Making the Most of Defeat – Temple-Synagogue-Family

October 21, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
6. Making the Most of Defeat – Temple-Synagogue-Family

When I say to you that the worst kind of setback can be the cause for the best of consequences, you may wonder if the pulpit now personifies Pollyanna. However, if you reflect on that part of our heritage which records the destruction of the Temple and the initiation of religious priority for synagogue and family, you too may marvel on what great things moral courage can create from disastrous defeat. The rabbis of old favored a parable which compared Israel to an olive. “In order for an olive to yield its essence, its pure oil, it must be subjected to pressure and crushed. History records that the Jews made their greatest contribution to religion, to art, to science at times of persecution and suffering.”

One of the most crucial events that is recorded in our history is the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, 586 B.C.E. Since being constructed in the reign of King Solomon, the Temple had been the sanctuary for Hebrew worship. The ritual laws had evolved to provide that only in the Temple could sacrifice be offered to Yahveh. Worship had been centralized. The campaign against offering sacrifices in village high places had been largely successful, though it had taken hundreds of years to eliminate the older practice.

Solomon’s temple was the shrine for the Ark of the Covenant, the place wherein sacred vessels were stored and provided a court for the worshipers. This was the acceptable place for sacrifice to the one eternal Yahveh. There was no alternative sanctuary.

Consequently, it was a bad defeat when Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem in 598 B.C.E. and exiled many of the leading persons and craftsmen to Babylon. But when the Babylonian monarch returned to Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., to suppress an uprising, he destroyed both the city and the Temple. Most of the remaining citizens were taken to Babylonian exile to join their neighbors who had mourned by the rivers of Babylon for more than a decade.

The destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the Babylonian exile mark the great divide in our Jewish heritage. How could acceptable sacrifice be offered? The Temple no longer stood. How could the Covenant be preserved when all manner of alien influence would surround the children of Israel and lead them into the paths and practices of Babylonian worship?

Under the pressure of disaster and such threat, the synagogue was organized and responsibility given to the family to preserve and perpetuate the unique religious heritage.

The Synagogue (Greek “Assembly,” Hebrew “ben Keneset”) became a permanent institution because the Temple was gone and a place for prayer and instruction was necessary. The remnant in Jerusalem and the colony of exiles in Babylon had to know their faith, so the scrolls of the Law were gathered. In the synagogues of Babylon and Jerusalem, the Jew could hear the traditions and laws of his religion.

Now when Cyrus and his Persians overwhelmed the Babylonians, he permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem after their fifty-year exile, although some chose to remain in Babylon. The returning exiles built another temple, which was to stand for centuries, until destroyed by the Romans, under Titus, in 70 A.D.

But the strong effort to make the vest of disaster had established the synagogue as a permanent institution and it was the growing edge of Judaism. Hundreds of synagogues existed in Jerusalem by the time of Jesus. Synagogues existed in most of the cities and villages of the Roman world. The gospels refer again and again to the time Jesus spent in the synagogues. (Matt. xiii/54; Mark vi/2; Luke iv/16). Judaism in those times was a missionary faith with tremendous appeal to the Greek-Roman world. To the jaded tastes of the world-weary, Judaism with its unequivocal monotheism, rejection of idolatry and explicit moral codes was refreshing, appealing and positive. Because missionary activity has not been a characteristic of Judaism for many hundreds of years, we tend to forget or be ignorant of the universalistic outreach of the Jews in ancient times. The converts were many. Actually, Paul, the greatest Christian missionary, was competing in the synagogues for converts.

With the building of the Second Temple about 538/515 B.C.E. and continuing to 70 A.D. the temple priests became a religious and political aristocracy. Religious leadership for the teaching of scripture and morals passed to the synagogue leadership. We in the Protestant traditions appreciate too little that for the most part we follow the synagogue patterns in our service: Psalms, the reading of scripture, prayer, exposition of scripture. We have the ancient and persisting heritage of a religious body which celebrates no ritual of sacrifice and without a hereditary priesthood. This has happened because the synagogue made the most of defeat. When the Second Temple was destroyed and the Jews dispersed throughout the world, there was no irrevocable disaster. The synagogue traveled with [the] wanderers. “We have Yahveh and his Torah and this will suffice.” The synagogue was a place of prayer and instruction, continuing of course to this very day.

We will fail to do justice to our heritage unless we apprehend that the synagogue, born from the ruins of the Temple, has been an inestimable influence on education as well as religion.

The synagogue is the longest continuous school in Western culture. The synagogue was the first center of adult education. The fathers came to learn; the children to listen. When Alexander the Great brought Hellenistic culture into the Near East, the Jews established schools for young people to counteract the alien cultural influences. this was followed by elementary schools for children. Before the time of Jesus, the synagogue provided education for women!

The educational procedures of the synagogue were directly connected to family responsibility. The synagogue did not remove from the father the responsibility of educating his children. The father’s responsibility was emphasized. More than other religions in our Western world, Judaism is a religion of the home. The Sabbath ceremonies are observed in the home. Judaism is a religion celebrated not by priests for people, but by the people themselves.

In ancient days, the Roman philosopher, Seneca, stated that the Jews were the only people who knew the reasons for their religious ceremonies and the source of their guidance. This religious competence is directly owed to the synagogue and family responsibility.

