Welcome back to our five-part series exploring the most complex and emotionally charged tenet of Jewish history.
If you haven’t listened to the previous installment, I strongly recommend you go back and do that before you go any further. This is not a regular Unpacking Israeli History series. In many ways, it’s more ambitious than any series we’ve ever done. And unlike previous series, which stick to verifiable facts, culled from verifiable sources, this one is a lot more interested in the founding stories that have carried the Jewish people throughout history.
Which is why our last episode utilized the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, as a jumping-off point.
this series has no interest in litigating the veracity of the Hebrew Bible, or anyone’s Bible. Instead, we’re focusing on the way an ancient religious text gave rise to all of Jewish history. To the stories that have sustained us through the centuries, anchoring our identities firmly in one place, even as exile scattered us all over the globe.
These stories have survived, without alteration, through thousands of years and over thousands of miles. Jewish people whispered the same story in medieval Spain, in the 18th century shtetls of Ukraine, in 1930s Baghdad. Over and over, the same theme, the same narrative, the same history. No matter where the Jews were, they kept their hearts and their eyes turned to the same place: Zion. Israel. The Holy Land.
Judaism rose up in the Land of Israel. Yes, rose up, as the Israeli Declaration of Independence puts it. This was where the Jewish people came into themselves after Sinai. Where they cemented their peoplehood.
Judaism, as a religion, does not make sense without that physical anchor. And it doesn’t matter whether we identify as Zionists in the modern sense, whether we pair our religious identities with our political feelings. This series is not about Zionism in the sense of “do you believe the modern State of Israel deserves to exist?” (By the way, that question is settled. Can we move on to more interesting questions now?)
This series explains WHY the modern state of Israel exists. WHY Jews have remained so connected to a patch of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Last week, we started with the voice of God, making elaborate promises. We watched those promises come true – through slavery and liberation; through the war for Canaan and the building of two Temples; through the fall of the United Israelite Monarchy; through Assyrians and Babylonians and Persians and Seleucids and Romans. We ended on a solemn note, with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the great rupture: the loss of sovereignty, and the migration to a place that, perhaps more than the Land of Israel itself, would animate a critical mass of Jewish history, culture, and community. That place being: exile.
And that is where I am going to pick up chapter two – not with the destruction of the Second Temple, but with what came next.
New strategies for survival. New choices. And new tensions that would one day explode into the modern Zionist movement itself: Was Zion a place to pray towards… or walk towards? Was waiting in exile a virtue… or a failure? Which is the bigger act of faith, or chutzpah: waiting patiently for God to get a move on… or helping God along?
Two thousand years later, we’re still duking it out. And it’s both comforting and exhausting to realize just how long we’ve been having this argument amongst ourselves. But in 70 CE, as they watched the Temple burn, the Jewish people had no idea how the future would unfold. All they knew was that their home was burning, and their eyes were turned to anyone who could answer the question: what happens next?
Chapter 1: A Walk Through the Fire (70 CE – 135 CE)
70 CE. Jerusalem is burning.
Roman legions have breached the city’s battered walls after a brutal siege. They destroy the Second Temple, the axis of Jewish spiritual life, until only an outer wall remains. Hundreds of thousands are dead. The Jewish historian Josephus writes that “The slaughter was everywhere so prodigious that well nigh the whole city ran with blood, and many things that lay underfoot were swept away by the torrent.”
The Talmud, meanwhile, highlights the psychological devastation of it all. The rabbis declare: “From the day the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One, blessed be He, has nothing in His world except the four cubits of halakhah alone.” Judaism is stripped to its bones.
This isn’t just the loss of a capital.
