אמרו חז”ל (איכה רבא פ”ב סי ‘ה) על בן כוזיבא ואנשיו: ובשעה שהיו יוצאין למלחמה היו אומרים לא תסעוד ולא תסכיף

As we have already explained, the armed rebellion of Bar Kokhba against the Romans was very successful at the beginning . So much so that the Emperor Hadrian had to bring his best general, Julius Severus, from Britannia, and more than 10 legions – something unprecedented – to face the brave Jewish fighters. But in the end the war against Rome did not have the expected success.
The Rabbis explained, among other things, that some of the soldiers who were fighting in Bar Kokhba’s army, with an excess of arrogance because of their first victories,  deliberately quoted incorrectly a verse from Tehillim (Psalm 60:10) and said: “Now HaShem, let us fight the Romans alone. We do not want You to fight with us or against us.” This arrogant attitude of some soldiers was seen by the Sages as one of the reasons for the horrific defeat

The rebellion of Bar Kokhba was brought to an end in the year 135. The Romans were looking for the “final solution”. They did not take Jewish prisoners to sell them as slaves, as they did in the war of the year 68. By orders of the emperor, they carried out a systematic and calculated genocide in all the territory of Judea, killing women, men and children. According to the texts  of the Roman historians themselves, like Dio Cassius , 50 fortified cities and almost 1000 villages were completely razed, and a total of 580,000 Jews were killed.  90% of the inhabitants of Judea were massacred.

The final battle took place in the city of Betar,   the most powerful Jewish fortification and where Bar Kochba resided along with the remaining soldiers and with the most important Sage of the time: Ribbí El’azar of the city of Modiín. Betar was a city of Tora and with many people. Better was considered unconquerable.

After months of constant siege with more than 100,000 soldiers the city finally fell. The city fell on the 9th day of Ab of the year 135.

Adriano punished very hard the rebellion of the Jews and did something that until the moment was unprecedented. He did not allow the bodies of the dead Jews to be buried. The romans piled hundreds of thousands of corpses in a large vineyard, watering the fields with the blood of the dead, and left them there, as a cynical tribute to their victory.

This horrible episode, a national trauma, was recorded in the collective memory of the Jewish people. The Sages tell that miraculously the dead bodies remained without decomposing until the decree of Hadrian expired and finally they were able to bury the dead of Betar.

There are different versions of how much time passed until the Romans allowed the bodies to be buried. According to some historians this happened in the year 138, when Hadrian יש”ו finally died, since according to the old laws and traditions all the decrees of a king expired with his death.

The Sages tell that on the day it was announced that the corpses could be buried the rabbis of Yabne formulated a special blessing “hatob vehametib” (HaShem exceeds in his kindness to us “) which is, ever since then, recited in the Bircat haMazon, the blessing we say after eating a meal with bread. This special thanksgiving to HaShem was officially established because Jews were able to bury the corpses and they did not decompose. But it is also possible that in this Berakha there is something else and deeper: it is true that at that time, say 138, we no longer had Jerusalem or Yehudah or even a land named “Israel” because after the falling of Betar Hadrian changed the name of Judea to  “Palestine”.

But somehow, once the emperor who tried like no one else to eliminate the Jewish people and Judaism was dead, our hopes were reborn, and so it was. The Jews settled in the North of Israel:  the Galil, the Golan, Bet She’arim, Tiberia, etc. and at the end of the second century many beautiful Yeshibot flourished  there, under the leadership of Ribbí Yehudá haNasí, the author of the Mishna

בתשעה באב נגזר על אבותינו שלא ייכנסו לארץ וחרב הבית בראשונה ובשניה ונלכדה בית תור ונחרשה העיר

Last week I wrote about one of the five tragedies that we remember on the 9th of Ab: the day that the city of Jerusalem was plowed. Hadrian desecrated Jerusalem and founded a new pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, through a ceremony known in Latin as sulcus primigenius (see here) delimiting the perimeter of the new city using a bronze plow pulled by a two white oxen. This deliberate desecration of our Holy City took place on the 9th of Ab

Today we will begin to explain the fifth catastrophe that we remember in Tisha BeAb: the falling of the city of Betar (in the ancient Sepharadic prayer books used for the qinot of Tisha B’Ab this city is called “Bit-ter”). 

we should understand first that the falling of Betar was not an isolated event, or a minor battle. It was the conclusion of a horrific war against Hadrian’s empire that took three and a half years: the rebellion of Bar Kokhba. The aftermath of this rebellion, which ended with the falling of Betar, was disastrous: 90% (sic) of the inhabitants of Judea were killed. As we will see later, this genocide was meant to be recorded in our collective memory, since not only do we remember it in Tisha B’Ab but unlike other tragedies, we refer to it every day, when we say the Birkat haMazon.

According to most historians Jerusalem was desecrated in the year 130 and Betar fell in 136. There are those who say, following the Mishnah, that although Hadrian’s plans to profane Yerushalayim were declared in 129, the city was plowed after the fall of Betar. One of the reasons that the details of this great national catastrophe are not very well known is that there is very little material written in our Talmudic sources on this subject: I calculate a little more than a dozen direct references. What we do find in the Talmud and the Midrashim are hundreds of stories —some explicit, other not—that describe the persecutions that we suffered, the murder of our Sages, the execution of the 10 martyrs, and many other tragedies that occurred in the times of Hadrian, who died in 138.

