On Jerusalem & Babylon
Jerusalem was on fire and, by some estimates, as many as half-a-million residents were trapped in its walls. As historian Simon Montefiore tells it, “some were fanatical religious zealots, some were freebooting bandits, but most were innocent families with no escape from this magnificent death-trap.”
For four months, from Passover through late July in the year 70 CE, the defiant city had withstood the Roman emperor’s son Titus and the soldiers at his command; but on the 8th of Av, Titus gave his 60,000 troops their orders – storm the city’s crown jewel at dawn, storm Jerusalem’s magnificent temple on the same day the Babylonians destroyed the first temple 500 years earlier.
The Romans constructed massive ramps against the Temple walls, but their initial assaults were repelled with ferocious resistance. Titus was running low on patience and made a fateful decision to set the Temple gates ablaze. The ornate silver-plated doors melted and the fire spread rapidly to the Temple’s wooden inner sanctums. Though Titus commanded the flames be extinguished, it was too late; the inferno exploded. By morning, Jerusalem and its precious temple were a smoldering ruin.
Putting down the rebellion once and for all, the Romans conducted a brutal purge—massacring the old and weak, taking captives and slaves, and killing indiscriminately. The streets ran red, and the once-grand edifices of Jerusalem were reduced to ash and rubble. Titus believed that by destroying Jerusalem, he was extinguishing the very essence of the people Israel—declaring, according to Josephus, "Your city, your people, and you yourselves are doomed to perish" (Josephus, Wars, 6.6.2).
How wrong he was.
Titus didn’t understand that Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean and Near East were already taking root away from Eretz Yisrael, adapting to new host environments and beginning to blossom without a physical temple at their center. Titus’ words reflect a trap that Jew-haters have set for the Jewish people for millennia, from Haman of Purim lure to Hamas & Hezbollah. In the book of Esther, Haman tells King Ahashverous: “It is not in your interest to tolerate [the Jews]…Let an edict be drawn for their destruction!” Just a few years ago in the summer of 2017, White Supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” Today, Hamas & Hezbollah lay their intentions bare: “Death to Israel!”
I call it a trap because it draws us Jews into a narrative of perpetual victimhood, where we primarily see ourselves as a people besieged, our survival hanging on the whim of those who hate us. It lures us, as historian Salo Baron teaches, to have a lachrymose conception of our story, of our history, and of our present. It's a narrative that views the Jewish Story simplistically as a series of tragedies, persecutions, and suffering, elevating the hardships Jews have faced throughout the centuries instead of all the celebrations and meaningful moments of Jewish life.
If you’ve had a conversation with me over the past year, you may have experienced me pushing back against this lachrymose conception, even in the hardest year many of us ever experienced as a Jew. When we tell our own story through this prism it robs us of our light, of our power—it convinces us that our existence is defined only by others’ bigotry instead of the brightness of our culture, the richness of our traditions, the holiness of our daily lives.
When we fall into this trap, we make our lives small, defined by fear rather than inspired by our values and our vision for a world redeemed. We forget that while we may have enemies, our story is not simply one of survival—it is one of thriving, of building, of transforming every place we live into a source of light, wisdom, and love. Whether in Eretz Yisrael - the land of Israel - or in the diaspora across the world, Jews across all time have blossomed where they were planted and made all other Jewish communities richer–and safer–by doing so.
The great 20th-century philosopher Simon Rawidowicz explains it this way. “The face of [the People] Israel has two profiles,“ he writes. “Babylon and Jerusalem. This is the way it has been for more than two and a half millennia…this is the way it shall be for some time to come…Every Jew worthy of the name is rooted in both—in a Jerusalem that is rooted in Babylon and in a Babylon rooted in Jerusalem.”
Jerusalem and Babylon are two sides of the same coin. “By Jerusalem,” Rawidowicz writes, “we mean Jerusalem as a symbol of the Land of Israel in its entirety. By Babylon, we mean not only that territory that lies on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates but every place that is not Jerusalem.” In other words, Jerusalem is a symbol of Eretz Yisrael - the land of Israel, the Jewish civilization in the land, and all the Jews living there. Babylon, on the other hand, represents all the lands where Jews live around the world.
