Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Debra and Avi Naider and Jody and Ari Storch. To sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or just to say what up, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
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When I first started this podcast, a whopping half decade ago – seriously, how did that happen?! – I had it all planned out. We’d unpack Israeli history from the beginning! But almost immediately, I ran into an obvious problem: What is the beginning? Where does Israeli history start?
Maybe, I thought, I should start with the First Aliyah of 1888, when tens of thousands of Russian and Yemenite Jews began flocking to a dusty little backwater province of the Ottoman Empire. But if I wanted to tell that story properly, I’d have to explain, in detail, why this particular stretch of land was so important. And to do that, I’d need to start somewhere between the 21st and 18th centuries BCE, when, according to one of my all-time favorite books, a man named Avram from Ur-Kasdim first heard the voice of God.
After weeks of agonizing, my team and I decided that we weren’t gonna start a history podcast with a Biblical figure or a divine promise – no matter how central they might be to Jewish identity. I wanted Unpacking Israeli History to speak to as wide an audience as possible: history nerds, religious folks, diehard secularists, Jews, gentiles, staunch Zionists, open-minded anti-Zionists, and anyone curious about this whole Israel and Israeli-Palestinian story thing. I wanted it to be approachable yet credible, as stacked with reputable historical sources as a college library. And that meant I wasn’t gonna start with the voice of God.
But after five years, over 100 episodes, and people constantly asking me, wait, tell me about your podcast Unpacking Jewish History (the name is Unpacking Israeli History), I got to thinking… What if I’ve been approaching this incorrectly all along? What if I had started my podcast in medias res, in the middle of things, when I should have started – just like the Hebrew Bible – beresheet. In the beginning.
For most of Jewish history, our people’s relationship to the Land of Israel has been universally accepted as a basic tenet of Judaism. Well before modern politics, before the formation of the nation-state, before ideas like “self-emancipation” or “self-determination” became trendy or even legible, there was the Jewish people, and a profound connection to a specific place.
Today, we call that place Israel – though the geographical boundaries of this territory have fluctuated over time. But that’s sort of the point: the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel transcends political borders. Transcends politics at all. That connection is spiritual, it’s historic, and it’s thoroughly entwined with Jewish practice. In other words: there are no Jewish people without the land of Israel. There is no Judaism without the land of Israel. True, the Jewish people have spent the past few millennia scattered throughout the world, most of them living in what we often call the Jewish diaspora. But a Diaspora implies a root origin. Once we were there. Now, we are here, but dreaming of there, always.
And you can’t fully understand Israel, or Israeli history, without understanding why. So for the next five weeks, we’re going to start at the beginning. Not with Dreyfuss or Herzl, not with the proto-Zionist movements of the 19th century. We’re going to unpack the story of the four-thousand-year-old relationship between a particular people and their particular place. It’s a story about longing, about identity, about trauma and grief and wandering and collective liberation. It’s the story of the Jewish people and our fraught relationship to the place where we first learned how to be a nation.
You can draw a straight line between God promising Avraham a parcel of land and Ben Gurion ascending the stage of the Tel Aviv Museum on May 14, 1948 – and it’s nowhere near as simple as “Ben Gurion simply believed God promised this land to the Jewish people.”
By the end of this series, I hope you’ll be able to trace that direct line, and to understand why the story of Zionism starts not in the 19th century CE but thousands of years prior. Why it’s embedded in Jewish practice and Jewish aspirations and Jewish thought. Why even the most committed ultra-religious quote-unquote “antizionist” isn’t really an antizionist at all. The land of Israel is just as central to their practice as it is to mine. We just quibble over the details. But the fact that we belong in and to Zion has never, ever been in question.
So I’m gonna start in a very untraditional place, at least for a history podcast. I’m gonna go back to Bronze Age Haran – thought to be in modern-day Turkey — with the man who claims to have heard the voice of God. Now, for the skeptics out there, I want to be clear. Whether or not Avraham existed is completely beside the point. This series isn’t about litigating historical or Biblical facts, but exploring the stories and philosophies that animate them. And the fact is, for thousands of years, Jews and Christians and Muslims around the world have been telling and retelling the same (or similar) stories, beginning with Avraham.
So, once more for the people in the back: for the purposes of this podcast, I’m not interested in whether the stories of the Bible are literally true. Especially because there is a major distinction between facts and truth. Something that never happened can still be true – capital T… but don’t let me fall down that rabbit hole because clearly, I will never find my way out of it.
For our purposes, I’m treating these stories as foundational myths – NOT in the sense that they’re fictions, but in the sense that Jewish identity has been built on them, whether or not individual Jews believe they literally happened as written.
Because for the purposes of this podcast, it truly doesn’t matter whether you or I believe that the Torah is the divine word of God, or “divinely inspired,” or a book of fairy tales. And it would make no sense to base a political argument on the Hebrew Bible, anyway, since every religion has its own holy book.
