Jewish Unity and World Unity

This year the fast day, Tisha B’Av, begins Saturday night and ends Sunday night. Tisha B’Av commemorates events that are part of the historical record, but they are also part of a more complex spiritual history of the Jewish people.

It causes me to reflect on Jewish and world unity, whose lack, in the rabbinic mind, is the source of these calamities:

In 587 BCE, Nebuchadnezzer II of the Babylonian Empire pillaged the Temple of Jerusalem. We commemorate that day on the 9th of the Jewish month of Av, or Tisha B’Av. The Second Temple, rebuilt after Cyrus the Great ended the Judean exile, was destroyed by the Romans, also on Tisha B’Av in 70 CE. 

The Four Empires

In between the destruction of the First Temple and the rebuilding of the Second, the Judean exile Daniel interpreted the dream of the briefly-reigning King Belshezar, who succeeded Nebuchadnezzar after he went mad. 

Belshezar saw four beasts, as recorded in the Book of Daniel, Chapter 7:

“The first was like a lion but had eagles’ wings. As I looked on, its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted off the ground and set on its feet like a man and given the mind of a man.” — the rabbis in the midrashic book of Leviticus Rabbah understood this as the Empire of Babylon.

“A second, different beast, which was like a bear but raised on one side, and with three fangs in its mouth among its teeth; it was told, ‘Arise, eat much meat!’” — the rabbis understood this as Persia.

“Like a leopard, and it had on its back four wings like those of a bird; the beast had four heads, and dominion was given to it.” — the rabbis understood this as Greece.

“There was a fourth beast—fearsome, dreadful, and very powerful, with great iron teeth—that devoured and crushed, and stamped the remains with its feet. It was different from all the other beasts which had gone before it; and it had ten horns. 

While I was gazing upon these horns, a new little horn sprouted up among them; three of the older horns were uprooted to make room for it. There were eyes in this horn like those of a man, and a mouth that spoke arrogantly." — the rabbis understood this beast to be Edom. Edom is interpreted to be Rome.

The Maharal of Prague, in his book on Hanukkah called “Ner Mitzvah, ” explained how each beast was each kingdom. The lion, or Babylon, conquered the first Temple out of a desire for domination. The hungry bear, or Persia, had an insatiable desire for physical goods — look no further than King Achashverosh’s massive feast in the Book of Esther. The clever leopard, being Greece, was a kingdom that tried to defeat Israel intellectually by Hellenizing it. 

But the most fearsome beast, the one resembling a horned, arrogant man, destroyed the Second Temple out of a desire for annihilation. Rome, he theorized, was motivated by something out of the norm.

World Unity

In the Maharal’s vision, the world has two timelines, that of Israel, and that of the four kingdoms. If Israel is united, then the four kingdoms do not reign. If Israel is broken, then the four kingdoms reign, one after the other. Babylon, then Persia, then Greece and finally Rome. Rome is bordered in its place in time by Greece before it, and the void in front of it.

The void is two things at once, a future with the Messiah, and it is the nothingness which will be filled by this future. It is this nothingness, this emptiness, which fills and defines Rome.

“And… the fourth empire has attached/intrinsic to them Emptiness, for this empire is the end and finish of the empires, and there will be loss and Lacking to all the empires, and in the fourth empire is attached intrinsically to Emptiness. And in that attachment to Emptiness this brings Emptiness upon another, and because of this it [Rome] destroys everything as well.” (Ner Mitzvah Vol. 1)

Rome, in the rabbinic idea, is not an empire that lives in the past, but the continuity of Western civilization itself. 

The Maharal’s read on the West is that you can see it as a sign of progression, in that it moves into the future, and into a better Messianic future for the world, but at the same, understand that it is not inherently more progressive. It is filled with the nihilistic tendencies that Hannah Arendt analyzed as a part of the “banality of evil,” that those who committed atrocities in the 20th century were filled with nothingness itself. In this way, the Maharal anticipated the genocidal nature of the future almost a half a millennium in the past, in 16th century Prague.

