The past: blueprint or prison? |
Mark Twain once marvelled at the Jews — how a people so small could outlast empires so vast. Kingdoms rose, ruled, and disappeared; the Jews, somehow, did not. Their influence was outsized, their survival inexplicable. What he framed as a riddle has never really stopped demanding an answer.
J.R.R. Tolkien, writing from a very different world, posed a question that gets closer to one: “What punishments of God are not gifts?” Strip away the theology, and what remains is something harder, sharper, and far more uncomfortable — the idea that catastrophe can force a people to become something new, or disappear. I would like to offer an idea, framed by the musings of these two literary greats: perhaps it is Judaism’s early catastrophic losses — the destruction of the Second Temple and the obliteration of the Bar Kochba Revolt, that are the reason that we remain.
If there is a single thread running through Jewish history, it is this uneasy pattern: devastation followed not by collapse, but by reinvention. You see it most clearly in the lead-up to Tisha B’Av, the Jewish calendar’s annual descent into grief for Temples lost two millennia ago. This is not passive remembrance. It is choreographed mourning — the stripping away of comfort, the deliberate narrowing of life, the demand that each generation experience this loss as if it were its own. Jews are not asked to remember Jerusalem’s destruction. They are asked to feel it.
And yet, the historical irony is hard to ignore: the destruction of the Temples, the defining trauma commemorated on Tisha B’Av, may also be the reason Judaism survived at all.
When Rome destroyed the Second Temple, it didn’t just level a building — it erased the centre of Jewish religious life. What followed could have been the end. Instead, it became a new beginning. Out of the wreckage emerged rabbinic Judaism: portable, text-based, decentralized. A religion no longer tied to one place, and therefore one that could endure displacement.
The same pattern repeated after the........