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Jewish World Review 29 Tammuz 3413 (348 BCE) Ezra the Scribe returns from exile By Rabbi Yonason Goldson
In 3408, the second year of his reign, Darius granted the Jews permission to continue the work halted 18 years earlier by King Cyrus and to complete the reconstruction of their Temple in Jerusalem. Moreover, Darius helped finance the project, sent building materials, and warned the Persian governor in Samaria that he would not tolerate any interference with the Jews.
Under the direction of Zerubavel, the prince of Judah, together with the prophets Zecharyah, Chaggai, and Malachi, the second Temple was completed in 3412 (349 BCE). On the third day of the month of Adar the Jews in Israel inaugurated the new Temple amidst great rejoicing, offering 100 bulls, 200 rams, 400 sheep, and 12 goats as sin offerings for the tribes of Israel.
Following the destruction of the first Temple, the tiny remnant of impoverished Jews left in Israel had struggled to survive in a land stripped of material and spiritual resources. 52 years later, during the reign of Cyrus in 3390 (371 BCE), Zerubavel, together with the nearly 43,000 who followed him, returned to their homeland. There they found a people spiritually and materially impoverished, their commitment to Torah eroded by lack of leadership and relentless exposure to the culture and values of the Samaritans among whom they lived.
THE TWILIGHT OF TRAGEDY AND REDEMPTION
In the year after the completion of the Temple, Baruch died and Ezra traveled to join the other leaders in Israel, arriving on the 29th day of the month of Tammuz. What he found there so anguished him that he ripped his garments, tore out his hair, and sat fasting in silence and isolation.
Although Zerubavel and his colleagues succeeded in organizing the people to rebuild the Temple, they had far less success turning the most disaffected Jews back to Torah observance. Torah study had become neglected, as had such fundamental Jewish precepts as the Sabbath and circumcision. Many prominent Jews, including the sons of Yehoshua ben Yehotzedek, the High Priest, had taken foreign women for wives.
These were the conditions that confronted Ezra when he arrived in Israel. But where the other leaders had failed, Ezra succeeded. Instead of rebuking the people, Ezra raised his voice in prayer and publicly lamented the sorrowful condition of Jewish society. Hearing Ezra's lamentations, a crowd of Jews gathered around him and, moved by his passion, confessed their disloyalty to G-d and beseeched Ezra to lead them in repentance.
Responding to the groundswell of renewed commitment, Ezra proclaimed a public assembly and exhorted the people with such emotion that, with only minimal resistance, the people as one declared their loyalty to the Divine, confessed their transgressions, separated from their non-Jewish wives, and acknowledged their covenant with the Almighty anew.
So intense was the remorse of the Jews who had sinned that Ezra instituted a special guilt-offering for this occasion to allow them a means of expressing their repentance. Rather than castigate the people for their transgressions, which might well have driven them even farther away, Ezra aroused their sense of shame and their desire to return to the straight path. By expressing and displaying his own personal grief at how far the people had descended, by declaring the urgency with which they must distance themselves from their sins, Ezra brought about repentance on a national scale.
NEW CITY, NEW HOPE, NEW COVENANT
Ezra's words comforted the Jews, and the days that followed saw a resurgence of Torah commitment. Two weeks later, the people's observance of the Sukkos festival was the most jubilant since the days of Joshua. And, the day after the festival concluded, the people convened for yet another assembly to make a collective expression of repentance and renew their commitment to uphold the Torah, its commandments, and its values. The Levites recited a song of praise recounting the Almighty's beneficence to the Jewish people from the time of the exodus from Egypt. The people responded by reaffirming their pledge to honor both the Written Torah and the Oral transmission as handed down by the prophets and the sages.
This assembly culminated in the formal Bris Amanah, or Covenant of Trust, which was not only read but written out in a series of documents and signed by the priests and the Levites, the members of the Sanhedrin, and the thirteen Temple officers. In it the Jews of Israel vowed to take wives for themselves and husbands for their daughters only from within the Jewish people, to cease the common practice of buying and selling of produce on the Sabbath, to suspend agriculture work and release loans in the Sabbatical years, and to support the Temple service and the priests through tithes and seasonal donations.
The acceptance of the Bris Amanah was, for its time, as profoundly significant as the acceptance of the Torah at Sinai nearly a thousand years earlier. The open miracles and unmistakable revelation of G-d's will at Sinai had made it virtually impossible for the people not to accept the Torah. In contrast, the early days of the second Temple were characterized by the concealment of G-d's presence. Nevertheless, the new appreciation for rabbinic authority that the Jews had acquired after the miracle of Purim now found formal expression in the Bris Amanah.
During the last days of the first Temple and the spiritual darkness of the Babylonian exile, G-d's concealment had allowed the people to drift away from the Torah and lose their sense of national purpose. Now, under the leadership of Ezra, the people again recognized that only through their connection to the Divine could they survive as a nation, that only through Torah could they preserve that connection, and that only through the sages could their eyes and their hearts remain open to the Torah.
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JWR contributor Rabbi Yonason Goldson teaches at Block Yeshiva High School in St. Louis. Comment by clicking here.
King Jeroboam of Israel prevents pilgrimage to Jerusalem
© 2006, Rabbi Yonason Goldson | ||||||||||