But this podcast is not about making political arguments. It is about all the things that make up and shape Jewish history and identity. And that starts with the Hebrew Bible, and everything it has to say about Israel. With the inextricable bond between the religion we call Judaism, and the people we call Jews, to the place we call Israel.
With all those caveats out of the way: this is the story of the Jewish people’s relationship to the land of Israel, from the beginning.
Okay, fine, one final caveat before we get started. As you may have noticed already, when I say a Biblical name, generally, I’m gonna do it the way I feel most comfortable, usually with a Hebrew accent, not an Anglicized one. Avraham instead of Abraham, etc, Chevron instead of Hebron.
OK, enough. Let’s get it started.
Prologue: The Promise
This story begins with the voice of God. At least, the Bible tells us that God is speaking. God never actually introduces himself to Avram, just commands him tersely to pack up his stuff and make for, quote, “the land that I will show you.”
If I’m Avram, I’ve got questions: Why me? Why there? And, who are you, by the way? By the way, fun fact…this is my bar mitzvah portion, so if you want me to read it to you with the melody… totally down for that. Just saying.
But if Avram asked any questions, we don’t know about it. As soon as God finishes promising him all sorts of awesome, lofty stuff, Avram, who is seventy five years old, by the way, starts walking. Well, he picks up his wife, Sarai, first. They’re on this journey together. But as soon as Sarai gets onboard, they pack their bags, harness their camels, and head off into the desert with their entire household.
It’s an odd beginning to this deep, tangled, and beautiful relationship between the Jewish people and their place. Especially because God doesn’t talk up Avram’s new property with promises of milk and honey. In fact, the first thing the Bible tells us about Avram’s new home is that it’s full of Canaanites. The second thing it tells us is that famine is raging. Almost as soon as he arrives, Avram leaves again, headed to Egypt so he and his crew don’t starve.
As a first encounter between chosen person and chosen land, it’s pretty unremarkable, even inauspicious. And yet it almost perfectly foreshadows the odyssey to come. Because Avram’s journey is based entirely on faith. He is promised an inhospitable patch of land, short on natural resources and full of potentially hostile neighbors. And yet he accepts this covenant with his invisible God. He agrees to bind his descendants to this land. It turns out they’re a package deal, this land and this eternal covenant. You can’t pull one thread without the other unraveling.
Avram and Sarai leave everything behind for a place they don’t know, trusting a divine promise. And everything they do for the rest of their collective lives
they do in service of that promise.
Thousands of years later, Jews around the world continue to follow in their footsteps. Many leave behind comfortable suburbs and Amazon Prime, native languages and ingrained social norms, to live in a place that’s still short on natural resources and long on hostile neighbors, sky-high real estate prices, and a postal service that deserves its own multi-part series, titled Why Is God Punishing Me? But to understand why, we have to fast-forward a few centuries, to the moment the Israelites finally enter Canaan – not as a small family, but as a large and fractious nation.
Chapter One: Welcome to Canaan
A few hundred years after Avraham’s death – sometime around 1200 BCE, if you want to get precise – his descendants have grown from a family into a people. They’ve survived slavery in Egypt. They’ve experienced a liberation so dramatic it got its own book. (AKA Exodus; no, not the Leon Uris version, though seriously, if you’re looking for your next soapy read, you can’t do better than Leon.)
Avraham’s descendants have witnessed plagues and miracles and the thunderous revelation at Sinai. They’ve spent forty years wandering in the desert trying to figure out who they are, how to live, and the macros in a single serving of manna. Now they’re here, on the eastern banks of the Jordan River. The land promised to their forefather is right across the water. And Joshua, who has just been promoted as Moses’ successor, is poised to lead them there.
Back in the book of Numbers, which describes the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert, Joshua was one of twelve spies sent by Moses to explore and report back about the land of Canaan. Ten of the spies basically filed a report titled “Hard Pass: this place ain’t it.” Only Joshua and Caleb came back with an endorsement, couched as a backhanded compliment. (So, so Jewish.) Like: “Yes, it’s scary. Yes, it’s full of fortified cities. But if God’s with us, we can do this.”
And now, the time has come. The Israelites are doing this. And, as will become a theme, “this” means crossing the Jordan River – which splits for them, obviously, also kind of a theme by now – and waging war. The Israelites conquer the pagan tribes of Canaan and make themselves at home for a few decades. And then, as so often happens in the Bible, things fall apart.
It was Moses who guided them through the wilderness, Joshua who led them into Canaan. But all men must die, as Game of Thrones reminds us, and when Joshua passes on, What’s left is a loose federation of Israelite tribes, no centralized leadership, a partially fulfilled mission, and a memory that is fading quickly.
Memory. Memory is central to Jewish identity. As the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi observed in his book, Zachor (Remember), quote, “What binds Jews together is not the memory of what actually happened, but memory itself—its rituals, its rhythms, its command.”
