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From Avraham to Ezra

All of Jewish history is the history of people, and not necessarily of events or forces in the world. This is the Jewish view of history, and it stands in contrast to the idea proposed by Karl Marx that history has almost nothing to do with people. In Marx’s view, which is now a tenet of modern historiography, the entire gamut of human experience reflects impersonal patterns of economic and political changes. People, therefore, are merely pawns. We are caught in the web of history, but we can neither direct it nor control it.

This idea is completely contrary to the Torah and the Jewish view of things. The Jewish view of things is that everything depends upon individual people. Individual people have choices for good or for better, and those choices bring about consequences, and those consequences are what we call history. This article will discuss individual people, and because we will talk about individuals, we will see patterns, and these patterns can be applied to all of Jewish history.

The Chumash, the Torah itself, is not a history book per se, though there is a great deal of history we can learn from it.  The Jewish people began over 3700 years ago with one married couple, Avraham and Sarah. In fact, the prophet Isaiah states that if you want to understand where you come from, you should “look at the life of your father Avraham, your mother Sarah who gave birth to you.” If you examine their lives, you will understand the patterns of all Jewish history.

This idea is expressed in a saying that is a tenet in Jewish history: “Maaseh avos siman l’banim.” “The actions of the Patriarchs are indicators for the children.” In other words, if you want to understand what is happening in the Jewish world now at the beginning of the 21^st century, you can do that by filtering today’s events through the lives of our ancestors and through the events that have occurred to us over the centuries.

Avraham and Sarah came from Mesopotamia and lived in a world that was entirely pagan, though there were some exceptions. Shem and Ever, for example, still kept the tradition of Noah, but for the most part, that tradition was destroyed, not by the Flood, but by the generation after the Flood, the Dor HaFlaga. It was a tyrannical world under the rule of Nimrod, a Stalin or Hitler of his era. Technology was valued over human beings. The Talmudic Rabbis tell us that when a brick fell from the Tower of Babel, everybody wept and said, “Oh, it’s going to cost us so much money to get the brick back up!” But if a human being fell off the scaffolding, nobody cared. That attitude has not departed from mankind. It still exists, even today.

Avraham lived in this world. According to Jewish tradition, he was born in the year 1948 after Creation. Though not all commentators agree, Maimonides, also known as the Rambam, stated that for the first fifty-two years of his life, Avraham was also a pagan. He was a product of his society. Only when he was fifty-two years old did he come to the idea of monotheism. As the Talmudic Rabbis expressed it, “He looked at the world and deduced the existence of a Creator.”

One of the Rambam’s basic ideas is that everybody can be a believer. God made belief easy for us by revealing Himself at Sinai, but if that had not occurred, we would still be obligated to discover God by ourselves. The Rambam says you can discover God through an examination of nature - by looking at the heavens or even at the intricate workings of our own bodies. The Talmudic statement “from my flesh I see God” expresses this idea. In modern philosophy, this idea is called “intelligent design.”

However, because free will is so important in God’s plan in the world, even the greatest scientist in the world who knows every fact about nature and physics can still be a non-believer. Everyone can choose whether to believe or disbelieve. Otherwise, free will would not operate.

Avraham and Sarah did not have an easy life. In the early part of his life, Avraham was impoverished. Sarah was barren. Nimrod had Avraham thrown into fire because he was a monotheist. Yet surprisingly, none of this information appears in the Book of Genesis; we learn it from the Oral tradition. Judging only by Genesis, we might conclude that Avraham had a tranquil life, and nothing ever bothered him. That is because the Torah wants to impress upon us the kind of people he and his wife Sarah were.

Thus, Avraham and Sarah set lasting patterns for Jewish history. One of these is that Avraham was rootless all of his life. God commanded him, “Lech l’cho” “Go away from your father’s home.” Thus, Avraham never had a permanent home; he was always wandering. And similarly, throughout Jewish history, the Jewish people have been basically rootless. Even when we settle somewhere, our happiness never lasts. We must always look for another place.

There’s a bad joke by Jackie Mason, which rings very true for the Jewish people. A rich man builds a 5 million dollar home in Long Island and invites all of his friends to the housewarming. But what is the first thing he tells them when they come into the door? “Wait till you see the next one I build!” There’s an element of truth in that. That is the pattern Avraham set, and we are still living with it.

Avraham was rootless. “Lech l’cha” means he was always going somewhere. He was also alone in the world. Even when he was successful, when he had spread monotheism across half of civilization, he was still alone and unique. That is the literal meaning of the word “Hebrew. ” Being a Jew means being few among the many.