It’s the collapse of a cosmic order. I’m going to use a word here: it’s a Holocaust. It’s starting over from the ashes. But even in the year 70 CE, the Jewish people already have centuries of experience navigating exile, dispossession, and ruin. We already have the Book of Lamentations — aka Eicha — written shortly after the destruction of the First Temple at the end of the 6th century BCE. And as a shattered people watch their Temple burn, Eichah is no longer just words on a page, a cry from the depths of history. It is raw. It is immediate. It is right now. The book begins in so much visceral pain:
“אֵיכָה יָשְׁבָה בָדָד, הָעִיר רַבָּתִי עָם! הָיְתָה כְּאַלְמָנָה”
“How lonely sits the city, once full of people! She has become like a widow.”
Jewish life, once anchored to ritual in the Temple, to the agricultural rhythms of the land of Israel, must once again reinvent itself to survive. First-century Jews face a choice. Do they fold themselves into Diaspora communities? Or do they try to rebuild their homes?
Some choose the former. Instead of a single temple in the heart of Judea, synagogues crop up. Instead of sacrifices, the people offer prayers, which become ritualized over time. Mourning for Zion becomes part of daily life, passed to children and grandchildren who have never seen the Temple, never known Jerusalem, never imagined self-rule.
If there is an advantage to the destruction of Jerusalem, it is this: Once destroyed, it can become portable. Once it’s anchored in collective memory, Jerusalem is no longer at the mercy of battering rams or pagan empires. Like faith, like God, like Judaism itself: it becomes indestructible. Un-erasable. Eternal.
But there is another group of Jews that refuses to go gently. Sixty-odd years after the destruction of the Second Temple, once again, a handful of dispossessed Jews take on the world’s mightiest empire, led by a charismatic guerilla fighter. What’s that line about history? It doesn’t repeat, but it sure rhymes.
Centuries prior, that charismatic fighter was Matityahu, former High Priest ready to kick the Seleucids out of Judea and reclaim their land. This time around, the troops rally around a man some sources call Shimon the son of Kosiba and others name as Shimon the son of Koseva. Either way, no one calls him that. Instead, he’s known by Shimon bar Kokhba. Simon, Son of a Star – a messianic title bestowed by his supporters, who are certain that he is the redeemer of the Jewish people. They borrow the name from the Bible. Numbers 24:17: “A star shall come forth from Jacob.”
Among those supporters is the most important rabbi in all of Judea: Rabbi Akiva, later called “Chief of all Sages.” When Rabbi Akiva declares someone the Messiah, you sit up and take notice. And for a second, it seems like he might just be right. Because for two years, Bar Kokhba and his fighters give the Romans hell. They take back Jerusalem. They mint coins trumpeting their triumph. TO THE FREEDOM OF JERUSALEM, reads one side. On the other: the Temple, framed by the word Shimon, crowned by a rising star. (Man, Bar Kokhba really understood the power of branding before that was a thing.) For a brief, shining moment, sustained Jewish sovereignty seems within reach again.
In Rome, Emperor Hadrian is pissed. His war against the Jewish rebels is grinding and difficult. Hadrian has to call in his top general and seven extra legions crush the rebellion.
It takes time. It incurs heavy losses. But in the end, it works. By 136 CE, Rome has put down the revolt, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and exiling or enslaving thousands more. Emperor Hadrian bans Jews from Jerusalem, rebuilds the holy city as the pagan (ay-LEE-uh CAH-pit-oh-LEE-nah) Aelia Capitolina, and then really twists the knife. He renames Judea ‘Syria-Palestina’ after the Jewish people’s Biblical enemy, the Philistines – a people who had been gone so long they could not even enjoy it.
Did Hadrian rename Judea specifically to humiliate the Jews, severing their connection to their home? It’s a matter of speculation rather than certainty. But the effect was profoundly demoralizing, all the same. Names matter. Memory matters. Renaming a place can rewrite assumptions about who it belongs to and who belongs to it, and Hadrian chooses a name that erases Jews from their own home.