But we needed to learn those rituals, those rhythms, that command. We needed to learn how to safeguard our collective memory. How to cherish and pass it down. And the learning curve was fairly steep. Joshua’s death leaves the Israelites, B’nai Yisrael in the OG Hebrew, with a serious power vacuum, and suddenly, the Book of Judges starts to read like Lord of the Flies, describing an endless cycle that goes something like this:
- Foreign enemies start attacking.
- The people sin nonstop.
- A righteous judge emerges to save them.
- They win back God’s favor, peace briefly reigns —
- And then, over time, everyone descends back to chaos.
Over and over again, forever. You want a dystopian horror story about the breakdown of society? Look no further than the end of the Book of Judges, whose final refrain serves as a warning:
“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25)
Sounds like a libertarian bumper sticker, feels like The Purge.
It’s a sobering prelude to every Zionist crisis that would follow. The dream of sovereignty is real – but without common purpose, without cultural, moral, or spiritual cohesion, sovereignty is just chaos with borders and taxes. Peoplehood, like a homeland, is not automatic. It’s built and rebuilt through shared vision, struggle, and, yes, the occasional disagreement. OK, many disagreements.
And that drama starts not in 1888 or 1948 or 2023, but as far back as the book of Judges, which reads to me like a cautionary tale about what it takes to build a homeland. What it takes to build a nation.
We’re still asking those questions today, by the way. We just have the benefit of several millennia of precedent. Several millennia of memory.
It turns out that conquering Canaan was the easy part. Actually uniting as a people – that was, and remains, the real challenge. Which brings us to Chapter Two of our series:
Chapter Two: The Capital of Longing
Out of the chaos of Judges comes Shmuel, Samuel — the prophet-judge-priest hybrid trying to keep the tribal circus from burning down. So when the people demand a king, God shrugs and says, “Fine, fine, but don’t blame Me when things go sideways.”
And things do, of course, go sideways. Because Shmuel anoints Sha’ul, Saul, as king: tall, handsome, and deeply flawed. He looks the part, but he doesn’t act it. The text tells us an “evil spirit” infects him, which is the Biblical way of saying the guy was unwell. Forget King Lear and his madness – I want to read Shakespeare’s take on Sha’ul. Quietly, the prophet Shmuel anoints a backup, a redheaded shepherd and musician named David. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
David didn’t exactly come from palace stock. He was the youngest son of a farming family in Bethlehem — initially dismissed, forgotten, left out of the lineup when Shmuel came looking for a future king. (Hey, is this the origin of the phrase red-headed stepchild? Maybe, I don’t know.)
But David’s not overlooked for long. He knows he’s got what it takes, even if outsiders can’t see it. Not just grit, charisma, and solid slingshot arm – but pure, unwavering faith in God. He defeats the Plishti, or Philistine giant, Golyat, Goliath, with a stone between the eyes: the first of many military triumphs. But Israelites being Israelites, it takes years of civil tension and careful coalition-building before the other tribes accept his authority.
After a lot of drama, which includes a doomed marriage to Sha’ul’s daughter, David eventually succeeds in uniting the Israelites (and, for what it’s worth, outwitting his very angry father-in-law.) For seven years, David makes his capital in Chevron, in Hebron, the heartland of his own tribe, Yehuda, Judah. But after he’s managed to unify the 12 tribes, the new King of Israel sets his eyes on a new target. It doesn’t look like much: a dusty, hilly patch of no-mans-land between the different tribal capitals. But after David makes his move, Yerushalayim, Jerusalem becomes the center of the world – at least, to the people of Israel. This is it: the origin story of the city’s millennia-long allergy to chill.
But David’s not just any king. Remember, he’s powered by something fiercer than military genius or political savvy. He’s got God on his side. So he doesn’t just stake his claim by planting a flag. He’s got bigger aims for this city, spiritual directives to follow. He brings the Ark of the Covenant to its final resting place, where it was always supposed to be. Jerusalem becomes the site of pilgrimage for every tribe, every Jew, for thousands and thousands of years. (NERD CORNER ALERT: today’s Jerusalem, the Jerusalem we all know and love, isn’t exactly the same as David’s Jerusalem. The core of his kingdom lay in a place we now call Ir David, the City of David, on the eastern ridge of ancient Jerusalem, immediately south of the Temple Mount. What’s the Temple Mount? Don’t worry, we’ll get there very soon.)
But back to David. The Bible excels at presenting relatably flawed characters, and David’s no exception. On the one hand, he’s a hero. On the other, his personal life is like something out of Game of Thrones. (Sorry for the second Game of Thrones reference in 20 minutes. My pop culture knowledge is stuck somewhere in 2015.) I’m talking bags of enemy foreskins, collected by force. Some creepy rooftop voyeurism. A little light murder so he can marry the object of said voyeurism. Then there’s the family drama, which often doubles as palace intrigue. One of his sons rapes ones of his daughters. Another son tries to overthrow him and ends up hanged by his own long hair. The Hebrew Bible: not for the faint of heart. I can’t believe we let kids read this stuff!