This idea is reflected later in the Torah with the verse: “Ki atem amat mi kol ha amim”- “you will be the least numerous of all nations.” God did not choose us for our numbers. If God had wanted that, He would have chosen the Chinese. Even today, there are thirteen to fourteen million Jews in the world, but there are over a billion Moslems, over a billion Christians, over a billion Buddhists, and over a billion Confucians and Shintoists. Yet despite our small numbers, we have had an overwhelming influence on the world at large. So who are we? Look at who we are. Look at the fact that you can’t touch anything in the world without the Jews being there. God told us that we would be like our father Abraham and our mother Sarah. We are rootless and alone, but we are the center of civilization. *

Even in the Land of Israel, a brutal and pagan culture dominated. Avraham was the exception even there. The city of Sodom was full of murder, cruelty, violence and immorality, yet the reason for its destruction was not because of its population of three million evil people, but because its population did not include even ten good people. It is much like the famous legend that there are 36 righteous people whose very existence supports the world. It is individuals that preserve the world.

Without righteous individuals, the world generally is a world of Sodom. It’s murder, immorality, cruelty, war, and violence. I think it is somewhat noteworthy that the 20^th century began with a Balkans war and ended with the same Balkans war. It is as though the 160,000,000 people killed in that century made no impression. We are right back where we started from. The world is Sodom.

Avraham saw as his task, as the Jewish people have always seen as their task, the necessity of saving Sodom from itself. That remains one of the great ideas of Judaism that Jews pray even for evil Sodom. We do not rejoice in its destruction because destruction, even when it is valid, does not advance the cause that the Lord wants mankind to achieve.

Another pattern we learn from Avraham’s life is that children do not always turn out the way their parents hope. Though Avraham and Sarah produced Yitzchak, Avraham also produced Yishmael. Almost every one of the heroes that exists in the Bible has a child or children that caused disappointment. Yitzchak and Rivkah produced Eisav, who is the bane of their existence. Yaakov barely escaped; his children were righteous, but the incident with Yosef and his brothers took the life out of him. Moshe had a grandson that became an idolatrous priest. The kings of Israel and of Judah had children that became pagans and sinners. Almost none of the Biblical heroes had, what in Yiddish we call “nachas.” Nachas is a hard thing to come by, and unfortunately, almost ironically, even when you have it, you don’t know that you have it because you’ve come to expect still more.

It was Yaakov who became the symbol of all Jewish history. Whereas the lives of Avraham and Yitzchak were rootless and alone, in his life, Yaakov suffered exile, servitude, abuse, and exploitation. The nations of the world regarded Avraham as a great man. They called him “the prince of God.” They likewise regarded Yitzchak as a great man. But they saw Yaakov as a pauper, and people took advantage of him.

Yaakov attempted to walk a thin line, to somehow come to an accommodation with his oppressors Lavan and Eisav while remaining true to himself and the Torah Tradition. Because he was able to do so, God changed his name. God gave him the name of the Jewish people, the name of the land that we live in and the state that we inhabit. The Torah calls him “Yisrael.” Yisrael has the ability to live in a world of Eisav, to live in a world of Lavan, and remain Yaakov. And that is the task that the Jewish people have undertaken through our long history.

We see this more recently. In one of the anecdotes in Martin Gilbert’s book on the Holocaust, an eye-witness tells the story of a child say who said to an SS soldier, “You’re Eisav, and I’m Yaakov. And even though you’re going to kill me, I would still rather be Yaakov.” That’s Yisrael. That’s the ability to remain Yaakov in a world of Eisav and Lavan.

The Torah also shows us the pattern of divisiveness within the Jewish people. The Jewish people argue and mistrust each other, and sometimes brother turns against brother. Each of the sides is convinced that he is correct and fighting for a holy cause. The story of Yosef and his brothers is a story that continues until today.

We will see throughout the Tanach that this conflict plays itself out, specifically in the competition between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judea. They never come to an accommodation, and that is because it is almost in our DNA, as seen from the story of Yosef and his brothers. Yaakov was powerless to prevent it.

