Rebuilding With Love: Lessons from the Destruction of the First and Second Temples

The highest degree of cohesion that the people of Israel achieved was at the time of the First Temple, which King Solomon built after his father, King David, united the kingdom of Israel. To understand the course of events that unfolded at that time and its impact on our time, we should begin by describing what the Temple symbolizes. It could be built only on the basis of the unity of hearts in the people of Israel since, in the spiritual sense, the Temple is a state in which love and unity prevail among everyone.

As my teacher, Rav Baruch Ashlag (RABASH) explains, “A man’s heart should be a Temple.” “Hence, one should try to build his structure of Kedusha [holiness], and … have the aim to bestow like the Giver,” meaning to overcome the egoistic desires emerging within and fully implement the great rule of the Torah: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The physical Temple was but a reminder of the state of internal connection.

Thus, in the days when cohesion prevailed in Israel, the nation was a source of inspiration to others. The Book of Zohar writes that when the Temple stood, “everyone’s face was lit up … and there was not a day in which there were no blessings and joys, and Israel sat safely in the land, and the whole world was nourished because of them.”

There were ties of love among the people; everyone felt free, happy, liberated from their personal concerns, and able to dedicate themselves to the well-being of the public.

The philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, described this special state everyone wanted to be part of as follows:

“Thousands of people from thousands of cities — some by land and some by sea, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south — would come each festival to the Temple as if to a common shelter, a safe haven protected from the storms of life. …With hearts filled with good hopes, they take this vital vacation with sanctity and with glory to God. Also, they make friendships with people they had not met before, and in the merging of the hearts … they find the ultimate proof of unity.” (Sifrey Devarim, Item 354)

The book Sifrey Devarim details how Gentiles would “go up to Jerusalem and see Israel … and say, ‘It is becoming to cling only to this nation.’” After the highest level of connection was obtained during the reign of King Solomon, the egoistic desire evolved to a new level. The people could not maintain their spiritual height, and separation began to prevail.

As a consequence, the kingdom of Israel was divided into two kingdoms: Israel and Judah. The kingdom of Israel was ruined by the Assyrians, its residents were exiled, and their fate is unknown to this day. The kingdom of Judah became entangled in power struggles with the great powers of the time: Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt until finally, the kingdom of Babylon took over the land.

During those years, the Temple still stood, but its essence became increasingly dimmer and more abstruse. Gradually, the kingdom of Judah declined into a state of constant internal power struggles, which reflected the internal division in the nation. A self-centered approach had infiltrated the Jewish people from other nations, which fostered selfish values.

Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag’s (Baal HaSulam’s) essay “Exile and Redemption” describes the stages of the people’s decline:

“This developed the ruin of the First Temple since they wished to extol wealth and power above justice, as do other nations. But because the Torah prohibits this, they denied the Torah and the prophecy and adopted the manners of the neighbors so they could enjoy life as much as the selfishness demanded of them. Because they did so, the powers of the nation disintegrated: Some followed the selfish kings and officers, and some followed the prophets, and that separation continued until the ruin.”

As a result, the people gradually divided into two groups that represented two opposing worldviews: the kings and officers, who grew further and further apart from each other, and the prophets, who strove to maintain unity.

As described in The Antiquities of the Jews by Jewish-turned-Roman historian Titus Flavius Josephus, the hatred of the Judeans for their brethren was brutal. About the anointing of King Jehoram, who ruled seventy years after King Solomon, he says that “As soon as he had taken the government upon him, [Jehoram] betook himself to the slaughter of his brethren and his father’s friends, who were governors under him, and thence made a beginning and a demonstration of his wickedness.” Jehoram’s fate, by the way, was no better than that of his victims. He, too, was overthrown by Jehu, who “drew his bow and smote him” in the back, “the arrow going through his heart so Jehoram fell down immediately … and gave up the ghost.”[1]

When Josephus describes the atrocities that King Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, perpetrated against his own fold, he writes, “He barbarously slew all the righteous men that were among the Hebrews. Nor would he spare the prophets, for he every day slew some of them, till Jerusalem was overflown with blood.”[2]

Due to disregard for the ties of love within the nation, its disintegration accelerated. The Talmud poignantly describes the Jewish leaders’ malevolence toward each other: “Rabbi Elazar said, ‘Those people, who eat and drink with one another, stab each other with the swords in their tongues.’ Thus, even though they were close to one another, they were filled with hatred for each other” (Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Yoma, 9b).

Finally, the internal division brought with it the ruin of the kingdom of Judah. On the ninth of Tammuz [Hebrew month, roughly around June], following a year and a half of ever-tightening siege, the Jerusalem wall was breached, and on the ninth of Av, the following month, the Temple was ruined. Subsequently, the Babylonians exiled the people of Israel from the land.

The king of Babylon appointed Gedaliah, son of Ahikam, as the ruler of the Jews who remained in Judah, but the inner conflicts did not let up, and in the process of the power struggles, Gedaliah was murdered. That murder brought with it the end of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.

