The 25th Knesset dissolves on Friday, the first since 1988 to complete a full four-year term, and the country is formally having an election on October 27.
The calendar between here and there is already dense: The Democrats primaries on July 20, Religious Zionist Party on July 26, Likud on August 4, and final party lists due September 9. At least one new party has pushed its launch to “after Tisha B’Av” out of respect, or because focus groups during a fast week are a waste of money.
And the government is using its last days to push through what it still can, including bills touching the draft and the courts, the two rawest nerves in Israeli life, on the theory that facts created in July outlive whoever wins in October.
Politicians from at least three different camps have sat in The Jerusalem Post studio in recent months and said versions of the same two things. Off camera: This election will decide whether the country can still hold together. On camera: That’s why the other side must be crushed. The same person, 10 minutes apart, apparently untroubled by the fit.
Talmudic account of destruction delivers what a sermon will not, what a news desk will
Next week, in Jerusalem and in Johannesburg, every congregation will hear the sermon: The Second Temple fell because of sinat chinam, baseless hatred, and look at us now. True, and safe. It accuses everyone, which is a polite way of accusing no one.
The Talmud’s own account of the destruction is harsher and, three months before an election, more useful, because it does what a sermon won’t and a good news desk must. It assigns responsibility to specific people, and not the obvious ones.
“Jerusalem was destroyed on account of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza,” the Gemara opens (Gittin 55b). The first scene is famous: A man invited to a banquet by mistake, humiliated, dragged out while the leadership of Jerusalem watches from their seats. Less quoted is what the humiliated man says on his way out: “Since the Sages sat there and did not protest, evidently they were content with what he did. I will go and inform against them to the king.”
Bar Kamtza wasn’t watching the host. He was watching the audience.
Rome sends a test, an animal to be offered in the Temple on the emperor’s behalf, and Bar Kamtza blemishes it on the road, subtly, in a way only Halacha would catch. The sages hold a genuinely bad hand. Most wanted to offer the sacrifice anyway for the sake of peace with the empire.
Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas stopped them and said: “People will say that blemished animals may be sacrificed on the altar.” They weighed something darker, killing the informer before he could report back. He stopped that too: “People will say that one who makes a blemish on consecrated animals is put to death” (Gittin 56a).
Notice what is missing from the record. Zechariah never proposes anything. Twice he explains why the option on the table sets a bad precedent, the meeting adjourns undecided, and Rome gets its war. When the rabbis later went looking for someone to hold responsible, they passed over the informer, the host, and the emperor.
Rabbi Yochanan said: “The humility of Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas destroyed our Temple, burned our Sanctuary, and exiled us from our land” (Gittin 56a).
The verdict lands on the careful man, the one guarding precedent while the house is filled with smoke.
Nobody has to win an argument in a starving city
The Gemara’s second scene is the grain. Besieged Jerusalem was, at the start, a supplied city; the storehouses of three wealthy men held enough, the rabbis say, “to sustain the city for 21 years.”
A city that can eat for two decades can negotiate, stall, and outwait an emperor. The zealot militias, the biryonim, wanted war now, and when the sages proposed going out to make peace, the zealots refused, “and they arose and burned those storehouses of wheat and barley, and there was a famine” (Gittin 56a).
Nobody has to win an argument in a starving city.
Here, journalism can add something the sermon can’t: a second source. The siege of Jerusalem had an eyewitness correspondent, Yosef ben Matityahu, known to the world as Josephus, and his dispatch confirms the rabbis’ report. The warring factions inside the city torched each other’s supplies, he writes, “as if they had, on purpose, done it to serve the Romans,” and the fire consumed grain, “which would have been sufficient for a siege of many years.”
Jerusalem, he concludes, fell to a famine that would have been impossible had its own defenders not prepared the way for it (The Jewish War 5:1, Whiston translation).
Two sources, one rabbinic and one embedded with the Romans, hostile to each other on almost everything, agree on the grain. In a newsroom, that is when a story runs.
And the two scenes are one story. The men with torches could act, because the men with authority wouldn’t. History remembers the zealots as villains; the Gemara saves its verdict for the respectable people who let the moment pass.
The storehouse test to be applied to all parties
So, a proposal, and a commitment. Call it the storehouse test, and from now until October 27, this newspaper will apply it to every party that submits a list. Two questions each: What shared national asset are you prepared to burn in order to win? And what decision that costs you votes are you prepared to make anyway?
The storehouses are not hard to name. An army that belongs to no party, currently pulled at from several directions in the exemption fight. The consensus around the hostages, which so far belongs to no coalition and has to stay that way. Courts whose rulings bind even the people who loathe them. And the least glamorous asset on the books, the assumption that whoever loses in October accepts it.
Someone in every camp is quietly pricing one of these as campaign fuel. Any reader who just pictured only their opponents doing so is sitting at Bar Kamtza’s banquet among the quiet guests.
Jews abroad should not read this as someone else’s election coverage. The federation table that still seats people who disagree about Israel is a storehouse. So is the campus coalition that took 20 years to assemble and could crack in a week.
In conversations with community leaders across three continents since the October 7 massacre, the cast never changes, only the accents: Every community has its biryonim, who would rather command a smaller and purer camp, and its Zechariahs, who chair the meeting, raise the procedural concern, and go home relieved that nothing moved.
Earlier this week, this column made the case that Israeli politics is driving out its mensches, and that the country will pay for it. This is where the bill comes in, Gittin’s. The good don’t leave a field empty. It is left to whoever brought the matches.
Fairness requires saying plainly: A full Knesset term, the first in nearly four decades, is a real institutional achievement in a region where governments rarely die of old age. But the Temple was magnificent on its last morning too. A building can stand for a long time after its contents have died.
Thursday, on the synagogue floor with the Kinot, somewhere between the ancient siege and the campaign calendar, the grain will come to mind: 21 years of it. Burned by Jews. Permitted by Jews. Hold this newspaper to the test.