The Lord promised Avraham that the Jewish people, his descendants, would undergo a process of being annealed in the furnace of slavery and exile, so that out of it would come a people that would be eternal, a people so tough that nothing would destroy it. Because the exile is so tough, we’re a tough people. If you have any doubts about it, stand on a line in a government office in Israel. Once I had to stand in line at the Kupat Cholim and they ran out of numbers. People were arguing. “Who’s the last one?” “I’m the last one!” “No, I’m the last one!” I said to the guy next to me, “It’s a good thing this the Kupat Cholim because they’re going to beat each other up. Here they can get treatment immediately.”

We have to be a tough people. Otherwise we can’t survive. Moshe called us an “a stiff-necked people,” a stubborn people. That’s not necessarily negative; it can be positive. If we wouldn’t be stubborn, we wouldn’t have anybody left. Our survival is only because we’re stiff-necked, tough people.

When the Jewish people entered the exile of Egypt, more patterns were set. The exile began on a high note, as does every exile. When the Jewish people first came to Egypt, Joseph was the viceroy. The brothers settled in Goshen, and the Jewish people were doing swimmingly well. As a result, they became super-patriotic. When Pharaoh called for volunteers to work, all the Jews volunteered because they were good Egyptians. But eventually the situation deteriorated, and the Jewish people became slaves.

The Jews were not the only slaves in Egypt; Egypt was a charnel house of slaves. Egypt was known for slavery even through the time of the Romans, but slavery itself is the most inefficient, inhuman, counter-productive way of building a civilization. And it’s always built upon bigotry and a crushing of the human spirit.

Our tradition tells us that the Jews were in Egypt for 210 years. Our tradition also tells us that it was only in the final 86 years that the real yoke of slavery was imposed upon the Jewish people. By then, the vast majority of the Jewish people were destroyed. 80% of the Jews did not survive Egypt. Three million Jews left Egypt: six hundred thousand males between the ages of 20 and 60, and if we’ll extrapolate that to include the women and the children, and those that were old and young, the resulting number is about three million. But three million was one-fifth of the Jewish world. The other four-fifths were lost, which is also a pattern in Jewish history.

I mentioned before that we are the smallest of people. At the time of the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, there were between twelve and a half and thirteen million Jews in the world, just about what there is today. In contrast, the population of China then was about six million. Two thousand years later, there are one billion, six hundred million Chinese. We haven’t increased as they have. There is a constant hemorrhaging, to the extent that there is Jewish blood almost everywhere in the world.

Nine out of ten Spaniards have Jewish blood in them. Throughout Europe, even in Poland and Eastern Europe where assimilation was more rare, a sizable amount of Jews mixed into the majority culture and got lost. I was struck with it when I visited Prague. Everybody in Prague claims to have Jewish blood. There are approximately 5,000 Jews in Prague, and 1,500 religious ones, but the tour guides told me that there are at least 100,000 people in Prague who claim to have Jewish blood, people who had a Jewish grandfather or great-grandfather.

That is what happened to the Jews in Egypt, and Egypt was a place from which nobody could escape. The Jews tried it. Thirty thousand Jews from the tribe of Ephraim burst out from slavery, and the Egyptians did not even try to bring them back because they knew they would die in the desert. Indeed they did, and they became the dead, dry bones mentioned by the Prophet Ezekiel. Yet though nobody could leave Egypt, three million people walked out one day, on a Thursday. We can deduce the day on which we left because we know that we stood at Sinai on a Shabbos. The Jewish collective memory remembers everything.

God took the Jewish people out of Egypt, and they wandered in the desert for forty days. Through miracles, they sustained themselves.  They had bread, water, and food, and they were able to withstand all the vicissitudes of the desert.

One of the great archaeological riddles is: Where is Mount Sinai? I just saw an article that appeared in “Vanity Fair” that places Mount Sinai in the northwestern tip of the Saudi Arabian desert and the point of the crossing of the Red Sea at the Straits of Tehran, the entrance to the Red Sea. Perhaps it is true. The archaeologists also discovered a tremendous mountain that had once been a volcano, laden with gold and other valuable treasures and resources. The Saudis have now made it into a radar base, one of the most sophisticated radar bases in the Middle East.

In the Kuzari, a text of basic Jewish philosophy, Rabbi Yehudah Ha Levy stated regarding the revelation at Sinai that nobody can fool the Jewish people. We are by nature skeptical, and that is one of our strengths. Rabbi Yehudah Ha Levy said that nobody could invent the story of Sinai and convince generations of people that it was true. It would sound ridiculous. The Jewish people would never have believed it if it hadn’t happened, if there had not been eye-witnesses, if they themselves had not been part of it.

