First Gate
It is summer of the year 2449 (1311 B.C.E.), and the Exodus from Egypt and the Giving of the Torah are still recent memories. We had left Mount Sinai on the 20th of Iyyar (Numbers 10:11), making a 3-day journey (v.33) concluding on 23rd Iyyar; then a 30-day sojourn in Kivroth ha-Ta’avah (ibid. 11:20, 34) concluding on 22nd Sivan, and finally seven days in Hazeroth (11:35, 12:15-16) before reaching the Paran Desert (ibid. 12:16) on 29th Sivan.
On that day Moshe sent out the twelve spies on their 40-day mission to reconnoitre the Holy Land, and they returned on schedule on the 8th of Av.
The plan was for them to be debriefed, and the next day – the ninth of Av – we would enter our Land in joy and holiness, taking possession of our inheritance, and the ninth of Av would become a celebration for the generations, a festival of redemption.
But the plan has gone horribly wrong when the spies betrayed their mission. They returned on schedule, but gave an evil report of the Land, demoralising the entire nation.
Night has fallen and the nation is crying in despair (Numbers 14:1). It is the evening of the 9th of Av, and “G-d said to them: You cried this night for no reason – so I decree that this will be a night of crying throughout the generations” (Talmud: Ta’anit 29a; Sotah 35a; Sanhedrin 104b. Midrash: Bamidbar Rabbah 16:20; Tanchuma, Sh’lach Lecha 12 et al).
This day, which should have been the day of national liberation, the culmination of the Exodus, has instead become a day of tragedy.
Second Gate
Almost a millennium later. Israel has been firmly ensconced on its Land for as long as anyone could remember, a sovereign nation with a long and rich history. Judges and Kings have ruled this Land, we have fought off enemies times beyond number.
But now the nation has sinned against G-d, and He has used Babylon as His rod of fury. Babylon has invaded. The Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar, sent his chief executioner Nevuzaradan to conquer Jerusalem, and he entered the city on the 7th of Av (2 Kings 25:8).
As the Talmud (Ta’anit 29a) records, the invaders first entered the Holy Temple on the 7th of Av, celebrating their victory there for two days. On the 9th they set the Holy Temple on fire, and it continued burning until the 10th (vide Jeremiah 52:12).
Third Gate
It is summer in the year 3826 (66 C.E.), and the Land of Israel is groaning under harsh and repressive Roman occupation. Gessius Florus has been Procurator for two years, and has been relentlessly hostile to the Jews.
Now, after two years of mounting tensions, Florus has plundered the Treasury of the Holy Temple, demanding 17 talents, equal to the value of 1 metric ton (2,200 lbs) of gold.
A couple of Jews, with archetypal Jewish humour, have been going around Jerusalem with baskets collecting gifts for Florus, portraying him as a beggar in need of charity. This sarcasm is eminently understandable; but Florus, infuriated by this humiliation, has sent a detachment of soldiers to plunder Jerusalem and wreak bloody vengeance upon the Jews there.
It was the 16th of Iyyar – and Judæa has been ignited. Within days, the Jews of Jerusalem rose in such fury that they drove the Romans out, restoring full Jewish sovereign independence to the city. No one knows it yet, but this will go down in history as the First Great Jewish Revolt.
Almost immediately, the Kohen Gadol [High Priest] Elazar ben Chananiah decrees that the daily sacrifice for the Emperor in Rome be ceased; this is an open declaration of revolution against Rome.
And from there, the Jewish revolt will spread rapidly.
All over the country, the Roman army is in retreat from Jewish forces – primarily the Kanna’im (the Zealots), commanded by Yochanan ben Levi from Gush Halav (the last town in the Galilee to hold out against the Romans), Shimon bar Giora, and Elazar ben Shimon (not to be confused with the Tanna Elazar bar Shimon, the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai).
Responsible for defending the Galilee is the 30-year-old Yosef Ben Matityahu. He chose Kfar Akko, 11 km (7 miles) north-east of Akko (Acre), as the centre of his resistance, built up fortifications there, and (with suitable modesty) renamed the town Yosef after himself.
(Today the town is called Yasif – an Arab corruption of Yosef – and is entirely Arab-inhabited. Yasif hit the headlines earlier this week, when Mikhail Samara, a 27-year-old resident of Yasif, was killed by shrapnel from an Iron Dome missile which was intercepting an incoming missile from Lebanon.)