Rawidowicz first published Yerushalayim v’Bavel in 1957, just a few years into renewed Jewish autonomy in our ancestral homeland. Within the Zionist establishment, there was the idea of negating the diaspora - that all Jews in the world should move to Israel and those that stayed were naive. While some chose to make aliyah, many in the diaspora reacted negatively to being told what to do, that they were in danger, and should immediately uproot their Jewish communities to move to a foreign land – even after the Holocaust.
Rawidowicz stood up and said, “Stop. This isn’t an either-or game. We are two sides of one coin. We, the Jewish people, have existed with two centers of Jewish life for millenia: Yerushalayim v’Bavel, Jerusalem and Babylon. It is a fact.” And it is a fact that I believe strengthens the Jewish people. Having strong Jewish communities in Eretz Yisrael AND in the Diaspora is a key element of Jewish continuity and survival. But it also raises the question: what is the responsibility of Jews in Jerusalem to Jews in Babylon and what is the responsibility of Jews in Babylon to Jews in Jerusalem?
The Jewish community owned slaves that worked their plantations, complicating Jodensavanne's legacy and perhaps explaining its buried history in our collective memory.
The Jewish community owned slaves that worked their plantations, complicating Jodensavanne's legacy and perhaps explaining its buried history in our collective memory.
A month before the Hamas attacks, Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer took a unique trip to South America with a group of Israeli archaeologists tasked with preparing a preservation plan for Jodensavanne – a place I had never heard of. Jodensavanne, Dutch for Jewish Savannah, was a thriving Jewish colony in the jungles of Suriname that, for more than 100 years spanning the 18th & 19th centuries, was the only place where Jews enjoyed self-rule between the fall of the Hasmonean kingdom in 37 BCE and the birth of the State of Israel in 1948.
The Jews who settled there were part of a wave of refugees fleeing the expulsions from Spain and Portugal, seeking safe havens wherever they could. They found an unexpected opportunity in Suriname, under Anglican English rule where, by 1665, Jews were legally on par with other colonists. By the early 18th century, the Jewish community was responsible for more than half of the sugar plantations in Suriname, spanning hundreds of square miles. They had their own militia, built synagogues & schools, took their boats up the river to gather in their regional capital for Shabbat & holidays, and thrived economically and socially.
Unfortunately, their golden era was fleeting and despite its early prosperity, the community’s self-sustenance proved fragile. After years of declining economic success, a devastating fire in 1832 delivered the final blow – the last families left and the jungle slowly reclaimed the once thriving Jewish community.
In reflecting on his trip after the attacks on October 7th and the challenging year that followed, Pfeffer wondered, “What does a Jewish community need in order to survive and thrive in hostile conditions? What kind of support must it have from Jews elsewhere? What level of coexistence with the neighboring cultures and communities is necessary for self-preservation?”
He says that, “Jodensavanne should feature in our collective Jewish memory…It is an urgent reminder that maintaining Jewish autonomy has never been an easy task, which is why autonomous Jewish communities have been so rare in history. To guarantee their viability, they must adapt to changing times. But above all, self-sustainment is never enough. If there is to be Jewish autonomy anywhere, it needs the support of Jews everywhere.”
Pfeffer’s reflections underscore a vital truth for us in 2024: Jewish survival is not just about the strength of a single community, but about the network of strong, thriving Jewish communities throughout the world. While Jodensavanne achieved a remarkable level of independence, it ultimately needed the support and solidarity of Jews beyond its borders that it did not receive. Autonomy anywhere requires the support of Jews everywhere.
The lesson is NOT that Jewish communities require a one-directional benefactor to survive. The lesson is twofold. First, Jews in both Jerusalem & across the world need to invest heavily in their own communities. They need to build agile, adaptive, thriving communities that are first and foremost for themselves.
Rawidowicz drives this home. He writes that:
“this is no time to canonize Torah but to reopen it in the light of the experiences we have acquired in our [wanderings] from country to country, nation to nation, era to era. I should urge Israel…to pump fresh blood into its veins, to place new emphasis upon the process of the development of Judaism and the evolution of a living community meeting the challenges it has faced in its historic struggles.”