Rabbi Yehudah Ha Levy also pointed out that the tradition of Sinai exists amongst all religions in the world. He calls it “consensusomnia.” The differences in the religions developed later, but everyone subscribes to Sinai.

As I have stated, the first stage of Jewish history was that of individuals, the patriarchs. The second stage was the slavery of Egypt. The third stage was to develop as a people in the desert. And then came the great experiment. God told us He would give us the Land, and we were to try and become a people in the Land. We, the unique “Hebrews,” were to learn to live in the ordinary situation of running a country. We were going to have to have a nation with leaders, armies, taxes, and all the things that go with nationhood. That was the ultimate experiment and the ultimate accomplishment for the Jewish people to attain. We have tried it twice and been unsuccessful. We are now in our third attempt. We pray that we will be successful, but it will take a great deal of effort, and will also take some knowledge and experience as to why we were not successful the first two times.

Perhaps if God have given the Jews a choice, we would not have chosen His Chosen Land. The climate is not comfortable; there is never enough rain, and the land yields its bounty very, very sparingly. God made it this way deliberately. He did not give the Jews the fertile land of Egypt. The commentators explain that because Egypt had the Nile, nobody prayed to God there.

God instead gave the Jewish people a land inhabited by other people who were not willing to give it to them. The Jewish people had to conquer it, and even after they did, they had a difficult time maintaining themselves. But this too is what God wanted. God wanted us to develop an attachment to the Land that would survive nineteen hundred years of absence. It is something that has never occurred in all of human history. No people has ever been away from its land for nineteen hundred years, come back to it, and made it into its Land again.

More than that, we feel at home in it. It is almost as though we never left. With all of the difficulties of living in the Land of Israel, then and now, almost all Jews feel a déjà vu feeling about it. It was the first feeling I had. The first time I came to Eretz Israel, I got off the airplane, and though I was never here before, somehow I had the feeling that I had been. I didn’t have that feeling when I went to San Antonio or Atlanta.

Another historical lesson the Torah teaches us is that the greatest and holiest of people are mortal. Moshe was a unique prophet in Jewish history. None achieved his level of closeness with God. He went to Sinai, saw the “countenance of God,” and brought down the Torah. The Psalms say of Moshe that he was one level below God.

Yet Moshe died. On Simchas Torah, we say a special prayer later in the day that always makes an impression upon me. Its title is “Moshe mes milo yomus” “Moshe Died; Who Shall Not Die?” The prayer asks: Who is immortal? The answer: Nobody is. And that is a lesson in history. Many, many problems in history arose because people were not willing to accept the fact that everyone is mortal.

Moshe was succeeded by Yehoshua, and this set another pattern. Yehoshua was not Moshe. The people complained that they were used to better leaders. The Talmud says, “Moshe is the sun; Yehoshua is only the moon.” But every generation has its leaders, and to compare generations and leaders is unfair and counterproductive.

Yehoshua conquered the country. He was able to maintain the centrality of authority because people saw him as a direct product of Moshe.

After Yehoshua died, the Jewish people became “shtiblized.” Everybody made his own place. Then, it became twelve separate tribes. The Jewish people so grew apart from each other that they mounted a civil war, Jew against Jew. 30,000 Jews were killed in the war, and the entire tribe of Binyamin was almost destroyed.

The Jewish people then came into contact with the Canaanite culture. It was one thing to be a good Jew for forty years in the desert where there was no civilization or culture to compete with, and even there, the Jews rebelled. But in the Land of Israel, they came into contact with a culture that had some attractions. A large proportion of the Jewish people gave up on the Torah lifestyle and became pagans. They lost sight of the vision, and they no longer wanted to be the Hebrews, a special people.

This theme, too, recurs throughout Jewish history. But God never allows the Jewish people as a whole to leave. Individual Jews sometimes quit, but the Jewish people as a whole can never quit. The covenant is binding.

The Lord sent judges to represent the different tribes and rule the people. They tried to centralize the Jewish people and push them back towards their original God-given mission. But the entire period of the Judges, which was almost four hundred years, was almost constantly a time of war. There were about one hundred years about which the Torah says, “and it was quiet in the Land.” In one place, it says, “it was quiet for eighty years.” Regarding the times before the prophetess Devorah, the Torah says, “it was quiet for forty years.” But for other centuries, it never was quiet. There was always a war going on.