When the Romans attacked, his soldiers fought bravely. Yosef Ben Matityahu himself meekly surrendered, switched sides, betrayed his soldiers and fellow-commanders, and joined the Roman forces against his fellow-Jews.
He also Latinised his name, and is now universally known as Josephus Flavius.
In charge of defending Jerusalem are Yosef Ben Gurion (who would be killed in action in 68) and the Kohen Gadol Chananiah.
Against them, surrounding and besieging Jerusalem, are four Roman legions – the Fifth, Twelfth, and Fifteenth to the west, and the crack Tenth Legion – the Special Forces of the Roman Empire, of whom we will yet hear more – on the Mount of Olives to the east. These legions are commanded by Titus (who nine years later will become Emperor of Rome) and his lieutenant, the renegade Jew Tiberius Julius Alexander.
This standoff will lasted for four years, with Titus determined to break the stalemate and conquer Jerusalem.
In 70, Titus employed a stratagem that was quite likely suggested by the Jewish traitor Tiberius: he allowed Jewish pilgrims to enter Jerusalem unhindered to celebrate Pesach and bring their Paschal sacrifices, then sealed the exits. The overcrowding was untenable, the city’s infrastructure was unable to cater to such a swollen population, and food and water supplies were rapidly depleted.
Titus then sent the other renegade Jew and Roman sycophant, the historian Josephus Flavius, to negotiate a truce with the Jewish commanders. They rebuffed him, shooting him with an arrow and wounding him (no doubt one of the reasons that Josephus’ account of the war is so viciously biased against the Jewish defenders).
The Roman forces subsequently began closing in on Jerusalem, breaching the recently-built Third (outer) Wall about five weeks after Pesach, and the Second Wall a week later. They then attacked the First (innermost) Wall and the Antonia Fortress (on the north-west corner of the Temple Mount), and were repulsed by the Jewish defenders who successfully defended the heart of Jerusalem on 28th Iyyar.
No one knows this yet, but on the same date 1,897 years later, Israel will liberate Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation in the Six Day War.
Titus regrouped his legions, built a siege wall, and launched a renewed attack some seven weeks later, breaching the First Wall and capturing the Antonia Fortress on the 17th of Tammuz.
And after three weeks of vicious, bloody fighting and desperate and heroic defence by Jewish forces, Titus’ Roman legions captured the rest of Jerusalem and destroyed the Holy Temple on the 9th of Av.
This day, which was destined to be a day of liberation and redemption, was still a day of tragedy. The curse of the Spies is yet unbroken.
The Great Revolt is all but over. The Emperor Vespasian struck a series of coins imprinted “Judæa Capta”, and the sole remaining rebel holdout was Metzada (Masada) in the Judean Desert, 4 km (2 ½ miles) west of the Dead Sea.
The almost 1,000 men, women, and children besieged on the plateau atop of this mountain will hold out for another three years. The Romans will need the crack Tenth Legion and several auxiliary units – some 9,000 warriors in all – and several thousand Jewish prisoner-slaves to capture and defeat Metzada in the year 73.
The Jews there avoided capture, slavery, and ignominious humiliation by committing mass suicide.
It has taken the unimaginably vast might of Rome seven years to quash the Jewish Revolt. And in the year 81, the new Roman Emperor Domitian erected the Arch of Titus in Rome celebrating the Jews’ defeat.
Fourth Gate
Actually, even then, the Jews were not finally defeated. Minor conflicts and uprisings continued throughout the Roman province of Judæa, until the last and greatest of them all – the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132.
The military commander was Shimon Bar Kochba, and the spiritual leader was Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest of all the Talmudic Sages.
They did something that no other nation in the history of the Roman Empire ever achieved: they revolted against Roman occupation, and kicked the European colonialist invaders out of their homeland.
For three years there was complete Jewish independence and sovereignty in Israel.
The Roman Emperor Hadrian, incensed and humiliated, brought his best general, Julius Severus, from Britannia to crush the Jewish rebellion. Beginning with just two legions in 132 (the Sixth and the Tenth, which we have already encountered twice), he increased to 5 legions (80,000 soldiers) in 133, and eventually seven full legions, reinforced by cohorts of another 5 legions and 50 auxiliary units, in 134.
