“A Lifetim e of Learning” - Partnership for Excellence in Jewish ...

The best, indeed the only, defence of a religious people isnot military or political but educational.leadership passed from kings, priests, andprophets to the sage, the teacher who“raised up many disciples.” Exiled, dispersed,and deprived of power, a shatterednation was rebuilt through one instrumentality:education.Surviving DestructionIn the first century C.E. a second crisisstruck with devastating force. An ill-advisedrebellion against Rome brought savageretaliation. The Roman forces led byVespasian descended on the centres of Jewishresistance. In 70 C.E. Vespasian’s sonTitus brought the campaign to its climaxwith a siege against Jerusalem. The citywas captured. The second Temple was destroyed.It was a fateful moment, thoughfew of those who lived through it couldhave known how long Jews would suffer itsconsequences. It was the beginning of thelongest exile Israel has ever known. Notuntil the twentieth century would Jewsagain experience what it was like to be asovereign people in their own land.The catastrophe, driven home sixty-fiveyears later with the suppression of the BarKochba rebellion, was almost total. Thebasis of Jewish life lay in ruins. The Temple,symbol and centre of the nation, wasgone. There were to be no more kings orprophets, serving priests or sacrificeswithin the foreseeable future. The loss ofthe first Temple had been accompanied byhope. There were prophets who foretold returnand reconstruction. Now there were nosuch visions, at least none that carried immediatepromise. The loss of the secondTemple brought the danger of hopelessness.Jewish tradition has rightly identified onemoment as a symbol of the turning point.The Talmud tells of how the sage Johananben Zakkai stood out against the Jews ofhis day. During the siege of Jerusalem,leaders within the city believed that theycould prevail against Rome. Johanan knewthey were mistaken and argued unsuccessfullyfor peace. Others believed that theywould be saved by Divine intervention. TheMessiah was about to come. Against themJohanan taught, “If you have a sapling inyour hand, and people say to you, ‘Behold,there is the Messiah’ - go on with yourplanting and only then go out and receivehim.” Johanan was a religious realist in anage of dangerous military and apocalypticdreams.Johanan, according to the Talmud, had himselfsmuggled out of Jerusalem and wastaken to Vespasian. He told the generalthat he would shortly achieve greatness (in69 C.E., Vespasian was made Emperor ofRome) and made one request. “I ask nothingof you except Yavneh, where I might goand teach my disciples and there establisha house of study and perform all the commandments.”Johanan predicated Jewishsurvival not on military victory or the messianicage but on a house of study and agroup of teachers: Yavneh and its sages.Few decisions have had more lasting effects.For seventeen hundred years Jewsbecame a people held together by a singlethread: study of Judaism’s holy texts. Inplace of the temple came the synagogue,the yeshiva, and the bet midrash. In placeof sacrifices came prayer, learning, and theperformance of good deeds. The mantle ofWe are in an unusually good position totest Johanan ben Zakkai’s strategy becausehis was not the only version of Jewish life.We know from Josephus and other sourcesthat there were several tendencies in Jewishlife in the Second Commonwealth. Johananrepresented the group known as thePharisees, who gave rise to the rabbis ofthe Mishnah and Talmud. There was a secondand more powerful group known as theSadducees, who were in general wealthierand more closely associated with the Templeand priesthood. Josephus calls the thirdgroup the Essenes. They lived quasimonasticlives in small separatist communitiesof which the Qumran sect, known tous through the Dead Sea Scrolls, may havebeen one.For the Sadducees, the central dimensionof Jewish life was the state and its institutions:the Sanhedrin and the Temple. Forthe Essenes it was the messianic age, for itappears that they lived in imminent expectationof an apocalypse which would shakethe foundations of the world. For the Pharisees,as we have seen, it was education.Their key institution was the school. Theirfigure of authority was the scholar. Theirtouchstone of Jewish identity was individuallearning and observance of the Torah.Neither Sadducees nor Essenes survived. Of their memory,only the most fragmentary traces remain. There was atime when both groups flourished and when each was convincedit held the key to the Jewish future. But historyruled otherwise. Once again, education proved the onlyroute to continuity.P A G E 14 • C O N T I N U I T Y M A G A Z I N E