THE MORAL OF THIS LONG STORY IS...

These patterns of militant violence, religious fanaticism, and rebellion, and the serious political policy mistakes and miscalculations of ancient Jewish leadership – clearly illustrated in this brief overview of Jewish political history from the death of King Solomon in 926 BCE to the final fall of Jerusalem to Hadrian in 135 CE – seem to form a long historical parable of warning to the Jewish people to keep to the principles of their Faith, and in adherence to the wisdom of their sages, to keep a check on the militancy and materialistic lusts for power and domination that their leadership, and indeed all leaderships, can so often be prey to. In fact, renowned Israeli professor and historian Yehoshafat Harkabi in his book “Facing Reality” has echoed this idea and noted that the militant situation of Israel today closely parallels the militant fanaticism that existed in the Israel of the ancient past - in the period just before the fall of Jerusalem to Hadrian, for example. As an AP report from Tel Aviv (“Israeli Historian Warns of Peril in Masada’s Example”) published in the October 18, 1988 edition of the Los Angeles Times explained:

“In his 107-page book, “Facing Reality,” Harkabi portrays the [Bar-Kokba] revolt as a disaster from start to finish, whipped up by rabble-rousing zealots blind to the realities of power in the Roman Empire. The result, he writes, was the destruction of Jerusalem and the slaughter of 500,000 of the 1.3 million Jews living there.”

The article then goes on to explain how Harkabi sees in the Israel of today the same two camps as existed there in the time of Bar-Kokba – “the realistic and sane camp” and the “blind, euphoric, and unrealistic camp,” a camp which minimizes the weight of the world’s powers, as was so often done by the Jewish leadership in the times of the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Greek, and Roman empires. Professor Harkabi writes, “The problem is not where Bar-Kokba erred. The problem is how we came to worship his error and how it affects our national thinking.”