Similarly, if you look over the history of the Jewish people in Israel, both ancient and modern, only for a very, very small percentage of time has it been quiet. The country is under constant attack. The Pelishtim were here; the Canaani were here; the Phoenicians were here. Later, the country found itself between two great empires, a situation that would persist almost till our day. The southern empire was Egypt; the northern empire was first Assyria and later Babylonia. The meeting point of the empires is here in this small country, and the Jews have always been subjected to this problem. Both empires are always determined to control and conquer them. It becomes a balancing act again. It is another instance of how to be Yaakov in a world of Eisav and Lavan, how to be Yaakov in a world of Pharaoh and Saddam Hussein.

The rise of the great prophet Shmuel marks the end of the period of the Judges. He centralizes the Jewish people. The Talmudic Rabbis tell us that on a list of Jewish leaders, after Moshe and Yehoshua, comes Shmuel. The Jewish people then became a monarchy. Strong kings were necessary because otherwise, the Jewish people would tear themselves apart and they would be unable to survive the external and internal pressures.

The first king, Shaul HaMelech, would have won the election 99% to 1%. Shaul was the perfect king. The Book of Samuel states that Shaul was “as free of sin as a one-year-old child.” Nobody had a bad word to say about him. He was the tallest of the Jews, the handsomest, the bravest, and a Torah scholar. He was the perfect king, except that he wasn’t.

There is a lesson there, too. As the Talmudic Rabbis teach us: you should never appoint a leader that does not have imperfections. Thank God, we have passed that test.

We should not look for perfect leaders. Perfect leaders are not what the Torah wants for us. I’ve seen it in my own life. In my yeshiva days, the dean refused to give semicha to the most pious boy in our classbecause he said that he didn’t feel that the boy could become a rabbi. The boy’s mother went to the dean to plead his case. “He’s the most pious boy in the class,” she said.

“For piety, you get the World to Come, not semicha,” said the dean. There’s a lot of truth to that. Piety and leadership are two different things. That is how it was with the pious King Shaul. His rule was a disaster.

As Shaul’s reign fell into decline, Shmuel was told to find another king. The other king was a most unlikely candidate. He was short and ruddy. His brothers didn’t have a high opinion of him. They thought he was just a shepherd, who wasted his time playing the guitar. But God says that he was the king that would succeed, so he became the king. Even though the Tanach has harsh things to say about him, he is nonetheless called “Dovid, melech Yisrael chai vekayam” “the king of Israel, alive and enduring.”

The model for Jewish leadership is Dovid. The Messiah will descend from him. He is also the composer of the greatest prayer book in human history, the Tehillim. Dovid is “the songster of Israel,” the person with the magic harp, who rose above all personal and national tragedies because he retained the vision. He kept the Jewish people as Yaakov. He was strong enough to fight Eisav on Eisav’s terms, and wily enough to best Lavan on Lavan’s terms.

Dovid had a son, Shlomo from his marriage to Bas Sheva. Shlomo was the wisest of all people, and as had happened with Shaul, the Jewish people again thought they had the perfect monarch, the wisest of all people. Shlomo built the Bais Ha Mikdash, the Holy Temple. The Jewish monarchy reached its zenith under his rule. The Land was quiet; there were forty years of peace. There was prosperity; the Shechina was there, the city of Jerusalem was built, and the Temple was constructed on Har Ha Moriah.

But Shlomo could not maintain all of this. He was too wise. The Talmudic Rabbis teach us that anybody that is “too” anything has got a problem. Too rich, too poor, too smart, too dumb, too handsome, too beautiful. Anything that’s “too” is a problem because people find it hard to handle.

Shlomo felt he was above the Law, above the Torah. The Torah says that a king may not have too many wives, horses, or acquire too much wealth, but Shlomo allowed himself to have them. And from there, the kingdom began to unravel. By the end of his reign, the centrality of the Jewish government was again threatened. We were reverting back to the time of the Judges, except this time, there would be two major kingdoms. The split between Yosef and his brothers was reawakening.

Upon the death of Shlomo, a great man and Torah scholar, Yerovam ben Navot, broke away and formed the northern kingdom of Israel with the ten tribes. Shlomo’s son Rechavam was left in Jerusalem with only the tribe of Yehudah and part of the tribe of Binyamin. Each side had a chance at reconciliation, but both made terrible errors.

Rechavam made the error of becoming a dictator, though the Jewish people told him that they did not want that. They wanted a leader who would treat them kindly and with respect, who would lower tariffs and taxes. Rechavam asked the Elders for advice. The Elders told him to come to an accommodation with the people. Then Rechavam approached the young people. They advised him to rule with an iron hand, which he did. From this incident, the Talmudic Rabbis teach us the rule that it is a mistake to listen to the young over the old.