And the dream David carries — the one he sings about in psalms and fights for on the battlefield — ends up incomplete. He conquers Jerusalem, unites the tribes, and brings the Ark to the Holy City… but God doesn’t allow him to build the Jewish people a Holy Temple. It’s more or less a punishment, God’s answer to all those very human flaws we outlined earlier.
It is David’s son, Shlomo – Solomon – who merits the privilege of building a permanent address for God.
The Hebrew Bible isn’t always the most forthcoming. But on the subject of the Temple, it’s downright chatty, with longform descriptions of the cedar and cypress and gold that adorn God’s House. It takes seven years for the Temple to open for business, but finally, nearly five centuries after God liberated the children of Israel, B’nai Yisrael, from Egypt, the Jewish people have their spiritual anchor.
This – the home of the Temple, aka the Temple Mount, Har Habayit – is where they will journey three times a year. Where they will entrust the priests to give their sacrifices. This is where they will celebrate their holidays and ask for forgiveness and say thank you to God. It is a jewel of the ancient Near East, drawing pilgrims from far and wide, the best PR for the invisible, single, omnipotent God that these strange Israelites insist on worshipping.
And that makes it a target. Because when Solomon dies, the center cannot hold. And the tribal unity his father built so carefully disintegrates in spectacular fashion.
This is in some ways the beginning of the end. The first of many repeat lessons. The first time, out of many, that the Jewish people fall apart. A house divided cannot stand, to borrow an anachronistic quote. When the Jewish people splinter, they are lost.
It might take time. But the Jewish people are surrounded by enemies who wedge themselves into every fracture, every tiny crack. Over time, those cracks widen until they become a chasm. And sooner or later, that chasm yawns wide, and some percentage of the Jewish people fall in.
And that’s exactly what happens here.
It’s not a civil war, but it comes close. Because when the United Israelite Monarchy falls apart, ten tribes more or less secede, headquartering their kingdom in the north.
Only two tribes – Yehuda and Binyamin – remain in the south, close to the royal palace and the Holy Temple. When the Assyrian Empire comes knocking in 722 BCE, and by knocking I mean “razing an empire to the ground,” these two tribes are the only ones that make it.
Shell-shocked survivors and refugees from the northern kingdom stream down to join their brothers in the south. Yehuda and Binyamin exhale in relief. Their brothers in the north have lost everything. But they have managed to hold out. The Assyrians try, but they can’t take Jerusalem. The holy city, and its holy temple, remains standing for over a century after the fall of the north.
Until the Babylonians show up.
Without knowing or intending to, they transform Judaism forever, forever, turning exile and longing into a cornerstone of the Jewish experience, Jewish identity.
Chapter Three: The First Exile
A century and change after the Assyrians destroy the Northern Kingdom, the Babylonians arrive.
And they’re not here to pay a social call.
At first, they just want tribute. You know these ancient empires, obsessed with their vassal states. But the kingdom of Judah eventually rebels. Like, no, I will not pay you more tribute. Stop trying to make tribute happen!
In response, the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzer, destroys Judea. These ancient empires were not messing around. He razes the Temple, burns down the palace, and hauls the elites off in chains. Judea is ashes. Judea is ruin. And that covenant between God and his people seems irreparably broken.
If God dwells in this land — and this land alone — then what happens when the land is lost? Psalm 137, composed during or after the Babylonian exile, captures this shift with haunting precision:
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, when we remembered Zion… If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.”
It’s a template for the next 3,000 years of the Jewish experience. No, not because the Jewish experience is all sitting and weeping by a river. But because the Jewish experience is centered on memory.
They’re not weeping because they were conquered, or because life in exile is so unbearably bitter. They’re weeping because they’re remembering Zion. For the next three millennia, every moment of joy will contain a tinge of sadness. Maybe this explains a lot of things that you’ve seen. This is why Jewish people smash a glass at weddings, why we fast multiple times a year. Even in our happiest moments, we commemorate the siege of Jerusalem, the breaching of the walls, the destruction of the Temples. Some people even leave a small part of their homes rough and unpainted, a constant reminder of the destruction. A constant reminder that our story is still unfinished, God’s promise still unfulfilled. It’s a kind of Jerusalem-mania, a collective memory that powers our identity. And we nurse that memory, sharpen and celebrate or mourn it, until past and present seem to collapse in on one another.
At every Seder, on Passover, the Haggadah – the official handbook of Passover – tells us that, quote, בְּכָל דוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָיב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִצְרָיִם. In every generation, each person must see themselves as though they are leaving Egypt.
As soon as we can talk, we are taught to empathize with our ancestors. Taught to absorb the lessons they died to teach us. Taught that in some metaphysical way, we are still sitting by the rivers of Babylon, weeping as we remember Zion.
In the words of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, quote:
“Jewish memory is not a passive recollection. It is an active shaping force. It demands not only remembering the past — but living with it.”
This is the alchemy of Jewish exile: the Temple burns, the land is lost, and somehow, through a strange and stubborn act of spiritual defiance, the people become more attached to their homeland than ever. Zion goes viral—across time, across continents, across generations. What was once a physical place now lodges itself in the collective Jewish psyche.