(Nerd corner alert: The term Palestine wasn’t new. It had been used to refer to some ambiguous portion of the region since the time of the Greek historian Herodotus. Many historians believe that when he refers to Palestine, he’s talking specifically about the coastal stretch where the Philistines had once lived. But by the time Herodotus writes his travelogue in the fifth century BCE, the Philistines are long gone. So who inhabits this stretch of land? According to Herodotus, it’s a tribe that circumcises its sons. According to other Greek writers, this tribe, the “Syrians of Palestine,” also celebrates a “seventh day feast.” Circumcision, a celebration of the “seventh day”… sounds a lot like Brit Milah and Shabbat to me. Sounds a lot like the so-called “Syrian of Palestine” was actually a Jew.)
All of which means that Palestine, as a place name, had existed for a long time, though no one is clear on its geographic parameters. But Hadrian does something new. He renames the entire region, completely erasing Jewish place names from the map, and the region’s new name, imposed by a colonial overlord, sticks for nearly 2,000 years.
And what about Bar Kokhba, the charismatic messiah figure at the heart of the rebellion? Is he a proto-Zionist hero, an early embodiment of the Jewish refusal to accept exile as our destiny? Early Zionists like Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Revisionist Zionist leader, and Jacob Klausner, a leading Zionist intellectual, certainly thought so.
But others disagreed.
Like the great 11th century scholar Maimonides, aka Rambam. He writes that, quote, “Rabbi Akiva, one of the greater Sages of the Mishnah, was one of the supporters of King Bar Kozibah… He and all the Sages of his generation considered him to be the Messianic king until he was killed because of sins. Once he was killed, they realized that he was not the Messiah.”
Rambam does not dispute the bravery of Bar Kokhba’s uprising.
But he also doesn’t romanticize the fact that the rebellion had brought disaster upon the Jewish people. With the benefit of hindsight, the medieval sage warns against premature messianism. Rambam was clear: redemption will only come after the Jewish people truly repent. There are no shortcuts. Any attempt to force the Messiah may result in catastrophe.
As he writes in his commentary on Mishna Sanhedrin:
“We do not desire and hope for the days of the Messiah because of the multitude of produce and wealth, … as ones of confused intellect imagine. But [rather] the prophets and pious ones desired the days of the Messiah – and their longing for it grew — because of what will be in it from the gathering of the righteous and the proper administration and wisdom, and from the righteousness of the king and his great uprightness, and the heft of his wisdom and closeness to God…”
In other words, intentions matter. Redemption will come when we want it, when we seek it for the right reasons. It will not come because we want to be more comfortable now. Though, to be fair, there’s a difference between wanting to establish a country full of “produce and wealth” and wanting to create a safe haven so you and your family aren’t murdered by neighbors in a pogrom. Potato, potato.
Millennia later, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews would tread this same worn path, debating the line between being the author of your own destiny and pre-empting God.
But that’s far, far in the future.
In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, Jewish leaders made a choice. They had fought, literally fought, with swords and stones, for survival and sovereignty. And they had lost.
The Jewish people had no more appetite for violence. If they wanted to survive, they’d have to find a different way.
They chose memory. Education. Spiritual endurance.
With no further hope of political restoration, they dreamt of Zion, praying for the day that their mouths would once again fill with laughter, their tongues with song. For thousands of years, they prepared for that moment.
Many of us have never stopped.
Chapter 2: Turning Inward: 200–1000 CE
In the centuries following the failed Bar Kokhba revolt, Judaism transforms.
Historians aren’t clear on how many Jews are left in the Land of Israel after Hadrian crushes the rebellion, but it’s a fraction of the 1-2 million who had clung to their homes in the Holy Land after the destruction of the Second Temple.
Regardless of the exact numbers, history agrees on one thing: the center of Jewish life is now the Diaspora, where between three and five million Jews are scattered. And the center of that center is Babylon, aka modern-day Iraq, where the Jewish academies of Sura and Pumbedita pump out generation after generation of legendary scholars.