Yerovam also had a chance to reconcile, but he was consumed with jealousy. He purposely erected a wall, the original Berlin Wall, in the city of Beit El and did not allow the Jews of his kingdom to go to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple. The halacha is that in the precincts of the Temple, only the king of the House of David was allowed to sit on a chair, but everyone else would have to stand.  Therefore, if Yerovam’s citizens went to the Temple, they would see their king standing while Rechavam sat. Yerovam could not bear that.

Some may doubt that so great policy decision, one that affected generations, could be influenced by such a petty matter, but that ignores human nature. Almost all great events arise from petty matters. Many a terrible war that has cost thousands and thousands of lives was started over a petty matter, over an insult imagined.

And therefore, Yerovam declared a new religion. The commentators tell us it was a strange religion: the Jews kept the Shabbos, the Laws of kashrus - they performed all the mitzvos, except they worshipped idols. They had a “frum” idolatry. Reb Reuven Margolies, in one of his great seforim, has a long essay showing how the northern kingdom lived. They lived as Jews, but ultimately their idol worship overtook them. All of the kings who succeeded Yerovam were sinners. None of them had the courage to break away, even though many of them knew better. In fact, some of them promised to destroy idolatry, but did not do so once they came to power.

Despite numerous warnings from the prophets, the Jewish people did not believe that God would ever do anything to them. They felt God had too much invested in them. I always mention that if you’re going to borrow money from a bank, borrow a lot of money. If you only borrow $1,000.00 and you don’t pay the bank back, they’ll come after you. They’ll garnish your wages; they’ll do everything in their power. But ifyou borrow ahundred million dollars from the bank and you’re late with a payment, they’ll call you up to see how they can work a deal with you. You’re in too deeply for them to just to pull the rug on you. It was the same thing with the Jewish people. The Jewish people felt that they were “in” with God, so to speak. God had invested His Name, His Torah, His Land, and His Temple with the Jewish people. What could He do to them? Therefore, the Jewish people thought they could do whatever they wanted.

The prophets warned the people that this was a terrible error. God is God without the people, without the Torah, without the Temple, and without the Land. He doesn’t need us; we need Him. And God proved it. In 732 BCE, Sancheriv invaded Israel and sent the Jewish people into exile. The ten northern tribes disappeared off the face of the earth. Most of them moved south to Judea and became part of the tribes of Yehudah and Binyamin, but large sections of them disappeared completely. Legend has them living behind a magical river somewhere, but the Talmud’s opinion is that they are never coming back. A new people, the Shomronim or the Samaritans came and inhabited the northern part of the country.

The people of Judea took these events to heart, but only temporarily. They also fell victim to bad leadership. They too felt somehow that nothing would ever happen to them. And finally, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Bavel (Babylonia) descended, destroyed Jerusalem, and burned the Temple to the ground. Ninety percent of the Jews were taken into the exile of Babylonia; ten percent went with the Prophet Jeremiah into exile in Egypt. The Jewish nation was over. The Jewish country was ravaged and ruined. There was no future.

What was the reaction of the Jews to this? A certain section of the Jews in Bavel told the Prophet that they wanted to stop being the unique Hebrews. They felt had God quit on them, so they would quit on Him. They said, “k’chol ha goyim bais Yisrael” “We are like everyone else.” They wanted to assimilate and be Babylonians.

God refused their plea. The Jewish people can never quit on God.

52 years after the exile began, the story of Purim occurred. In that series of events, Haman proved that Jews could not quit being Jews. Haman was hunting for every Jew. He wanted“the people of Mordechai,” not just Mordechai himself. And he did not want to kill Mordechai because he had a big black hat, sidecurls, and looked funny. He was out to get all Jews, the professors, the doctors, the diplomats, the bankers, all the assimilated Jews in general.

The Jewish people were miraculously saved from Haman’s plot. With that miracle the Jewish people finally repented of their sins that had led them to the exile. Purim became the second Kabbalas HaTorah, the second acceptance of the Torah. The Jewish people accepted that there is a covenant, and that they and their descendants are a part of it. With Purim, they agreed that they could not quit on God. And because of this repentance, eighteen years later, Queen Esther’s son King Darius gave permission to the Jews to return to the Land of Israel, and another attempt at being Yaakov in a world of Lavan and Eisav began.