Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el used to say: The world stands on three things: on law, on truth and on peace; as is said, "Judge in your gates truth and the justice of peace".
4:
The period of the presidency of Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el may be divided into two periods from the historical point of view. Up to the year 136 CE events were catastrophic for the Jewish nation; from then onwards the situation improved, in no small measure because of the great effort towards national reconstruction that Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el and his colleagues made.
5:
Even though the Jews had been decisively defeated by the Romans in the year 70 CE and all their national institutions destroyed, the defeat did not serve to quell the general sense of national outrage. The nationalistic fervour that had caused the great revolt against the Romans had not abated, and the resentment and deep hatred that many people had for the Romans in general and for the Roman occupation in particular continued to fester in the decades that followed the débâcle of the year 70 CE. The Lion of Judah had been cowed but not subdued, and from the historical point of view we can receive the Roman claim that Judah had been "pacified" with a hollow laugh. Much more accurate was the caption on the series of special medallions that the Romans issued to celebrate their victory: Judaea Capta, Judah Defeated.
6:
The Lion of Judah was cowed, but the Jewish people in all their dispersions were truly outraged at what had happened. In the years 115 – 117 CE there was a belated reaction to the destruction of the Bet Mikdash some 45 years previously. The Jews rebelled against the Romans in Egypt, Cyrenaica and Cyprus. The revolt started in Cyrene which prompted unrest in Alexandria in Egypt. (With a population of some 150,000 Jews, Alexandria had the largest urban concentration of Jews in the world.) In 116 CE, the Jews organized themselves: the temples of gods like Nemesis, Hecate and Apollo were destroyed; the same fate befell the tomb of Pompey, the Roman general who had captured Jerusalem almost two centuries before. Meanwhile, the Cyrenaican Jews plundered the Egyptian countryside, reaching Thebes, six hundred kilometres upstream. Trajan, the Roman emperor, ordered the commander of his Mauritanian auxiliaries, Lusius Quietus, to clean the suspects out of these regions. Quietus organized a force and killed many Cypriot, Mesopotamian and Syrian Jews – in effect wiping them out; as a reward, he was appointed governor of Judaea. (He is one of the few black Africans known to have made a career in Roman service.) He was responsible for a forced policy of hellenization; in response, the sages banned the teaching of Greek. For more details concerning this period see Sotah 110. Trajan's successor Hadrian dismissed Lusius Quietus, who was killed in the Summer of 118 CE.
To be continued.
Amnon Ronel writes:
I am very fond of verses 13 – 15, and I try to observe them and to pass on their message to my children. It is much more difficult to teach verse 12 because its observance, in my opinion, depends on faith and not logic.
I respond:
There are two different but closely linked concepts in Judaism: the fear of God and the fear of sin. For some people, especially in bygone ages, what prompts them to observe the "ethical" commands of Judaism is the fear of God: the laws of the Divine Lawgiver must be obeyed and only thus will retribution be avoided. Many modern Jews are no longer motivated by such considerations. Even if they still pay lip service to the conceptualization, their actual behaviour is not informed by fear of God and Divine retribution. The concept of fear of sin however, can easily be accommodated for such people: the ethical sin itself can be seen as so heinous that it must be shunned. I do not think that it is too fanciful to imagine that if the Psalmist had been living in the 21st century CE he may well have considered substituting "fear of sin" for "fear of God" in verse 12.
Even though I am officially on vacation I hope to send out as many shiurim in this series as possible. Please forgive me if here and there I should fail in my good intentions. In the meantime I have utilized some of my free time to add
Chapter Six to the Sanhedrin archive. Please use
this link.