It is these legendary scholars who compile the Talmud – or should I say the Talmuds, plural. Because there are two: one compiled by that minority of Jews still in the Land of Israel, mostly in the Galilean city of Tverya, Tiberius, around the 4th century. Strangely, it becomes known not as the Tiberian Talmud but as the Talmud Yerushalmi, or Jerusalem Talmud, despite – or maybe because of – the fact that Jews are no longer allowed in Jerusalem.
The other Talmud, finalized roughly two centuries later in Sura and Pumbedita, becomes known as the Babylonian Talmud, and it is both richer in legal argument and wider in scope than its Galilean counterpart. Which isn’t surprising, given that the Babylonian Jewish community is larger, wealthier, and far more stable, with the funds and the space to sustain the yeshivot churning out deep and systematic scholarship.
Still, both Talmuds are haunted by the absence of Zion. The rabbis discuss the Temple in obsessive detail, arguing over its rituals, architecture, and laws. As though by studying the Temple, they could somehow keep it standing – in the mind, if not in physical space.
But even this reverence is complicated. The rabbis of the Talmud are much more cautious after the Bar Kokhba revolt. And some passages, particularly the famous Three Oaths in Tractate Ketubot, became the theological basis for centuries of Jewish patience – or passivity, depending on who you ask. Maybe you remember these oaths from our episode on the Neturei Karta, who interpret them as divine warnings. They are:
One, that Jews should not ascend to the land en masse,
Two, that they should not rebel against the nations,
Three, that the nations should not persecute the Jews excessively.
We can understand the rabbis’ caution, from a historical perspective.
Imagine what they had seen. Consider the price their forebears had paid for supporting Bar Kokhba. So it’s not surprising that later rabbis were wary of any hint of rebellion. What is surprising, though, is how deeply this wariness, and these three oaths, have rooted themselves in the theology of certain Haredi sects, what people call the ultra-Orthodox. who saw in these teachings not just caution, but an outright prohibition. They longed to return to Zion – but on God’s timeline, not ours.
And that’s why Zion remains everywhere in Jewish life. Why we pray towards Zion three times a day. Why we end every Passover Seder with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Why we smash a glass at weddings, to remember the destruction of the Temple even amidst our greatest joy. And why we bring it up, almost casually, in the most mundane contexts. Birkat Hamazon, aka the Grace After Meals – the blessing we say after we eat – isn’t just a “thank you” for the turkey club or the mlawach or the kale salad I’ve just inhaled. (Jokes, I would never eat a kale salad. No judgment, just not for me.)
Like so many of our other rituals and prayers, it’s also a reminder of exile – and a rehearsal for our return. We thank God not just for our food, but for the “good, expansive” land promised to our ancestors. And then we follow up that “thank you” by asking for just one more thing: the rebuilding of Zion and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty.
We are never, ever allowed to forget the loss of Jerusalem, not even while digesting lunch.
And it doesn’t matter if we’re eating in Rome or in Havana, in Casablanca or in Kyiv. It doesn’t matter if the local ruler is a Christian or a Muslim or even a pagan, if we’re tolerated or persecuted, if we’re enjoying a sumptuous meal or eating on the run. Every meal remains connected to history, to land, to collective memory. The rabbis ensured that even our gratitude for our food is bound up in our gratitude for our place, linking sustenance and sovereignty. For us, all roads lead to Jerusalem. Barred from our home, we replaced actual roads with metaphors. In this case, a sandwich. So rabbinic Judaism didn’t erase Zion. It elevated it to the heart of Jewish consciousness, made it mobile and portable, capable of flourishing even in exile. No matter where you are, you can always turn towards Zion.
But should you turn towards Zion in your heart? Or should you march towards it with your body?
Not that the Jewish people had the luxury of worrying too much about this. For most of our history, we just did our best to survive in the face of new and exciting threats.
Like other religions’ holy wars.