Second, we diaspora Jews in Babylon must invest in Jews in Jerusalem and Israeli Jews in Jerusalem must invest in Jews in Babylon. This relationship is symbiotic, but only if we put the effort in. Before October 7th, the gulf between Babylon and Jerusalem was growing, nearing a point that seemed unbridgeable. The horrors we experienced in 5784 were a wake up call for all of K’lal Yisrael, the entire worldwide Jewish community. The terrorist attacks on Simchat Torah awoke a worldwide Jewish consciousness and brought it to the fore. We understood that by isolating Jerusalem from Babylon, by not concerning ourselves with the fate of the other, we inadvertently weakened the entire people Israel. We cannot ever, ever let that happen again.
Titus could not have been more wrong when he quipped: “Your city, your people, and you yourselves are doomed to perish.” To his cynical quip, Rawidowicz writes that, “Babylon laughed in the face of the destroyer. The sacred capital was burned to the ground, but the seed of Abraham [& Sarah], Isaac [& Rebecca], Jacob [& Rachel & Leah] lived on. They recognized the difference between being struck a heavy blow and being struck a mortal blow.”
There is a midrash Rawidowicz uses to deepen his point. The rabbis struggle with Psalm 79, which begins, “A hymn of Asaph. O God, the nations have invaded Your domain.” The rabbis of the midrash (Lamentations Rabbah, 4:15) ask, “Why doesn’t the Psalm begin, “the weeping of Asaf, the wailing of Asaf, the lamentation of Asaf.” Why–HOW–could it be “A mizmor l’asaf, a psalm of Asaf, a hymn of Asaf? The Holy Blessed One, has caused Temple and Sanctuary to be destroyed, and yet you sit singing a hymn.’
Asaf replies:
“I sing a hymn because the wrath of the Holy Blessed One was poured out on the wood and stone, and not upon Israel.”
What Asaf understood, and what Titus couldn’t grasp, is that Rome struck a heavy blow to Jerusalem, but could never strike a mortal blow to the people Israel. So too, as we turn to a new year in 5785, we must recognize that the Jew-haters of our day wreaked havoc on Jews across the world. They murdered our brothers and sisters in Jerusalem, have brought the scourge of anti-semitism to our very doorstep in Babylon, and made our year in both centers of Jewish life incredibly difficult. But the spirit, the resiliency, the determination, the regeneration of Israel – is impossible to stomp out.
Rawidowicz concludes that
”The way of Jerusalem-and-Babylon is the way of Israel in its wholeness. It is the master highway that connects all those routes we have traveled from the time that Abraham went forth from the land of his birth to the days of his descendants who are returning to the land. The Jewish thinker in our time must help pave the way of Babylon-AND-Jerusalem for our generation and for generations to come.”
May this be our work of 5785: investing deeply in our Jewish community and the Jewish communities of Babylon. Anywhere you travel this year – Mexico, Aruba, England, Australia, the holy Mecca of West Palm Beach, anywhere there is a synagogue – I encourage you to find it and celebrate Shabbat with the Jews there. Strengthen them with your presence, draw a new line of connection from our community in Santa Monica to the many Jewish communities our community will travel through this year.
At the same time, we must work to ensure that Jerusalem—our Jewish family in the land of Israel and the beautiful communities they have built—continue to flourish. We have to make sure we continue to support the Israelis in our lives. We have to get a trips to Israel on our calendars – or talk to me so we can get a community mission off the ground. We have to donate to Israeli charities that speak to our values. We have to strengthen Jerusalem with oour love.
As we enter 5785, may we commit ourselves to the sacred work of Jerusalem-AND-Babylon: to investing deeply in our own community at Beth Shir Shalom and Jewish life in Los Angeles; to strengthening the ties between our Jewish family in Israel and Jewish communities in the diaspora; and to build new bridges of connection from Santa Monica to Jewish communities around the world. This is how the Jewish people endure—not just as victims of history but as creators of a thriving future, for Jews and for all who live alongside us.
Gmar chatimah tovah - may we be inscribed for a year of renewed connection, to each other and to Jews around the world