It is fascinating that as a people we have a 4,000 year history but, tragically, all too little of that has been lived in freedom and sovereignty in our land. Three times in history the Jewish people went into exile. Once in the days of the biblical Joseph. A second time after the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile. The third time after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, and the longest exile any people has ever suffered almost 2,000 years.
Look at those exiles. They are the three critical moments in Jewish history, and each time the cause of exile was identical: a failure of Jews to live peaceably together.
Exile One: Joseph.
The Bible tells us - in Bereishit (Genesis) 37:4 - “vayissne'u otto velo yachlu dabro leshalom” “The brothers hated Joseph and couldn't speak peaceably to him.” The result? They plotted to kill him, eventually they sold him into slavery, and the result is the entire Jewish people were sold into slavery in Egypt. Exile one.
Exile Two: The Destruction of the First Temple
Well, biblical Israel, the Israel of the Kings, was remarkably short-lived. There were only three generations of kings who ruled Israel as a united nation: Saul, David, Solomon. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom divided into two. Ten tribes of Israel in the North, the two tribes of Judah in the South. Divided, the Jewish people could not stand. It always has been a tiny people surrounded by large empires, and it needed an extraordinary degree of unity to survive at all.
So when in the days of Rechavam (Rehoboam), Solomon's son, and Yeravam (Jereboam) the rebel, it divided into two, the end was inevitable, however long it took. And so in 722 BCE the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians, its population transported and vanished into oblivion known as “the lost Ten Tribes”, and - inevitably - the Southern Kingdom, a tiny kingdom, fell in turn to the Babylonians. It was that inability to live together as one nation that led to the destruction of the First Temple.
Exile Three: The Destruction of the Second Temple
In the Second Temple, one would have thought that Jews had learned the lesson of history but, if anything, the divisions were even worse. Josephus tells us they were divided into three groups: Essenes, Sadducees, Pharisees. Even within the camp of the Pharisees we know that they were divided between the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai that at one point threatened to split apart and - in the words of the rabbis - na'aseh Torah lishtei Torot [the precise phrase that the Gemara uses is ונעשית תורה כשתי תורות]. The whole of Judaism was in danger of splitting into two Judaism, and that is within the Pharisee camp alone.
We know that even among the political options there were the accommodationists, and the moderates, the doves, and there were the zealots, and the zealots themselves were internally divided. According to Josephus who was an eyewitness of the Siege of Jerusalem under Vespasian and Titus, the Jews within the besieged city were more intent on killing one another than on fighting fighting the enemy outside.
As the Talmud says, Jerusalem was destroyed because of sinat chinam, baseless hatred. That is the understatement of all time.
Three times Jews were unable to live peaceably together, and three times our people went into exile. Divisions are written into Jewish history, and think of this: almost every great world power has, in its time, attempted to destroy the Jewish people. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the medieval empires of Christianity and Islam, all the way to the 20th century - the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Every one of those those, empires which seemed Invincible in its day, which bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus, every one of those has disappeared into the pages of history, to live only in museums, and this one tiny nation can still say “Am Yisrael Chai”.
There is only one nation in the world capable of threatening the future of the Jewish people, and it is the Jewish people