Chapter 3: New Challenges, New Responses (7th–15th Century CE)
In the 7th century, a new empire emerged in Arabia. Within decades, it had conquered Jerusalem, toppling the Christian Byzantines who had controlled the city for centuries.
That new empire, of course, was Islam. And – except for an 88 year interlude – Muslims would control Jerusalem for the next 13 centuries.
Islam came to the Holy Land in 638 CE, under the banner of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. As the first caliph to rule the Levant, Umar had a lot of important questions to figure out.
Like: how should a Muslim leader treat the non-Muslims under his rule?
The Caliph’s answer set a precedent of centuries of Jewish life under Islam. Non-Muslims who practiced other Abrahamic faiths – i.e. Judaism and Christianity – became dhimmi, protected but subordinate. They paid a special tax called jizya, wore distinctive clothing, and lived under certain – and often selectively enforced – legal restrictions.
Some of these restrictions were meant to humiliate and degrade non-Muslims, establishing a hierarchy with Islam at the top. But wearing distinctive clothing or not carrying weapons was a small price to pay for being allowed back into Jerusalem.
Because once Umar showed up in the Holy Land, he allowed Jews back into their holy city for the first time in centuries, where they set up their homes close to the Temple Mount, in a home that felt both familiar and strange. Traumatized but just grateful to be there, they have no appetite for rebellion.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, Diaspora Jews kept their eyes fixed towards Zion. Even highly successful communities – like those of medieval Spain, before the Spanish Inquisition – dreamt of their return. Medieval Jewish poets like Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi captured this aching paradox — living in physical comfort but spiritual dislocation. It was at the height of his fame and success in 12th century Spain that HaLevi wrote his most iconic and plaintive poem:
“לִבִּי בְּמִזְרָח וְאָנֹכִי בְּסוֹף מַעֲרָב”
“My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West.”
Physical flourishing was not a cure for spiritual longing. If anything, it sharpened it. It didn’t matter if they were in Babylon, North Africa, or Muslim Spain, where a Golden Age of Jewish poetry, philosophy, and politics was blossoming. Even the most successful exiles kept their eyes trained on Zion.
But not all Jewish exiles were successful. To the West, the Jews of Christian Europe were suffering. And the Crusaders were about to bring that suffering east.
When Pope Urban II launched a Christian holy war to reclaim Jerusalem from Muslim rule, he did not instruct his crusaders to lay waste to every Jewish community they encountered along the way.
They did that on their own, hopped up on apocalyptic fervor and promises of heaven. They destroyed the Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz, and Speyer. And when they finally reached Jerusalem, three years after they first set out, they slaughtered Jew and Muslim alike, burning synagogues with worshippers still inside.
Anyone they didn’t kill, they took as war booty. Anyone they didn’t enslave, they exiled from the city. For nearly a century, Jerusalem lay in Christian hands. Until Saladin came along in 1187, and kicked the Crusaders out for good.
As Christians and Muslims duked it out for control, Jews remained. The Muslim Fatimids who had controlled Jerusalem before the Crusaders showed up had made life, uh, not great for their Jews. Yet the Crusaders made the Fatimid period feel like a cakewalk. So when Saladin showed up, the Jews rejoiced, but let’s be real – it’s no picnic to be a minority caught between two holy wars.
Despite their precarious position, small groups of Jews continued to travel to and even settle in the Land of Israel. Benjamin of Tudela, the 12th-century Jewish traveler, documented these scattered communities — a few dozen families in Jerusalem, small outposts in Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed — clinging to survival amid conquest and ruin.
In the pantheon of old-school explorers, my guy Ben gets overshadowed by your Marco Polos and Magellan. But to the scholar of Jewish history, Benjamin of Tudela is incredibly important. Not because he’s powerful or influential, but because he is attentive, recording in great detail the lives that take place on the margins of history. His 12th-century magnum opus, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, maps Jewish survival across the Mediterranean world.