As the years passed, the Jews who were exiled to Babylon went through a series of states. Great hope was renewed when Cyrus made his declaration, which led to the return to Zion. Thus, seventy years after the ruin of the First Temple, the Second Temple was built.

Sinat Chinam (Unfounded Hatred) and the Second Temple

The destruction of the Temple was a tipping point in Jewish history. Therefore, it is important to emphasize what was the root cause of that tragedy. As mentioned in Chapter II: “The people of the generation of the ruin of the Second Temple were obstinate and perverse… Therefore, because of the unfounded hatred that they held in their hearts for one another … they thought that anyone who did not act as they saw fit concerning fear of the Creator, it is a commandment to kill such a person. …From this emerged all the evils in the world until finally, the house was ruined,” wrote Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin in Delve in the Matter.

The aspiration to restore the independence of Judah, which was taken away by the Roman Empire, instigated the Great Revolt in the year 66 CE. In those days, society was torn from within by religious polarization and economic gaps. There was a lot of debate and struggle over whether or not to revolt, as well as on many other topics.

Divisions stemmed from the loss of the spiritual ideology on the basis of which the Jewish people was founded. Consequently, Judah came to a state where, while the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem and almost breached its walls, the Jews inside ferociously fought against one another and inflicted horrors on themselves.

When Titus, the victorious Roman general, finally conquered Jerusalem, he felt that he could not attribute his victory to his own military craftiness or to his army’s might. The war against the Jews was so gruesome and filled with Jewish self-inflicted cruelty that it made the Romans think that God was actually on their side.[3]

At the beginning of the siege, looking at the Jews fighting one another inside the city, “the Romans deemed this sedition among their enemies to be of great advantage to them, and were very earnest to march to the city.”[3]

“They urged Vespasian,” the newly crowned Emperor, “to make haste.” The Roman commanders wanted to take advantage of the situation for fear that “the Jews may quickly be at one again,” either because they were “tired out with their civil miseries” or because they might “repent them of such doings.”[3]

However, the Emperor was very confident that the hatred of the Jews for one another was beyond repair. “Vespasian replied,” writes Josephus, “that they were greatly mistaken in what they thought fit to be done … that God acts as a general of the Romans better than he can do, and is giving the Jews up to them without any pains of their own, and granting their army a victory without any danger; that therefore it is their best way, while their enemies are destroying each other with their own hands, and falling into the greatest of misfortunes, which is that of sedition, to sit still as spectators of the dangers they run into, rather than to fight hand to hand with men that love murdering, and are mad one against another. … The Jews are vexed to pieces every day by their civil wars and dissensions, and are under greater miseries than, if they were once taken, could be inflicted on them by us. Whether therefore any one hath regard to what is for our safety, he ought to suffer these Jews to destroy one another.”[3]

The siege on Jerusalem was the end of a four-year battle. When it began in 66 CE, after the earlier mentioned pogrom in Caesarea, violence broke out throughout the province. If during the Hasmonean Revolt, the fighting was between Hellenized Jews and militant Jews who remained faithful to their religion, now the fighting was only among “proper” Jews, among various sects of the militant Zealots, and moderate Jews, who strove to negotiate peace with the Romans. Yet, the unfounded hatred that surfaced among Jews during the revolt was far worse than even the already intense odium that the factions in the nation felt for one another before its outbreak.[4]

Initially, writes Josephus, “All the people of every place betook themselves to rapine, after which they got together in bodies, in order to rob the people of the country, insomuch that for barbarity and iniquity, those of the same nation did no way differ from the Romans. Nay, it seemed to be a much lighter thing to be ruined by the Romans than by themselves.”[4]

This statement, that what the Jews did to each other even the Romans did not do to them, would repeat itself throughout Josephus’s elaborate and graphic descriptions of the revolt. Clearly, he spared no effort to stress that, as our sages said, it was our own hatred of each other that destroyed us rather than our enemies’ war machines. And while the Jews were at each other’s throats, the Roman residents did not stand by. They, too, participated in the killing and the looting. Historian Paul Johnson writes that as a result of the fighting that erupted everywhere, “Jerusalem was filling up with angry and vengeful Jewish refugees from other cities where the Greek majority had invaded the Jewish quarters and burnt their homes.”[5]

Josephus writes that “this quarrelsome temper caught hold of private families, who could not agree among themselves, after which those people that were the dearest to one another broke through all restraints with regard to each other, and everyone associated with those of his own opinion and began already to stand in opposition one to another, so that seditions arose everywhere.”[6]

This estrangement among family members would lead to some of the most horrific chapters in this civil genocide known as the Great Revolt. Despite the vast number of people in Jerusalem, there should have been no shortage of food. Being a regular place of congregating, the city was well prepared for feeding very large gatherings for extended periods. Its enormous food depositories should have outlasted the ability of the Romans to maintain the siege. Yet, as Johnson writes, “The Jews were … irreconcilably divided.”[7]