Seven full legions – when the entire Roman Imperial Army comprised just 28 legions! That is to say, more than one-fourth of the might of Rome, just to reconquer one single province of the Empire!
And the cost to Rome was almost unbearably high: the XXII (Deiotarana) Legion was destroyed; the IX (Hispana) Legion was so attritted that it never recovered its former power, never fought gain, and was disbanded a few decades later; and the crack X (Fretensis) Legion sustained heavier casualties than it had ever sustained in any previous battle, or would ever sustain again.
In 135, the Romans reconquered the entire country. The final stronghold of the Jewish rebels was Beitar, which the Romans captured on the 9th of Av, 65 years to the day after destroying the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
It was definitely not a defeat to be ashamed of. Quite the contrary: the Jews proved that they fought more fiercely, more determinedly, more courageously, more tenaciously than any other nation that Rome ever conquered and colonised. It was a truly magnificent defeat.
Fifth Gate
Most of the world reckons the year as 1914, but we Jews count it as 5674: in Hebrew תרע"ד, an ominous portent. תִּרְעַד, meaning “she will shake”, “she will shudder”; equally “you will shake”, “you will shudder”.
On the 5th of Tammuz (29th June), a Serb nationalist, Gavrillo Princip, hoping for Serbian independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
In short order Austria-Hungary sends an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia; on Rosh Chodesh Av (24th June) Serbia mobilises, expecting an Austro-Hungarian attack, and the next day Austria-Hungary mobilises; on the 5th of Av (28th June) Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia; on Shabbat 9th of Av (1st August), Germany (Austria-Hungary’s most important ally) declares war on Russia (Serbia’s most important ally); on the 10th of Av – the day of the Fast – Germany invades Luxembourg; the same day, Turkey and Germany ratify the Ottoman-German Alliance, bringing the Turkish Ottoman Empire (the Caliphate) into the war; the next day Germany declares war on France; on the 12th of Av (4th August) Germany invades Belgium, and Britain – an ally of Belgium – declares war on Germany.
Two days later Austria-Hungary declares war on Russia, and Serbia declares war on Germany.
The world has rapidly been engulfed in this violent conflagration, known then as the Great War, today known as the First World War.
The 9th of Av is a day of disaster. The First World War was a global disaster on incomprehensible scale; and it led directly, inexorably, to the Second World War, an even greater global disaster, and the Holocaust.
And yet the 9th of Av is also a day of redemption: on the morning of the 9th of Marcheshvan 5765 (29th October 1914) Turkey attacked Russia; Turkey, which had occupied and controlled Israel for 400 years, was now irretrievably in the Great War and three days later Russia, Britain, and France all formally declared war on Turkey.
The ultimate result was the defeat of Turkey, the dissolution of the Caliphate, and the remains of the Ottoman Empire being divided up between the victorious Allies.
On the 17th of Marcheshvan 5678 (2nd November 1917) Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, recognising the Jewish historical claim to the Land of Israel. This was the first time that a major world power had power officially and unequivocally recognised this ancient right since Rome had extended that same recognition to the Maccabean Government in 161 B.C.E.
Sixth Gate
The 9th of Av 5784. Israel is in the turmoil of a war which began 10 months ago, and no end in sight.
As I write these words on afternoon of the 8th of Av, the tension is mounting. The spring is being wound ever-tighter.
Will there be some major attack in the very near future? – No one knows yet…but this is akin to hearing the leaves of the trees begin to rustle as the winds begin to blow before the hurricane bursts forth, the feeling of the hairs on your arms prickling with electricity as the storm-clouds approach, hearing the sound of distant drums which might or might not be heading our way.
Will Iran, or one of its proxies, attack Israel today, tomorrow, the next day? Is the current war about to spiral into something vaster?
Again, no one knows yet…but the 9th of Av is a junction. Any event on this day can be part of disaster, or part of redemption.
But whatever may happen in the next very few days, it is not happenstance, not random chance. The ninth of Av was predestined to be a day of redemption, a day of celebration.
Our current reality of the ninth of Av as a day of mourning is an anomaly – even though it has persisted for most of our history.
Will this year be the year in which we restore the ninth of Av to its intended character?