The historian Simon Dubnow once called this spiritual nationalism—a kind of identity not rooted in land, to be protected by garrisons and armies, but a spiritual identity sustained by texts, rituals, and longing. There are no sacrifices in Babylon, no Temple service, no Temple, no Jewish king, no thrice-yearly pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
But astonishingly, Jewish life doesn’t die. It adapts. It even thrives. Synagogues emerge, new communal spaces to pray, study, and preserve Jewish identity. The Temple is lost. Jewish community is not. Millennia later, archeologists will excavate half-ruined synagogues from the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and by the time the Romans show up, these synagogues are everywhere, both in the Land of Israel and in the Diaspora.
The Torah essentially becomes portable — recited, studied, copied by candlelight. Instead of sacrifice, we have prayer. Instead of outsourcing our religion’s secrets and rituals to the priests, we begin building schools. Teaching our story to our children. Reminding them of who they are.
So even as shell-shocked Jews build lives in Babylon, even as new generations are born who have never seen Jerusalem with their own eyes, the city remains the center of gravity. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel would later write:
“To be a Jew is to be attached to the memory of a place we have never been.”
That’s not just empty poetry, but theology. A national survival strategy. Exile made our religion portable, resilient, accessible no matter where we were. Which brings us to the strange and essential contradiction of Jewish history: the loss of Zion gives birth to Zionism. But if Zionism is the pull, the unseen summons to return, what do we do once we arrive?
Chapter Four: Homecoming
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about human beings: even when we say we want something, we don’t always go out and get it. Think about the gym in January. Everyone buys a membership, everyone swears they are going three times a week, minimum, and by February the place is empty except for two very motivated people and the dude who never wipes down the treadmill. Wanting something is easy. Following through is the hard part.
The exiled Jews of Babylon were no different. Except instead of talking about how much they wanted a six-pack, they talked about how badly they wanted to go home. They said they longed for Zion, they prayed for a return, they did all that poetic weeping on the riverbank… but as the years ticked by, they sank their time, effort, and energy into building a strong communal life in exile.
They did their job too well.
Sixty years after the destruction of the First Temple, Babylon is swallowed by the Achaemenid Empire. But the guy in charge, a Persian king named Cyrus, is nothing like Nebuchadnezzer. He’s famously tolerant, even philo-semitic. He allows the Jewish people to go home, even to rebuild their temple – a policy that earns him the lavish praise of the Hebrew Bible.
But not everyone answers the call.
It turns out not every exile dreams of returning — especially when “home” is in ruins, and “exile” comes with Hanging Gardens and top-tier kubbeh. (If you know, you know. If you don’t, think kreplach, but seasoned).
In fact, only a fraction of the exiles return.
Among them is Nechemiah, who my 10th grade Jewish history teacher, Dr. Katzen, called NeHemiah, which I think about weirdly often. Nechemiah is a Persian court official turned community organizer, fundraiser, and national conscience-slash-nag. He’s not a prophet. He’s not a warrior. He’s a man with a plan and a clipboard. And in many ways, he’s the first “Zionist administrator” (yes, air quotes, relax, chronology police), less dreaming of redemption than project-managing it. He’s humorless, by the way. Constantly annoyed with the people, and profoundly competent. Exactly the right guy to lead the Jewish people back home.
Nehemiah oversees the reconstruction of Jerusalem’s walls, restores public observance of the Sabbath, and encourages social justice. He knows he occupies an unglamorous position. He also knows its importance. So when opponents try to lure him away from his task, he shuts them down immediately:
“I am doing a great work, and I cannot come down.”
—Nehemiah 6:3
Besides being an all time out-of-office auto-reply, this response captures an essential truth. Holy work can be toilsome, even painfully mundane. No one likes a goody two-shoes who is constantly working and harassing others to do the same. But Nehemiah’s not here to win popularity contests. He has a mission, and he will fulfill it.
He’s not flashy or cool. He doesn’t conjure miracles or call down plagues on his enemies. He organizes committees and audits temple records and rebuilds Jerusalem’s walls.
It’s slow and incremental and frustrating and bureaucratic.
And it’s constantly interrupted by enemies.
The book of Nehemiah tells us that “the Arabs, and the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites” were threatened by the return of the Jews to their homeland. These pagan enemies did everything they could do to make the task of rebuilding that much harder. (A common theme in history, eyyyy?)
When the Arabs and Ammonites and Ashdodites start harassing the returnees, Nehemiah simply arms his men. Jewish men rebuild Jerusalem’s walls with a tool in one hand and a weapon in the other, rebuilding and fighting at the same time.
The scholar Yuval Levin points out that Nehemiah didn’t believe in division of labor. If you were a builder, you were also a fighter. He didn’t post soldiers on the walls to protect the builders. Instead, the builders built while protecting themselves. Nehemiah understood that renewal belongs to all of us. That for a task of this magnitude, all people needed to build, and all people needed to be prepared to fight.