One of the great religious affirmations of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, A.D., was Martin Luther’s exposition of the “priesthood of all believers.” This was a defense of the proposition that man needs no priest to mediate or intercede for him with God. Man can maintain a direct relationship with his God. It is ironical that Martin Luther, seethingly anti-semitic, was defending an idea that had been Jewish custom and practice for thousands of years.

When the Temple was destroyed and the people exiled, Judaism became essentially a layman’s religion. The synagogue teachers were laymen, not priests; the responsible fathers, taking seriously the obligation of religious nurture in the home, were laymen, not ordained ecclesiastics. The scribes were laymen and “rabbi” means teacher, not priest.

There has been growth and change in Judaism, as well as other religions of the Western world. But the goals of the ancient synagogue are still high values toward which not only the Jew, but also all other people may worthily aspire: “the discovery of one God in Nature and the Social Process,” (Noss), the demand that religious meaning shall culminate in the individual achieving a morally mature personality, the prevailing insistence that the child shall be taught by the parent to be loyal to the best of his heritage.

These values were strengthened, and workable educational methods achieved by the home and a laymen’s league, as a consequence not of good fortune, but rather of crushing disaster. This leads to another historical truth which may surprise us: national defeat meant perpetuation of what was far greater value than national pride or possession.

Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple, but in less than fifty years, Cyrus at the head of the Persians crushed the Babylonians. Cyrus was fair with the Jews, permitting them to return to Jerusalem and build another temple. The Persians were a mighty empire for awhile. Cambyses conquered Egypt and Darius subjected Scythia and Thrace. But Darius and Xerxes, his successor, were held by the brave Spartans at Thermopylae; Greek sailors administered a crushing defeat to Persia in the Bay of Salamis; and the Persians tasted the bitter dregs of defeat and decline. Alexander, a bright and quick-burning Greek flame, marched to India; returning, died at Babylon, where his generals divided up the spoils of empire. Then the Romans conquered the remains of Alexander’s divided empire. So conquest and defeat has marked our history then and all centuries since. The poets mourn the “glory that was Greece” and the “grandeur that was Rome,” but Shakespeare dramatized the truest insight when King John muses (act iv, sc. 2),

“There is no sure foundation set on blood,
No certain life achieved by others’ death.”

Except for the brief period of Maccabean independence, and until 1947, when the State of Israel was established, from Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler, in most places the Jews have been a subject people, sorely tried and cruelly treated. The Jew was segregated into ghettos in much of Christian history. He was prevented from access to many occupations and professions. Socially he was barred. Even today in our country, anti-semitism still exerts both obvious and subtle discriminatory practices in education, business, social life.

But during this continuing ill-fortune, the Jew has made the most of depressing circumstances. In Europe, the most severe repressive measures, up to the advent of Hitler, occurred in the Middle Ages. Amid the squalor of Ghettos how did our religious founders respond? First, their home life was distinctly more worthy than their neighbors outside the Ghetto. They were moral in a time when Christian culture was at a low level generally. With the Jewish family, drunkenness was rare, while outside the Ghetto it was common. Hospitality was ungrudging. As in the Days of Babylonian exile, education was a duty. When most of the Christian communities were illiterate, in the Ghetto period, “there existed in the smallest Jewish community an education system of breadth and universality which even now in the most advanced countries has barely been equaled. Enrollment for either sex was free. The number of pupils in each class was regulated .... Meals were given to those who were in need.” (Cecil Roth, JEWISH CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION, MacMillan, 1938, p. 34.)

The Hebrew epic is the most telling historical example of the truth that national defeat created the conditions for the perpetuation of ideas more precious than national power and might. Consider how much we Americans dread losing our place of pre-eminent power among the nations of the world. We are willing to make war to preserve the forms of our national sovereignty. We forget easily that “There’s no sure foundation set on blood.” I suspect that pride and fear are embedded too deeply in our bones to consider the desirability of perpetuation of values rather than maintenance of might. Last year, the driveway of the parsonage received a new layer of asphalt, pounded down and smoothed by a road roller. Late this summer, I observed a healthy dandelion which had grown through several inches of asphalt. So with great ideas. Nurtured with loyalty and persistence by a surviving remnant, values can break through the crust of hard disaster.

The survival and growth of values in spite of defeat should highlight another aspect of the human venture. Values are not necessarily corrupted when new institutional forms are found necessary. It may be surmised that as the beaten exiles made their weary way to Babylon with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed, the could hardly have guessed that out of the catastrophe would emerge a new institution, the synagogue, which would make the religion of Yahveh the most pervasive religion in history, directly through Judaism and indirectly through its two main offshoots, Christianity and Islam.

There is something in the nature of man which tends to find a way of solving puzzles and to make good spring forth out of present evil. Religion is many things; takes many forms and one of our needs is to create new forms today. We need not fear a dynamic religion, one of changing forms as long as we uphold the obligations of moral men. That ancient and enduring obligation is to refuse to remain blocked from our loyalties by whatever obstacles changing conditions may place in our path; to deny domination over our minds by all shadowy threats which would destroy our determination to search for the truth which will make us free. This is what inner strength can produce and our heritage testifies to it.

The rabbis concluded the parable of the crushed olive, “If we take oil of an olive and attempt to keep it at the bottom of a glass of water, the oil will rise to the top. So it is when Israel is crushed low and forced in to the gutters of human degradation by oppression. Then those of the faith must rise above their suffering; rise above injustice, upward in the direction of God.”