## Rabbi Sacks on Yom Kippur Mahzor, Musaf, Eleh Ezkera

###### Rabbi Sacks on Yom Kippur Mahzor, Musaf, Eleh Ezkera 3
[Rabbi Sacks on Yom Kippur Mahzor, Musaf, Eleh Ezkera 3](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Rabbi%20Sacks%20on%20Yom%20Kippur%20Mahzor/s/Musaf,_Eleh%20Ezkera/r/3)

**English Edition; Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2017:**
אֵֽלֶּה אֶזְכְּרָה These I remember. A lament for ten great rabbis who went to their deaths as martyrs, killed by the Romans. Their story is told, in differing forms, twice a year: once on Tisha B’Av, the other here. On Tisha B’Av the emphasis is on grief, since that is a day of mourning. Here the emphasis is on the way they gave their lives for their faith – as if to say that though the destruction of the Temple brought sacrifices to an end, Jews did not cease to make sacrifices for the sake of God. Often they gave their lives.
In the first and second centuries CE there were three rebellions against Rome. First was the Great Rebellion of 66–73 during which Jerusalem was conquered and the Second Temple destroyed. Second was the uprising throughout the empire in 117 against the Emperor Trajan. Third, and in human terms the most tragic, was the Bar Kokhba rebellion of 132–135. It was during this last that most of the sages here mentioned, died.
Throughout history there have been two kinds of assaults against Jewry, the first against Jews, the second against Judaism. Among the latter was that of Antiochus IV of Syria (against whom the Maccabees fought and won), and the Roman emperor Hadrian. Both sought to impose a Hellenistic culture on the peoples of the Middle East and both banned the public practice of Judaism, including circumcision. Jews, under the command of Shimon bar Kosiba (popularly known as Bar Kokhba, “son of the star”), rose against the Romans in 132.
Initially the campaign was successful and Roman losses were heavy. Archaeologists working in the Judean desert between 1952 and 1961 found documents from the rebels, showing them to be deeply religious Jews concerned with the practice of their faith. But as more Roman legions were brought into the area, the tide turned and the rebels faced their final defeat in Beitar in 135.
The Romans were ruthless in their reprisals. According to the Roman historian Dio, “very few [Jews] were saved.” Fifty forts were destroyed, 985 settlements razed, 580,000 Jews died in the fighting, along with “countless numbers” who died of starvation, fire and the sword. “Nearly the entire land of Judea lay waste” (*Roman History* 69:14). Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, which Jews were forbidden to enter except on Tisha B’Av and the name of the land was changed by Hadrian from Judea to Syria-Palestina, the origin of the name Palestine.
The tragedy was compounded by the fact that many of the greatest scholars were brutally put to death, among them Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Yishmael, Rabbi Ḥananya ben Teradyon, Rabbi Tarfon, head of the Sanhedrin before the revolt, Shimon ben Azzai and others. That is the historical basis of the events narrated in “These I remember,” although it also includes sages like Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel the Nasi and Rabbi Yishmael the High Priest who were killed in the earlier revolts.
The narrative opens with the suggestion, paralleled by a passage in the Book of Jubilees, that the ten martyrs suffered death to atone for the ten sons of Jacob who sold their brother Joseph into slavery (Gen. 37:26–28). There may be an allusion here to the idea, expressed elsewhere by the sages, that the Second Temple fell because of internal dissension and “causeless hatred” within the Jewish people (*Yoma* 9b).
Whatever the cause, the combination of physical destruction and spiritual devastation by the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt brought Jewry closer to despair than almost any other time in history. The Talmud (*Bava Batra* 60b) says that there were those who came to the conclusion that “by rights we should issue a decree that there should be no more Jewish marriages and no more Jewish children so that the seed of Abraham comes to an end of its own accord.”
The memory of the martyrs never faded. The Talmud tells a famous story that one figure, Pappus ben Judah, warned Rabbi Akiva to stop teaching Torah in public for fear that he would be caught and killed by the Romans. Rabbi Akiva replied with a fable of the fox and the fish. A fox walking by a river saw fish darting here and there and asked them why. The fish said they were escaping the nets of fishermen. “In that case,” said the fox, “come and live with me safely on dry land.” The fish replied, “If we are in danger of death here in the only element in which we can live, how much more so on dry land where we cannot live at all” (*Berakhot* 61b). For Rabbi Akiva life without Torah was as inconceivable as a fish living without water.
It is said that Rabbi Akiva went to his death serenely, saying “All my life I wondered whether I would have the chance to fulfill the command, *You shall love the Lord your God…with all your soul* – meaning, ‘even if He takes your soul,’ and now that I have the chance to fulfill it shall I not do so?” (ibid.). Heroic deaths like these inspired Jews in many subsequent centuries. Yet Judaism remains a religion of life, not death.