Efrat, Israel -- The Biblical reading of Devarim always falls out on the Sabbath preceding Tisha B’Av, the black, leak fast commemorating the destruction of our Holy Temples. This is not merely an “accident” of the calendar; in our Biblical portion, Moses reviews his life as leader of Israel in his farewell address to his people and he cries out, “How so Eicha) can I bear your troublesomeness and your burdens and your belittling barbs?” (Deuteronomy 1:12), a verse which begins with the same word that opens the Scroll of Lamentations (“How so- Eicha- does she sit alone, the city filled with our nation”).  Hence, according to most customs the Torah reader on the Sabbath chants the Biblical verse Eicha with the very same haunting melody used for the Eicha reading on Tisha B’Av.
<>What is the real significance of our mourning when we weep for the destruction of the Temple?  how truly important could the Temple have been if Judaism managed to survive without it for the last 2000 years?  And of the essence of the Temple was the sacrificial rite, how many modern Jews can really identify with the slaughter of animals as offerings for a Temple?

I believe that if we explore a fundamental difference of opinion between two great Jewish leaders- Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiva- we will gain a great insight into the most profound significance of our Temple, an insight which will instruct us as to the irretrievable loss we suffer as a result of its destruction.  It is common knowledge that Rabbi ben Zakkai managed to leave Jerusalem and meet with Vespasian, the leader of the Roman armed forces besieging the Temple, with the request that he spare the City of Yavneh and her wise men, the Sanhedrin of seventy-one Jewish Sages.  Rabbi Yohanan was willing to relinquish Jerusalem and the Temple so long as the Jews could remain in Israel and maintain their ongoing interpretations of the Oral Law 69 C.E.).

Approximately six decades later, Rabbi Akiva bitterly condemned this accommodating stance of the teacher (R. Yohanan) of his two teachers (R. Yehoshua and R. Eliezer) referring to a verse from the Prophet Isaiah which he applied to ben Zakkai: “G-d turns the sages backwards and transforms their wisdom into foolishness” (B.T. fitting 56 a,b). opparently, Rabbi Akiva believed that Rabbi Yohanan gave up too much too soon, that he should have continued to fight in order to retain Jerusalem and the Holy Temple.  Indeed, R. Akiva put his ideas and ideals into practice by spearheading the Bar Kochba rebellion against Rome (app. 135 C.E.) for the avowed purpose of Israel’s liberation of Jerusalem and rebuilding of the Holy Temple.

What was the fundamental difference of opinion between these sages?  Apparently, R. Yohanan ben Zakkai believed that the only value (in addition to the prohibitions of murder, sexual immorality and idolatry) for which one may forfeit one’s life is the survival of the Jewish nation; hence the Bible introduces the concept of a life-endangering obligatory war (milchemet mitzvah) for the sake of the conquering the land of Israel at the dawn of our history, because without the land of Israel there would never have developed a nation of Israel.  Given the overwhelming might of the Roman Empire and the Roman armies, Rabbi Yohanan concluded that if the land of Israel and the Torah of Israel could be secured – Yavneh and her wise men- it would be unnecessary and even halakhically unacceptable to risk the survival of the Jewish people in a war for Jerusalem and the Holy Temple.

Rabbi Akiva believed differently.  He understood the function of the Holy Temple and Jerusalem as being cardinal to the mission of Israel, a holy nation and a kingdom of priest-teachers (to the world) through whom all of the families of the earth are to be blessed.  It is the people of Israel who were entrusted to teach the world that G-d created every human being in His Divine image, that each individual must be free and inviolable, and that our G-d of love and morality demands a world of peace and security for all.  The city from which this message must emanate is the City of Jerusalem, the City of Peace (Yeru Shalom); the mechanism by which this mission is to be advanced is the Holy Temple, the beacon from which the Torah will go forth to all nations of the world, impressing upon them how “swords must be beaten into plowshares end spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift sword above nation and humanity will not learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2, Micah 4, Zecharia 7,8,9). without our involvement in disseminating this teaching to the world, there is no purpose to our national being, believed Rabbi Akiva.  Hence the centrality of our Messianic vision and the necessity of our continuing to fight for Jerusalem and the Holy Temple. 
 
Rabbi Akiva’s belief and support for Bar Kochba turned out to be faith in a mission that ended in failure. The subsequent Hadrianic persecutions and the resulting Jewish exile wrought havoc upon our nation, and it became clear to the overwhelming majority of our Sages that Rabbi Yohanan had been correct; after all, it was R. Ben Zakkai  who rescued the future of Judaism by his initiating the ‘exchange’ with Vespasian. 
 
But now the situation has changed radically.  Contemporary history, post-Holocaust, teaches us that the nation of Israel cannot survive without a Jewish State and a Jewish army; the fact that we do live in a global village in which one madman with (G-d forbid) nuclear power can destroy the entire world teaches us that unless the inviolability of the human being and the universal acceptance of a G-d of peace becomes an axiom of all humanity there will be no free humanity left in the world, and certainly no Jewish Nation.  For today’s world, Rabbi Akiva has become vindicated; only a Holy Temple teaching fundamental and absolute morality in our City of Peace can secure the future of Israel and the free world in our global village! 

Shabbat Shalom and a Meaningful Fast