GEZEROT HASHMAD

in 129 Hadrian began his religious war against the Jews. His decree to penalize circumcision with death and the transformation of Jerusalem into a Roman idolatrous colony, was only the beginning. Hadrian also banned with the death penalty the study of the Tora in public, since he considered the Tora a code of law which was not recognized by the Roman Empire. He forbade the rest of Shabbat, since for the Romans, Shabbat was an unjustified leisure day, and in the Empire everyone had to work to maximize the production of taxes for the general benefit of Rome. He also forbade the reading of Megillat Esther and the lighting of the Hanukkah candles, because those Jewish stories were irrelevant to the Roman cultural heritage. He also prohibited other laws such as the use of the Mikve, the Tefiilin, the Talit and the Mezuza. In all this Hadrian exceeded himself more than any other tyrant, including the infamous Antiochus Epiphanes, the Greek ruler who died in 164 BCE. These anti-religious laws are known in Hebrew as “gezerot hashmad” or “gezerot adrianus“, the decrees that intended the elimination of Judaism and the Jewish people, which was Hadrian’s ultimate goal.

Hadrian was a passionate admirer of Greek culture. And unlike the previous Roman emperor, Trajan (reigned from 98 until 117), Hadrian did not intend to conquer more territories for Rome. But he did want to impose a cultural and religious hegemony: he wanted all citizens of Rome, including the Jewish population of the Roman province “Judea”, to follow laws and traditions of the Empire. For the Jews this would mean to renounce to the Tora, and assimilating collectively, that is, a national suicide.   That is why from the year 130, Jews began to organize very courageous and risky rebellion against the Roman Empire. This rebellion was headed by Shimon Bar Kosiba (שמעון בן כוסיבא), later known by his “battle name”, Bar Kokhba.

For two years, between 130 and 132, Bar Kokhba secretly organized all the logistics and the strategy of the rebellion. The Gemara tells us, for example, that Bar Kokhba recruited 400,000 warriors, who had been trained in guerrilla tactics and in physical resistance. Among other tests, the men who wished to join Bar Kokhba’s army had to be able to uproot a tree  while riding a horse. 

To be continued….

The 9th of Ab is the day of the national mourning of the Jewish people. As we explained in previous years, the first reason why we fast and mourn this day is that on that day it was decreed that the generation that left Egypt would not enter the Promised Land but would die in the desert.

The second tragic event that we remember, always in chronological order, is the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem in the year 586 before the common era.
In the year 68 of the common era (historians say 70), the second Bet haMiqdash was destroyed, this time by the Romans.

There are two other tragic events that we remember in the 9th of Ab. These two events occurred after the destruction of the second Bet HaMiqdash, and in a certain way they were the direct consequence of it.

The first of these two events is called in Hebrew: חרישת העיר, which means that “the City was plowed”. The city to which we refer here is none other than Jerusalem. This happened in the year 130 of the common era, sixty years after the destruction of the Bet haMiqdash.
Finally, on the day Tisha B’Ab, corresponding to August 4 of the year 135, the city of Betar fell into the hands of the Romans, in Hebrew: נלכדה ביתר, “The city of Betar was conquered.”
This year I would like to explore and explain these last two events in a little more detail.

Let’s start from the beginning:

Historians say that when the Bet HaMiqdash was destroyed, the Romans killed around 1 million Jews: one third of the local Jewish population. In addition, tens of thousands of children older than 7 years were captured and sold as slaves. And thousands of young Jews from 17 years old and up were assigned to die in Roman circuses, where they would be killed fighting gladiators, or being devoured alive trying to escape from hungry beasts, to the delight of the spectators.

Thousands of Jews also escaped to Alexandria (Egypt), to Cyprus or to the coasts of Africa, where they founded important communities, which were tragically destroyed by the Romans around the year 117 of the common era, in what historians call מרד התפוצות, ” the rebellion of Jewish communities in the diaspora. ”

Back to Israel, which was no longer “Israel” but Judea, a Roman province completely dependent on the Roman Emperor. In order to have the right to continue living in the now Roman territory, the Jewish survivors had to pay high taxes to the empire and endure constant humiliations and abuses.

Very impoverished, Jews were resettled in the north of the country, the Galil, and in the center, in cities such as Lod, Bene-Berak, Betar and especially in Yabne. In this last city, from the 70’s was founded an important rabbinic academy under the leadership of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakay and Rabban Gamliel, who tried to maintain the best possible relationship with the Romans. The foundations of the Mishnah, the Midrash and the Talmud came from the Yabne Rabbinical academy, through great luminaries such as Ribbi Eliezer haGadol, Ribbi Yehoshua ben Hananiya, Ribbi Yishmael and Ribbi Aquiba, the most famous of the Sages of that time.

It could be said that during this period of time, from year 68 to 129, the Yehudim slowly recovered from the enormous loss of the Bet HaMiqdash and began to grow again as a people, studying and developing more and more our Tora and the Rabbinic institutions. The situation seemed to be improving, especially with the new Emperor Hadrian, who on one of his trips to Judea assured that he was going to allow the Yehudim to rebuild the Bet haMiqdash … but in the end, everything changed, for the worse.…

To be continued….