idea of a Messiah is the idea that we will have world peace, and yes, I look forward to world peace. I wish we could achieve it.

Q: “Is the surname Del Vecchio exclusively from ancient Romans 2,000 years ago in Rome?” A: I honestly don’t know. It’s a well-known name, but Vecchio, of course, can apply to the name of, there was the old ghetto, and the Ghetto Vecchio as well. So honestly, I don’t know the answer to that one.

Q: Susan, “Were the Jews buried when they made Galilee their homes since Jerusalem was no longer the centre?” A: No, Jews were buried wherever they could find land to be buried, but there were burial grounds in Galilee, and there are to this day, the most famous one of Shimon bar Yochai. This mystic I mentioned is buried in the Galilee and in a town called Meron. People go every year to celebrate his anniversary of his death.

Thank you, Lana. “Thank you, Dr. Rosen,” . Thank you very much. “It is said that Jesus was a student of Hillel.” Well, possibly. I mean, I think there were thousands of people like Jesus at the time of Hillel, or following Hillel’s example, or travelling around teaching the masses. We don’t know who was who. It’s an open question. Ian, thank you very much.

Q: “Over what period was the Babylonian Talmud developed?” A: Well, the Babylonian Talmud, in the Gemara form, followed the Mishnah, although people were studying before. The Mishnah was composed about 200 and the Talmud was compiled finally, the Babylonian Talmud, around 600, so that’s the span of the era.

So I’ll say goodbye to everybody and wish you a happy New Year, if I don’t speak to you or see you before then. Bye.