The Maharal, building upon the ideas of the Talmudic past, sees Jewish unity as being metaphysically foundational to the universe itself and to the liberation of humanity. 

In the Talmud Gittin, the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, the guest who is mistakenly invited to a party and refused entry in an escalating series of mutual insults and embarrassments, roping in the rabbis of the time, and finally bringing in the Romans to conquer Jerusalem, is seen as the prime example of sinat chinam, or “baseless hatred” that rips apart the Jewish people, making them vulnerable to destruction. 

The Maharal sees that Jewish unity itself is not only important for the Jews, but is also the source of world unity. He derives this from the messianic line in the prophet Zechariah that we recall in the Aleinu prayer: 

“And God shall be sovereign over all the earth; in that day there shall be one God with one name.” (Zechariah 14:9)

From here, two questions come to me:

Does Jewish unity have any connection to world unity, to the messianic age?

How do we achieve Jewish unity, and what is it?

Rabbi Hollander once demanded of me, in the name of his teacher Rabbi Alan Lew, to see Tisha B’Av as the beginning of the period of time that leads to the High Holidays. Moving from the destruction of the Jewish world due to communal problems, we begin to focus on ourselves as individuals, hoping to take accounting of ourselves and how we react to problems. From Yom Kippur, where together we proclaim our faults, but quietly we meditate upon them, we move to Sukkot, where the world comes together to Jerusalem to pray for rain, for abundance. In fact, based on that very section in Zechariah, we come to understand that in the Messianic age, the world will unite in Jerusalem to give offerings.

In other words, the cleansing aspects of Yom Kippur can give rise to a Jewish people who have it within them to unite, and in doing so unite others. The Rambam in his medieval Mishneh Torah halakhic commentary, attempts to lower the euphoria of future Jewish domination.

“The Sages and the prophets did not yearn for the Messianic era in order to have dominion over the entire world, to rule over the gentiles, to be exalted by the nations, or to eat, drink, and celebrate. Rather, they desired to be free to involve themselves in Torah and wisdom without any pressures or disturbances, so that they would merit the world to come, as explained in Hilchot Teshuvah.

In that era, there will be neither famine or war, envy or competition for good will flow in abundance and all the delights will be freely available as dust. The occupation of the entire world will be solely to know God.
Therefore, the Jews will be great sages and know the hidden matters, grasping the knowledge of their Creator according to the full extent of human potential, as Isaiah 11:9 states: 'The world will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the ocean bed."” (Mishnah Torah, Kings and Wars 12)

This idea, of a world free from human and societal conflict, drawn into a knowing and connection with God, is also the central premise of some of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s Sippurei Ma’asos, his stories that he told in Yiddish at the turn of the 19th century. In his 12th story, the Prayer Leader, who converts the money-obsessed and violent people of the world (who categorized people as gods and animals depending on their wealth) into his way of life using magic foods, you might notice that nowhere are Jews mentioned — this is a story about the world:

“The Warrior gave them from these foods and they brought the foods into their country, and as soon as they gave them from these foods they all immediately began to cast away their money and buried themselves in the earth out of disgrace; and the very wealthy and the gods were most ashamed, but even the lesser people who were called "animals" and "birds" by them were also ashamed for having been so little until now in their own eyes because they had no money, because now they knew that on the contrary it's just the reverse: money is the main disgrace. 

For these foods have such an effect, that whoever eats from the foods is very repulsed by money, for he senses the bad smell of money, just like feces exactly. They all cast away their money and their gold and silver. Then they sent them the Prayer Leader and he gave them teshuvot [ways to make amends and return to God] and tikkunim [repairs; remedies], and he cleansed them. And the King became king over the entire world, and the entire world returned to God, Blessed be He, and they all were involved only in Torah, prayer, teshuvah and good deeds. Amen, so be His will. Blessed is Hashem for eternity, Amen and Amen.” (Sippurei Ma'asos 12)

World unity, as the Jewish imagination evolves, is characterized by the reign of God, but more specifically, a God who created all people — and not a reign of Jews. This isn’t necessarily a consensus position, but an emerging one, moving from a physical king, eternal life and expansive land to a world of higher consciousness, cooperation and wisdom.