They were so engrossed in mutual destruction that they could pay no thought to the future, not even to the following day. As a result, as part of their all-out war, “Simon and his party … set on fire those houses that were full of corn and of all other provisions. The same thing was done by Simon when, upon the others’ retreat, he attacked the city also, as if they had, on purpose, done it to serve the Romans by destroying what the city had laid up against the siege, and by thus cutting off the nerves of their own power.” As a result, “Almost all that corn was burnt, which would have been sufficient for a siege of many years. So they were taken by the means of the famine.”[8]

As terrible as burning each other’s food supplies is, the cruelty of the Jews toward each other went further, much further than that. First, without explicitly mentioning to which camp they belonged, Josephus describes the desecration of the High Priesthood as a means to bring people to despair. He speaks of robbers who plundered the city and did with its population and government whatever they wanted. “In order to try what surprise the people would be under,” he writes, “and how far their own power extended, [the robbers] undertook to dispose of the high priesthood by casting lots for it.”[9]

Moreover, and here Josephus writes as a Jew lamenting the fate of his people, destroying the sedition “was a much harder thing to do than to destroy the walls, so that we may justly ascribe our misfortunes to our own people.”[10]

By the time the Romans finally breached the walls and stormed Jerusalem, there was no longer anything left to desecrate. The Romans killed whoever still had the urge or energy to fight, set aflame the little that had not been burnt, and took captive and into slavery the rest of the city’s inhabitants. Within a mere five-month period, out of a population of 2.7 million strong who inhabited Jerusalem at the beginning of the siege, “The number of those that perished during the whole siege [was] eleven hundred thousand [1.1 million], the greater part of whom were indeed of the same [Jewish] nation.”[11]

And the vast majority of the Jews were slain by people of their own fold. Tacitus, who documented the unfolding solely from the perspective of the Romans, had similar estimates to those of Josephus regarding the number of casualties. He counted just short of 1.2 million Jews, but he also included in his estimate Jews who were exiled.[12] The bitter outcome soon proved Vespasian right. The Great Revolt failed; Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed.

Clearly, the ruin was due first and foremost to the unfounded hatred that had spread among the Jewish people. When the nation that was established on the basis of love of others lost its ability to stick together, there was nothing to keep the people united above the emerging differences. Thus, the people were exiled. Exile is more than a physical relocation of masses of Jews from Israel to other countries. The true and deeper meaning is the detachment of the nation from its identity, from the reason, purpose, and ideology that formed it.

A selfish approach to life had caused a spike in the passion for wealth, power, and control. All of those manifestations expressed the loss of unity with the internal rift that tore the people apart. This is why the sages wrote about this period, “Why were they exiled? It is because they loved wealth and hated one another” (Masechet Minchot, Tosfata, 13).

Such hatred and division were in utter contrast to the spiritual state called “Temple,” which is a state of love and unity among everyone. Baal HaSulam refers to such a shattered state of the Jewish people in his article “The Nation”: “As our sages testified, ‘Jerusalem was ruined only because of unfounded hatred that existed in that generation.’ At that time, the nation was plagued and died, and its organs were scattered to every direction.’”

Kamtza and Bar Kamtza

The story most commonly associated with the destruction of the Second Temple can be found in the Talmud (Gittin 55–56). According to the story, once when the Temple still stood, a wealthy Jew in Jerusalem had a friend named Kamtza and an enemy named Bar Kamtza. One day, the wealthy Jew decided to make a feast. He sent his servant to invite his friend, Kamtza, to the feast, but the servant mistakenly invited his enemy, Bar Kamtza.

The surprised Bar Kamtza took this as a gesture of reconciliation and accepted the invitation. He put on his best clothes and went to the home of the man who he thought was no longer his enemy.

When the host noticed that Bar Kamtza was there, he was infuriated and demanded that he leave at once. The mortified Bar Kamtza pleaded with the host to let him stay. He even offered to pay for his own food and drink and for everyone else’s, too. The host not only refused him mercilessly but even had Bar Kamtza dragged out of his house and thrown into the street.

Humiliated and disgraced, Bar Kamtza pledged vengeance not only against his host but also against the guests who supported the host. He decided to slander them before the Emperor.

Bar Kamtza went to Emperor Nero and told him that the Jews were planning to rebel against him. After some cunning persuasion, the Emperor was convinced that Bar Kamtza was telling the truth and sent his army to destroy Jerusalem and the Temple.

Over the generations, this famous story has come to symbolize the unfounded hatred that had led to our social and moral decline and to our subsequent exile. In today’s social climate, it could not be more pertinent. As we can see, read, and hear each day, conflicts, manipulations, and dishonesty have never been more prevalent among us. The sarcasm and derision we use against each other point not to our wit, but to our dislike of one another.

As a solution to such a state, Rav Kook wrote, “If we were destroyed due to baseless hatred, then we shall rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, with baseless love — Ahavat Chinam.”[13]