Part 1: Seeds of tragedy
It is the 8th of Av, a year-and-a-quarter after the Exodus. 40 days earlier, on the 29th of Sivan, Moshe had sent 12 spies on a reconnaissance mission to spy out the Land of Israel.
Today they have returned, delivering an evil report. Those 12 men would prefer to remain in the desert, safe from the hazards of living in Israel as a free nation. Better exile than sovereign independence, they argue. Liberty means responsibility, and they fear responsibility.
But their fear is contagious, and infects the entire nation. After 210 years as slaves, their fear of freedom and its concomitant responsibility is eminently understandable.
But it does demonstrate that as a nation, they are not yet ready for freedom.
Nevertheless, it also demonstrates a lack of faith in G-d, Who had brought them out from Egypt just 16 months earlier. What? - After defeating Egypt, the mightiest country in the world; after bringing the Children of Israel through the Red Sea; after bringing them to Mount Sinai and giving them the Torah; after feeding them with Manna for all this time - they don’t believe that He can lead them to victory over the Canaanite nations and then protect them in the Land of Israel?
Evidently not.
The sun sets on the 8th of Av, darkness falls over the desert camp, and as the 9th of Av begins, the Jews weep in despair.
“You weep this night for no reason?” - said G-d - “I will yet give you a reason to weep on this night!” (Ta’anit 29a).
Part 2: Sunset
It is the fourth day of Pesach, 18th Nissan 48 C.E. Judea is a province of the Roman Empire, and has been for 110 years. Queen Shlom-Tziyon (Salome Alexander), the last independent monarch of Israel, is long-since dead, and ever since 62 C.E., Judea has been nominally a Jewish kingdom, in fact a vassal state subservient to Rome.
Even this pretence of Jewish autonomy is over: the last king, Agrippas, died four years earlier, and Rome abolished the monarchy and appointed procurators to rule the province.
For 110 years Judea has been wracked by Roman oppression, civil war, and constant uprisings against Rome.
In this year, Judea is groaning under the rule of the third Roman Procurator, Ventidius Cumanus.
He had decreed that Roman soldiers be stationed in and around the Holy Temple whenever more than 6 Jews gathered there (which in practice meant almost constantly). And on this day, a Roman soldier decided to have a little sport.
As the Jews were worshipping, bringing the Festival Sacrifices, he turned his back on them, lifted his tunic, and “mooned” them, making the sort of noises through his lips that most of us grew out of by the time we were ten.
The Jews, outraged at this desecration, spontaneously attacked the Roman garrison. This swiftly escalated into a country-wide uprising, the first major Jewish revolt against Roman occupation - indescribably brave, but ultimately hopeless.
Josephus Flavius (Antiquities of the Jews, XX:5:3 and Wars of the Jews, II:12:3-7) estimates 20,000 Jews killed in the initial melee, while Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History, Book 20 chapter 5) puts their number at 30,000.
This was only the beginning.
Two years later a Roman official, Stephanus, was attacked and robbed near Jerusalem, and the Romans inflicted reprisals on all the villages around. One of the soldiers found a Torah-scroll, and ripped it apart while berating the Jewish villagers.
This almost provoked another large-scale rebellion, which Ventidius Cumanus narrowly avoided by sentencing the soldier to death.
The Jews in Judea were demonstrating their ability and willingness to throw off the yoke of Rome. However harsh and cruel Roman reprisals may be, the Jews refuse to accept defeat.
Part 3: Fighting for independence
It is the 16th of Iyyar 66 C.E., and Judea is about to explode into the greatest revolt yet - the revolt which will lead to the destruction of the Holy Temple.
Gessius Florus has been procurator for two years, and is unremittingly hostile to the Jews. After two years of mounting tensions, the final outrage which triggered the Great Revolt was Florus’ plundering the Treasury of the Holy Temple, demanding 17 talents, equal to the value of 1 metric ton (2,200 lbs) of gold.
Some Jews, with archetypal Jewish humour, went 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, sent a detachment of soldiers to plunder Jerusalem and wreak bloody vengeance upon the Jews there.
Judæa is 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 for the first time in 128 years.
The Kohen Gadol [High Priest] Elazar ben Chananiah immediately stopped the daily sacrifice for the Emperor in Rome, which was an open declaration of revolution against Rome.