Nehemiah leads the Jewish people in an essential process that will serve them for the next few millennia. He teaches them to be ambidextrous. To understand that this is the only path that will allow them to survive. As Levin writes, quote: “To let others handle the fighting while pretending you’re too good for it yourself is to mistake cowardice for high-mindedness, and to ignore the moral and intellectual substance of the culture we are working to renew.”
Nehemiah understands that intuitively.
And so do the actual Zionist pioneers who pick up his mantle thousands of years later. They will haggle with Ottoman officials over land prices and muck out the swamps and coax the rocky soil of their lost homeland to yield fruit once more. They will reverse the original sin of the Spies who saw swamps and marshes and enemies and said, no bueno. This time, the modern Zionists will see the swamps and marshes and enemies and say, game on.
In the 19th century, as in the time of Nehemiah, the task of rebuilding Zion looks the same. Both times, it falls to a relatively small group of people idealistic or crazy or far-thinking enough to envision a Jewish utopia. Most Jews are content to stay where they are, returning only if they have no other place to go.
Which means that Nehemiah did the work of a Zionist before “Zionism” existed. And for the next four centuries, the people of Judea will worship and serve in a city that he began to rebuild.
But sovereignty is fragile. So is faith. And as we’ve already illustrated, the smallest fracture can turn into a gaping chasm between brothers.
Chapter Five: The War for the Jewish Future
A hundred years after Nehemiah, a new conqueror comes to town. Alexander the Great doesn’t stay in Jerusalem for long. But the ideas that attend him linger, and the Jews of Judea are duly seduced. Hellenism is glamorous and urbane and philosophically dazzling. It’s sexy. It’s fun. And it challenges Judaism in unprecedented ways. Hellenism promises a world of sharp ideas, refined beauty, and effortless sophistication, a cultural package that feels exciting, modern, and hard to resist.
By the second century BCE, the Greeks have taken charge of Judea. The threat they pose isn’t physical, but spiritual – the first in a long series of battles over the course of Jewish history. But this is where it starts. This is the battle from which all others follow.
At its core, the debate over Hellenism isn’t really about foreign culture. It’s about what type of Jews we want to be. Who gets to define what it means to be Jewish? Is Judaism a set of rituals and beliefs that can live in many cultures, or is it a distinct civilization that must preserve its integrity, even if that means being out of step with the times?
Being out of step with the times can be hard. There’s a real cost to resisting the dominant culture.
So two schools of thought emerge among the Jews.
On one side are the Hellenizers, Jews who believe they can assimilate and probably still be Jewish. Maybe if I just master discus throwing, or shave my beard and hit the gymnasium, they’ll finally let me sit at the cool kids’ table.
On the other side are the traditionalists, who soon become zealots. And their thought process goes something like No assimilation ever. No discus, no gymnasium, no pagan philosophy.
This is it: our very first fault line in the argument over how to be a Jew. The Jewish people of Classical Antiquity aren’t wrestling with Greek soldiers, at least not yet. They’re wrestling with Greek ideas.
And, by extension with each other. The fight even reaches the rebuilt Temple. Hellenized priests take over. The traditionalists are disgusted, horrified, enraged. The Jews are headed towards a civil war when King Antiochus gives them a reason to unite: good old fashioned antisemitism. I know, anachronistic as a term, chill chill chill.
But – as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out – this is not the antisemitism of the Nazis, of Haman in the Purim story, of those who merely want us gone. The Greeks aren’t interested in genocide. What a bummer to waste your time killing people when you can be getting swole and debating philosophy. The Greeks don’t want to kill Jews. They want to kill Judaism. To get its weirdo adherents to abandon their silly old book and their scary old god, to stop circumcising their sons and worrying about what they eat, and to start being normal. Just like everybody else.
So Antiochus bans Shabbat and circumcision and kosher laws. He brings Zeus into the Temple and offers a pig on the holy altar. He puts idols everywhere. He makes learning Torah a crime.
If the traditionalists were ticked off before, they’re really mad now. Enter: the Maccabees. Before they were the namesake of about 200 Jewish day school mascots, they were a priestly family with a bone to pick. Mattityahu, the patriarch, had been a high priest in the Temple, before he was kicked out by a group of Hellenizers. He wants his job back, darn it. He wants the Hellenizers out. And if he has to kill a fellow Jew to save Judaism, well, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet, right?
So a ragtag crew of priests, farmers, and backcountry rebels launch a devastating guerilla war against the Seleucids, and they win. They recapture Jerusalem, purify the Temple, and relight the menorah with the one improbably small cruse of pure oil left. Thousands of years later, we eat fried foods and give each other presents and debate the inevitable editorials about whether we should even be celebrating a holiday that commemorates zealotry.
Because the Maccabees are zealots. They do kill fellow Jews. When they retake their country, they give the Hellenizers a choice: Give up Hellenism, leave Judea, or die. And then they establish a theocratic dynasty, temporarily winning the fight against assimilation.