Understanding that this is the world unity that the Maharal alludes to, we now move to understand what it will take to bring this unity, and to what role Jews actually have in it, by our own logical understanding. 

Jewish Unity and Antisemitism

Looking to Theodor Herzl’s original political thought, he reasoned that with Jews as minorities everywhere, antisemitism was implacable. As long as there were narratives, religious or secularized, relying on Jews to be the minority who represent a central evil in the world (or in my view, goodness), there would always be a way to divert the attention of the public to the Jew — as they say in modern circles, “noticing” the Jew — away from the repair that people need to do on themselves. As a nation with a state (and not specifically in any given place in the world), Jews could become a people that defined themselves on their own terms, and not in the center of anyone’s narrative.

Herzl was contradicted by the Russian Jews at his conferences to bring about a Jewish state, who needed the redemption offered by the Holy Land to redeem them from their suffering, from the many horrific pogroms. His suggestion, Uganda, would not do it for them.

In the Land of Israel, the sacralization of the Jewish role in the world was reignited. Here, Herzl’s theory no longer worked: Jews could not play the role of any other nation when they were in their ancestral home — their existence continued the narrative of the Jew as a central force in the world, just as it did as minorities in other countries, primarily because of the apocalyptic role the land of Israel plays in religious narratives.

What if Jews could overcome the role of antisemitism in the world? I posit that without this fantasy of eternal evil or eternal good, nations would have no choice but to confront themselves in reality, to do the kind of kheshbon hanefesh or internal accounting that we take on on Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur. The eternal evil and good of the Jews is always external to people, but those forces actually exist inside of them, waiting to be examined.

How could Jews defeat antisemitism? It is unclear. I certainly do not believe that you can “confront” antisemitism. I do not think you can convince people out of it. Antisemitism and philosemitism are the same worldview, not a mere prejudice. It is something, I think, that exists also in Jewish people in the form of auto-philosemitism. The core of the idea is that we are the center of the world. 

I think that every people has a central myth that places them in the center of it, and therefore in the center of the universe, but as the Rambam writes, the highest point of our spiritual centrality is our complete abdication of narrative centrality, and even of fundamental metaphysical difference.

We can not reasonably believe other people can let go of the idea that we are at the center until we let go of it ourselves. 

Tisha B’Av

This brings me to Tisha B’Av, when the Jewish people were so certain that God would never let His home be destroyed. Yet God threatened Israel many times with this if they did not stop oppressing others in their society. And as we saw in the Talmud, one of the underlying points in this oppression was hatred for one another.

We must become humble enough to not see ourselves as better than any other segment of the Jewish people. If we do so, we will be invested in speaking to each other so that we can hear each other. If we do not hate each other, we can be in the position to demand the improvement of our international nation, as opposed to its abandonment or disconnection. 

Humility desacralizes us and decentralizes us. It reminds us that we are not specially punished or rewarded beyond the degrees that anybody else is, and that we live the consequences of our own actions, and act upon our own thoughts. This is what gives us the means to be united and just — approaching each other with humility. If we can do that, the nations of the world can learn to do that as well, and jettison the mythic “other” from solving their problems.

Lamentations 4:12-13:

The kings of the earth did not believe,
Nor any of the inhabitants of the world,
That foe or adversary could enter
The gates of Jerusalem.     

It was for the sins of her prophets,
The iniquities of her priests,
Who had shed in her midst
The blood of the just.

לֹא הֶאֱמִינוּ מַלְכֵי־אֶרֶץ (וכל) [כֹּל] יֹשְׁבֵי תֵבֵל כִּי יָבֹא צַר וְאוֹיֵב בְּשַׁעֲרֵי יְרוּשָׁלָ͏ִם׃ {ס}

מֵחַטֹּאות נְבִיאֶיהָ עֲונֹת כֹּהֲנֶיהָ הַשֹּׁפְכִים בְּקִרְבָּהּ דַּם צַדִּיקִים׃ {ס}