Category: From the Print Archives

Thoughts on Tzom Gedaliah
By LARRY YUDELSON

(From the October 4, 1984 edition of Hamevaser: A Student Publication of Traditional Thought and Ideas Published by the Jewish Studies Divisions of Yeshiva University)

After two or even three days of festive eating, who would even think of eating on Tzom Gedaliah, even if it weren’t a fast? And of course, being Aseret Ymei Tshuva, we would say slichot and avinu malkeinu anyway. If this were not enough to make Tzom Gedaliah the least noticeable of all the fsat days, it is overshadowed by Yom Kippur, the archetypical fast and the hardest, which is but one week away.

This is all most unfortunate, since I believe that Tzom Gedaliah has more immediacy and meaning to us than the other fasts which specifically recall the stages in the destruction of Jerusalem. Traditionally these days served to focus and contain our mourning for Jerusalem, but though we still weep for our long history, the ruins and desolation of Jerusalem do not bring tears to the eyes of us who are privileged to be living in atchalta d’geula (to me the terms shomema and b’zuya recall Washington Heights, more than the now thriving Jerusalem).

Tzom Gedaliah recalls a situation closer to our own. The Temple has been destroyed, Jerusalem is in ruins, and most of the Jewish people are in exile. Judah has but a faint glimmer of autonomy under its Jewish Governor  Gedaliah ben Ahikam, but Babylon is firmly in charge. Still, the Jewish refugees who fled to Edom and Moab begin to make their way back from their dispersion. Llfe begins again. There is wine and fruit to be harvested, and the harvest is good.

But Gedaliah was a quisling. He swore his loyalty to the Chaldeans; to Ishmael ben Nethaniah he was a traitor. So Ishmael, with the support of the king of Ammon (who also hated Babylon), assassinated Gedaliah and his men. Gedaliah, the Babylonian lackey, is ,dead-long live Free Judah! But the “freed” Jews saw what was coming-Babylon looking to avenge the death of her governor-and fled to Egypt. The final act in the destruction of the Jewish state had been played.

Six hundred years later, when Judea was a Roman province, a rebellion was in progress. Some Jews would just as happily be Romans, others would settle for imperial dominion if they would be free to study Torah (Chazal fell into this category), and others would not settle for anything less than total freedom and political independence. This latter group was faced with a problem: their compatriots, willing as they were to compromise, were more inclined to sit passively through a long siege and negotiate a suitable settlement with the centurions than to risk their all in battle. They were not fighting hard enough. So the Zealots forced battle on them by burning the grain that would have fed Jerusalem through long years of siege. Now Jerusalem had no choice but to fight and win-or starve. And as we still do every Tamuz and Av, they starved.

What do these tragic incidents have in common? Most obviously, a decision by a small group to decide the fate of klal Yisrael, without consulting either the people as a whole, or the religious leadership (Jeremiah and Yochanan ben Zakai). They thought they knew what was best for the nation, that they were the only ones fit to lead it. They lead us to tragedy and disaster.

There is another factor these groups share: their primary value. They were devoted to the independence of the Jewish state, but not to the Jewish religion. Better dead than Babylonian or Roman was their motto, unlike Jeremiah and Chazal, who saw the possibility of devotion to God even as prisoners and a conquered people. It was a devotion to nationhood as a goal in itself and it lead to an unwillingness to compromise, to accept anything less than total national sovereignty.

The application to our own times is obvious. In the past few years groups of Israelis have increasingly opposed attempts by the state to achieve peace, not through the appropriate means of democratic debate, nor through rallying the voice of our religious leadership; but taking our national fate into their own hands, from Yamit to the Mosque of Omar. Let us learn the lessons of our tragic history.