At least, for a couple of decades.
But the fight continues wherever there are Jews. Open an Israeli newspaper and you’ll see it splashed across the headlines. We’re still fighting over who counts as Jewish, over who gets to define a Jewish state. That fight trickles down to every part of Israeli life. Who is required to defend the state? Is Torah study as effective as a tank? And who decides how big the state should be? Should it encompass Judea and Samaria, or are the communities there an obstacle to peace? Should Jerusalem have a gay pride parade? What’s more important: strict observance of Jewish law, or democracy?
The line between unity and fragmentation, between redemption and civil rupture, has never been clean. It’s a tug-of-war — not just with the outside world, but within our own ranks, over the shape and meaning of Jewish destiny.
Even the Maccabees don’t escape the consequences of power. Corruption dogs their descendants, the Hasmoneans, who do shady things like imposing forced conversions and taking on the mantle of High Priest when they’re not supposed to. They become what the Maccabees had once fought against: an oppressive elite. And yet again, Jewish factions fracture into Sadducees, Pharisees, Sicarii, as another empire watches greedily from afar. It’s only a matter of time before the Roman Empire moves in to clean up the mess.
The Maccabean revolt wasn’t just the source of one of our best holidays. It was also a moment of proto-Zionist self-examination: a test of Jewish leadership that would haunt future generations of Zionists grappling with what it means to hold power in the Land of Israel.
Not to be a bummer, but the story of Hanukkah is really a cautionary tale about power, about zealotry, about moral decay. The flame of the menorah symbolizes Jewish identity. But if it burns too fiercely, if it divides instead of unites, it risks destroying everything it stands for.
The Jews of Judea learn this the hard way. They don’t know it yet, but their days of self-rule are coming to an end. And this time, the lesson they are forced to learn will come with a very, very heavy price.
Chapter Six: Rebellion
In 63 BCE, Rome comes to pay a visit. They’ve been watching Judea’s disintegration from afar. Now, it’s time to make their move.
They install a client king who leaves a complicated legacy. Herod’s building projects – fortresses, aqueducts, palaces, theaters – still stand. You can visit his fortress at Masada. Run your fingers along stones schlepped up a mountain two thousand years ago, explore the ritual baths carved into the floors. You can still visit the beautiful port city Caesarea, with its renovated amphitheater where Roman orators once thundered. Today, Israeli pop stars belt out love songs in that theater, or war songs, or songs of grief and hope and despair, rich with Diaspora influences but sung in modern Hebrew.
But Herod’s most important project is the renovation of the Holy Temple, which becomes the Talmud’s standard of architectural beauty. They say, “If you haven’t seen Herod’s Temple, you haven’t seen a beautiful building,” which like, okay, calm down, have you seen Zaha Hadid’s buildings? Look her up, she was an incredible architect.
To be fair to the Talmud, I’ve never seen Herod’s temple. But I have touched the outer single wall that remains, even tucked a note between its stones, maybe you have too. The outer, western wall was once part of a greater whole, enclosing the Temple courtyard. Today, it is all that is left of the Second Temple.
In between his ambitious architectural projects, Herod finds time to murder his family members, spy on rabbis, and put more than half of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish High Court, to death. All the while, he walks a tightrope between Jewish and Roman interests. When he dies, he is not replaced. Instead, Rome installs a rotating cast of governors to rule Judea. Some are indifferent to their charges. Others are brutal. And once again, the Jewish people have to figure out how to live in Judea, under occupation.
In Jerusalem, the Sadducees—the priestly elite—collaborate with Roman authority, hoping to preserve their status. Meanwhile, the less aristocratic Pharisees have little use for Rome. They counsel restraint: focus on Torah, on ritual, on obeying Jewish law. Keep your heads down, and God will help us survive even this storm.
And then there are the Zealots, who – as the name implies – have no interest in keeping their heads down or collaborating with the evil empire. To them, Rome isn’t just an occupier. It’s an abomination. And so are those Jews who collaborate or accede to the occupier’s authority.
By 66 CE, the pressure explodes. Jerusalem revolts. What begins as a fringe insurgency becomes a full-blown uprising. For a fleeting moment, it works. The rebels seize control of the city and expel Roman garrisons. For a brief, shining moment, Jews rule themselves once more. Nothing survives of this short-lived government but the coins it minted. Silver and bronze, stamped not with Caesar’s face, but with bold, defiant words:
“For the Freedom of Zion.”
It is, in many ways, the last great gasp of biblical-era Zionism — raw, nationalistic, and fervently religious. A claim to self-rule not just as a political right, but as a sacred duty. The Temple still stands. Pilgrims still arrive. There is a sense, however fragile, that the dream might yet survive.
And then the walls collapse.
The divisions between the Jews widen and expand. Every faction claims to represent Israel’s true destiny. Zealots. Moderates. Messianists. Caught in the middle are the ordinary people, brutalized and intimidated for simply wanting to live. Jerusalem, the symbolic heart of the Jewish people, becomes a battlefield of competing visions, and Rome steps into the breach with torches and chains.