In fluid, un-showy Hebrew – let me emphasize that: the travelogue was written in Hebrew, Hebrew, proof that the Hebrew language never actually died – he describes the Jewish communities of the land of Israel, who stubbornly refused to disappear even as their sovereignty crumbled and their safety eroded and their numbers waned.
His work is proof of the continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel, of the Jewish refusal to accept exile. It did not matter who was in charge – Jews, Christians, Muslims – his travelogue emphasizes what history seems to have forgotten: the Jewish people never left the Holy Land. That always, always, some Jews remained, holding it down for centuries until their brothers and sisters could return.
But to those Diasporic brothers and sisters, return was often a distant dream, a comfort they turned to as their lives unraveled under intense and continuous pressure.
Take the Jews of Yemen. In the 12th century, amid mounting persecution, a wave of false messiahs began preying on the people’s hope. And Maimonides, Rambam, writing from Egypt, was watching.
His Epistle to Yemen – an “epistle” is just a fancy word for a letter, by the way – urged Yemen’s Jews to stay strong. Not just against persecution, but against the temptation to follow any false messiah. (Man, this guy hated a false Messiah.) Just wait, the Rambam cautioned. Quote:
“All that the prophets and sages have said about the Messiah is true. However, we must not act rashly, nor must we attempt to force the end.”
Rambam had good reason to urge caution. Ten centuries after Bar Kokhba, the trauma still ran deep.
But there may have been another reason for the Rambam’s caution. He wouldn’t have used the term hedonic adaptation, but as a keen observer of human nature, I bet he would have loved these psychological concepts almost as much as I do.
Hedonic adaptation is a fancy way of saying that humans have a baseline of happiness, or at least satisfaction, that we return to no matter what happens. Sure, our life satisfaction can spike when something great happens, and dip after something awful. But after the initial rush of, say, winning the lottery, we tend to go back to our natural baseline. And the same is true of less pleasant experiences, too – which, frankly, I find kind of comforting.
But maybe that was the problem. Maybe the Jewish people had grown too comfortable in exile. And I don’t mean “too comfortable” as in “things were too good.” I mean after a millennium in exile, it had become the baseline. As though they had forgotten what it meant to be a sovereign, independent people.
If hedonic adaptation is our ability to get used to good things, its dark mirror is learned helplessness: the feeling that nothing ever gets better, no matter what happens.
Had the Jewish people grown too used to exile? Grown too accustomed to living as guests in foreign nations, sometimes welcome, usually not? Had we forgotten the spirit of Ezra and Nehemiah, who guided the first exiles back home?
Chapter 4: Revival: 1500–1800 CE
It took 15 centuries for Jews to return to the Holy Land en masse.
The Ottoman Empire had been around since 1299, but it wasn’t until 1516 that they showed up in the Holy Land. Slowly, political turbulence began to die down. Stability returned.
Unlike the Christian leaders of Spain and Portugal, who banished their Jews in the late 1400s, the Ottoman sultan was beyond thrilled to welcome these refugees into his lands. In 1492, Bayezid II even sent ships to help ferry Spain’s newly homeless Jews to safety in his territories, letting local governors know in no uncertain terms that they would be accepting Jewish refugees.
Bayezid wasn’t merely being altruistic. As he once said to an advisor, incredulously, quote: “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”
So a wave of Jewish refugees sought safety in the lands of the Ottoman Empire – which, just a couple of decades after the expulsion from Spain, came to include the Holy Land. There, they joined the small existing Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Hebron, and the upper Galilee.
Within a matter of decades, a Jewish revival began to blossom in the Holy Land’s northern mountains. Today, the city of Tzfat, or Safed, is known for its hippies and artists, its mystics and holy people. That reputation is hundreds of years old. By the mid-16th century, Tzfat was an epicenter of Jewish spiritual life, drawing in mystics, scholars, poets, and legalists.