From there, the Jewish revolt spread rapidly.
All over the country, the Roman army was being defeated by Jewish forces - primarily the Kanna’im (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 was the 30-year-old Yosef Ben Matityahu, who surrendered without even attempting to fight. He switched sides, began collaborating with the Romans against the Jews, and latinised his name to Josephus Flavius.
In charge of defending Jerusalem were Yosef Ben Gurion (who was killed in action in 68) and the Kohen Gadol Chananiah.
Against them, surrounding and besieging Jerusalem, were four Roman legions - the Fifth, Twelfth, and Fifteenth to the west, and the Tenth on the Mount of Olives to the east. These legions were commanded by Titus (who nine years later would become Emperor of Rome) and his lieutenant, the renegade Jew Tiberius Julius Alexander.
This standoff lasted for four years, with Titus determined to break the stalemate and conquer Jerusalem.
In 70, Titus employed a stratagem that was 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 - the same date that Israel would liberate Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation in the Six Day War 1,897 years later.
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.
The Great Revolt was all but over, and the Emperor Vespasian struck a series of coins imprinted “Judæa Capta”. The sole remaining rebel holdout was the isolated and besieged Metzada (Masada) in the Judean Desert, 52 km (32 miles) south and slightly east of Jerusalem, 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 held out for another three years. After bringing in the crack Tenth Legion (of whom we will soon hear more) and several auxiliary units - some 9,000 warriors in all - and several thousand Jewish prisoner-slaves, the Romans finally defeated Metzada.
The Jews there avoided capture by committing mass suicide.
And in the year 81, the new Roman Emperor Domitian erected the Arch of Titus in Rome celebrating the Jews’ defeat.
It had taken the entire might of the Roman Empire seven years to defeat the Jews. Defending their ancestral Land, the Jews fought more tenaciously than any other nation in the Empire.
An inspiring episode, indeed!
And even then, the Jews refused to concede defeat. Minor conflicts and uprisings continued throughout the province of Judæa, until the last and greatest of them all, the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132.
Part 4: Flash of light in the darkness
The military commander was Shimon Bar Kochba, and the spiritual leader was Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest of all the Talmudic Sages. An indication of Rabbi Akiva’s greatness is the principle that in any halakhic debate between Rabbi Akiva and any other singe authority, we invariably follow Rabbi Akiva’s ruling.
They did something that no other nation in the history of the Roman Empire ever achieved: they revolted against Roman occupation, and kicked those 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. He began with two legions in 132, the Sixth and the Tenth; the Tenth Legion was the elite of the Roman Army - the Green Berets, the SAS, the Spetznaz, of Rome.
When these were unable to defeat the Jews, 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! More than one-fourth of the entire might of Rome, just to reconquer one single province of the Empire!
The cost to Rome was almost unbearably high: the XXII (Deiotarana) Legion, whose speciality was quashing local revolts, was destroyed; the IX (Hispana) Legion was so attritted that it never recovered its former power, never fought again, and was disbanded twenty-three years 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, just 10 km (6 miles) south-west of Jerusalem, which the Romans captured on the 9th of Av, 65 years to the day after destroying the Holy Temple.
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.
Part 5: Towards dawn
For the next 1,813 years, Israel would never see any independent state. It would pass from conqueror to conqueror, from empire to empire, from occupier to occupier. Countless other nations and cultures would attempt to settle in our Land, and all would fail.
No one else would ever succeed in establishing an independent state on Israeli soil. Many would try - Romans, Persian Sassanids, Arab Muslims, Egyptian Muslims, Mongols, European Christian Crusaders, the French Empire, Ottoman Turks, the British Empire - and all would fail.
The country would remain bleak and inhospitable…until its native sons, the Children of Israel, would return to reclaim their ancestral heritage.
The great British wartime leader, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, famously said: “Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished”.
Israel went down fighting. And though Israel was defeated, it was a magnificent and inspiring defeat, a defeat which ultimately destroyed the Roman Empire.
And today, 2,000 years on, we, the Jewish Nation, are still here to commemorate our history; while the mighty empire which defeated us has long centuries since crumbled into the dust of history.
The destruction of the 9th of Av was not the end. It was but the beginning of the night, awaiting the new dawn of redemption.