This time, they are successful.
They destroy the Temple and crush all subsequent rebellions. By 136 CE, the Jews are well and truly in exile. The Romans bar them from Jerusalem. For the next 2,000 years, most stayed away.
It could have been the end of the Jewish people.
It wasn’t.
Chapter Seven: Give Me the Sages of Yavneh
If Jewish history has one enduring feature, it’s this: when the center collapses, the margins adapt. In the aftermath of destruction, Jewish leaders are forced to answer a terrifying question once again: What does Judaism look like without Zion?
Enter a rabbi who would change Jewish history forever. His name was Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai — not a warrior, not a rebel, but a rabbi with vision. The Talmud describes an incredible story. As Jerusalem burned and the Temple fell, he pulled off what can only be described as a spiritual jailbreak. His students smuggle him out of the besieged city in a coffin. Instead of running for the hills, he goes to the Roman general Vespasian, not to beg for mercy, but to chart a future.
At first, his ambitions seem humble. He asks for a doctor to treat his friend, Rabbi Tzadok. He asks the general to spare the family of Rabbi Gamliel, who traced his lineage back to King David. One day, he believes, that line will reemerge and take its rightful place at the helm of a rebuilt Jerusalem. But Rabbi Yohanan knows that that day is far in the future.
So he asks the general for one more thing: Please. Spare the city of Yavneh and all the Torah scholars who live there. And the general, impressed by Rabbi Yohanan’s chutzpah and foresight, grants his requests.
Rabbi Yohanan is the reason Rabbinic Judaism survives. It is at Yavneh that the Hebrew Bible is officially codified. It is at Yavneh that the Sanhedrin, the Jewish High Court, reconvenes. And it is at Yavneh that so many Talmudic debates rage and are eventually written down.
Rabbinic Judaism does not forget the Temple. It makes its absence central. Remembering Zion becomes ritual, the backbone of our liturgy.
It is at Yavneh that the sages compose the prayer we now know as the Amidah. Three times a day, we say:“May our eyes behold Your return to Zion in mercy.” As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi puts it:
“Jews did not simply remember the Temple—they embedded its loss into the very structure of daily life. In this way, Zion became a living absence.”
Of course, this wasn’t the first time Jews had to figure out how to be a people without a land, right? They had a template in Babylon. Now, they had to learn to apply it across the globe, as they slowly scattered further and further from the literal, physical Zion.
So when Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai asked, “Give me Yavneh and its sages,” he wasn’t just preserving Judaism — he was continuing the legacy of previous sages, forced to adapt to exile.
And it worked. It worked. Even when all seemed lost. Even as Jerusalem lay in smoking ruins, the Temple grounds turned into a city dump. Across millennia and continents, the Jewish people remained anchored to their land, and to one another. More than coins or kings or revolts, this is what carried the Zionist idea across millennia. Not political power or military might, but devotional persistence. A hope spoken over wine, in whispered prayers, by children in exile and sages in study halls.
The Temple was gone. But the longing never left. It became the thing that held the people together. Zion as a memory and a map of the Jewish soul.
Epilogue: The Beginning of the End. The End of the Beginning
Whew. That was intense. We’ve journeyed from the banks of the Jordan to the courtyards of the Second Temple, through kingdoms, exiles, revolts, and redemptions. We’ve witnessed unifications and splinterings and bitter fights about the Jewish future. And we watched in horror as the center collapsed, not once but many times, forcing us to adapt or disappear.
We adapted. And all the while, we remembered.
This episode wasn’t about Zionism as a modern ideology. It was about the slow, layered formation of an idea — a longing that outlasted its object, a place that became a promise, a direction you face even when you’re nowhere near it. We learned how the Jewish connection to the land developed. We watched as Zion became embedded in prayer, encoded in rituals, etched into the rhythms of Jewish life. Not something lost, but something carried. This is the inheritance that later Zionism would draw upon—whether we knew it or not. Because the question wasn’t only “Can we return?” It was “What are we returning to?”
And this is where we go next.
In our second episode, we’ll step once more into the breach, dear friends, with the last-gasp revolt of Bar Kokhba. Then we’ll venture into the medieval and early modern period. We’ll meet philosophers and mystics, wanderers and revolutionaries. We’ll explore how Jews across the world kept Zion close, in spirit if not in miles.
Zionism didn’t begin with Herzl. But it was waiting for him, kept alive by a stiff-necked people who refused to forget. who chose over and over to remember, even when it would have been much easier to turn away.
And some did. Some did!
But a scattered minority, millions strong, kept hope alive, until Next Year in Jerusalem became a reality, brought into being by the spiritual descendants of the prophets and rebels and bureaucrats and kings we learned about today.
Next year in Jerusalem. Amen, amen, amen.
Outro
Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, and you felt like you learned something, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show, and it’s just a kind thing to do. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Amir Tsemach, Adi Elbaz, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week for Part 2.