Like Rabbi Yosef Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch, the great code of Jewish law. Some people might be familiar with this epic legal work. You might think of this guy as a strict legalist, highly rational, by the book – but hey, this is Tzfat, so Karo was also the author of the Maggid Meisharim, a spiritual diary of the divine revelations he believed he was receiving, which offered guidance, rebuke, and mystical insight.
Rabbi Karo was far from the only rabbi in Tzfat in tune with the Divine. The mountain city was also home to Rabbi Isaac Luria, also known as the Arizal, a revolutionary kabbalist whose teachings transformed Jewish theology and eternally popularized those red string bracelets that everyone rocks after their Birthright trip. Kabbalah, of course, is way more than red strings, and the red strings didn’t start with the Arizal. But the point stands: if you’re seeking divine communion, head to Tzfat.
The city’s Kabbalists may have seemed to have their heads in the clouds, but their feet were planted firmly on the ground. To them, Zion was no abstraction, no distant dream. And they refused exile as their baseline, an eternal status quo. The Arizal in particular believed that human action could change everything.
Including exile.
He saw exile as a scattering of divine sparks. Once, the world had been whole. Now, it was shattered, littered with shards of Divine light. But there was no reason to accept brokenness as the natural state of things. Not when human action could repair that brokenness, gathering those divine sparks into wholeness once more. And the best way to repair the world, he taught, was by performing the mitzvot – the good deeds/commandments we find in the Torah – in the land of Israel.
Maybe you’ve heard of this concept before. Tikkun olam, or “repairing the world,” has almost become shorthand for “Jewish involvement in social justice causes.” But in its original form, tikkun olam meant that the Jewish people had an obligation to pick up all the scattered sparks and bring them home to the Land of Israel.
In short, national and metaphysical redemption was contingent on agency and action. It wouldn’t just come while the Jewish people were sitting around, waiting for miracles. They had to be active participants in their own redemption. Which meant prayer and good deeds… and returning to the land.
Centuries later, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook — the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, and definitely on the Mt. Rushmore of Religious Zionist thinkers — would draw directly from this mystical vision.
Like the kabbalists of Tzfat, he believed that the physical return to Zion was a necessary first step towards messianic redemption. This return was a kind of tikkun — meaning a repair – that would heal both the spiritual and material worlds through human action.
For Rav Kook, as he is commonly called, that repair could be advanced not only through prayer and study but through practical nation-building. The divine sparks could be elevated through shovels and plows, through politics and guard posts, as well as good deeds and Torah study.
Rav Kook’s thought became foundational to religious Zionism. But he argued that even secular Zionists — the often-atheist kibbutzniks and pioneers draining swamps and laying railways — were, knowingly or not, agents of divine will. His theology bridged faith and nationalism, tradition and modernity, messianism and state-building.
Rav Kook did not live to see history test his ideas. He died in 1935 – before the great catastrophe of the Holocaust, and before the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
But all that would come much later. Right now, in the 16th century, the Ottomans were still in charge of the Land of Israel. The vast majority of Jews still lived in the Diaspora. And throughout the Empire – from Greece to Libya, from Hungary to Iraq – Jewish communities watched the resettlement of the Holy Land with great interest, even sending funds to sustain these early pilgrims. This phenomenon, known as the halukka, or “distribution,” was not charity, but a form of participation. If these Jews couldn’t journey to the Holy Land themselves, they’d enable someone else to do it.
Tzfat was not the only holy city to experience a revival in the 1500s. The Jews of Jerusalem, Chevron/Hebron, and Tiberias/Tverya immersed themselves in study and spirituality – even as economic hardship, political instability, and the occasional massacre threatened their way of life.
But was this fragile, scattered presence enough? Was returning in poverty and vulnerability a fulfillment of the ancient dream — or a pale echo of what true redemption demanded?
The mystics believed that their work, hidden and painstaking, was hastening the arrival of the Messiah. But for many Jews in the diaspora, the idea of a material return remained remote — a hope, but not a program. Without a clear political path, longing remained spiritual. They still prayed towards Jerusalem three times a day, but they didn’t pull on their walking boots to go there themselves.
Beneath that surface, though, something had shifted.
The mere fact of presence — however modest — kept alive a radical idea: that Zion was not just a direction of prayer, but a destination. That Jews were not only to wait for redemption — but to prepare for it.
Every Hebrew word has a linguistic root, and the root of Zion is צ-י-ן (tzayin–yod–nun), which means marker, signpost, or raised point. Originally, Zion likely meant a distinguishing marker or elevated landmark, something visible and set apart. It still does, in some ways. Zion is the destination point.
It would take centuries for the Jewish people to reach that point in an organized, political way. In a way that involved setting up infrastructure and bureaucracies, airlines and immigration paperwork.
But slowly, mystics and dreamers were laying the groundwork for the Jewish people’s arrival.
And so were the agonies of exile.
In 1648, the Khmelnytsky Uprising in Eastern Europe unleashed brutal massacres against Jewish communities across Ukraine and Poland, wiping out entire communities. Some estimates put the Jewish death toll at 20,000; others, at 100,000. Regardless of the exact number, the trauma seared itself into Jewish collective memory, reminding many Jews – not that they needed it – that the Diaspora was not safe.
Yes, the Jewish people needed to build resilience in exile. But exile was not a foregone conclusion, or a natural state. The exilic spirit that had adapted to centuries of displacement was beginning to strain.
Or, to put it a lot less poetically: the Jews were tired. Tired of being murdered by their neighbors. Tired of living as second-class citizens. Tired of oppression. Tired of waiting for redemption. Tired of trusting that history would eventually get nicer. Tired of safety that could be revoked at any moment. Tired of being told this was just the price of Jewish history.
It would take another couple of centuries before that exhaustion with exile would spur Jews into action. But already, the Jewish people were coming up with new ideas for how to heal their fractured world.
Action. Movement. Agency. The exact same spirit that would animate David Ben Gurion centuries later, as he thundered It doesn’t matter what the world will say. It matters what the Jews will do.
Epilogue
We’ve traveled from the destruction of the Temple to the development of Rabbinic Judaism, from the rise of Islam to the Crusades to the beginning of Ottoman rule. We’ve covered the fourth century compilation of the Talmud, the medieval communities that suffered Christian holy wars, the 16th century Kabbalists reigniting a long-dormant flame. We ended on a dark note, with the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648, and there is more darkness to come.
But there is also so much more triumph and resilience and pride.
Because as we’ve traveled from the first to the 17th century, we’ve watched the Jewish people transform themselves. We’ve seen them reinvent their religion, re-imagining Zion not as a physical place but a spiritual destination. And we’ve discovered the paradox that still defines Jewish life.
We are a people that adapted to their diaspora — but never stopped dreaming of what was. A people who nurtured their broken story over centuries – but refused to see themselves as victims. A people who often flourished in exile, all the while longing for a different world. Who thrived when given the chance in Córdoba, Fustat, or Krakow, but still prayed, still sang, “Next year in Jerusalem” every single year.
But with every passing century, next year in Jerusalem began to feel more urgent. Embedded inside that promise lay a question:
Do we wait for redemption? Or do we bring it ourselves?
Next week, we’ll enter the modern world. The world of the Enlightenment and the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. We’ll meet thinkers who dared to reimagine the Jewish future.
We’ll follow the debates of the early Zionists as they grappled with questions of identity, liberation, religion, and politics. And we’ll prepare for the head-on collision between the Zionist movement… and the people who had come to inhabit the land of Israel in the centuries since the Jews were exiled.
We’ll watch as the dream of Zion moved from the realm of theory to the realm of action. I can’t wait for the big, messy ideas we’re about to encounter.
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, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. 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 3.