The whole purpose of adding musical instruments to the song during Simkhat Beit Hashoava according to today’s daf TB sukkah 51 was to ramp up the celebration with extra rejoicing (שִׂמְחָה יְתֵירָה). The Mishnah describes what a celebration it was by saying “One who did not see the Celebration of the Place of the Drawing of the Water never saw celebration in his days.” (Sefaria.org translation) On the following dappim the Gemara will expound upon the sequence of events surrounding Simkhat Beit Hashoava. Today’s daf describes two magnificent buildings, the Temple in Jerusalem and a synagogue in Alexandria, Egypt.
Jumping off the phrase “One
who did not see…” We learn “The Sages taught: One who did not see the Celebration of
the Place of the Drawing of the Water, never saw celebration in his life. One
who did not see Jerusalem in its glory, never saw a beautiful city. One who did
not see the Temple in its constructed state, never saw a magnificent
structure. The Gemara asks: What is the Temple building to which the
Sages refer? Abaye said, and some say that it was Rav Ḥisda who
said: This is referring to the magnificent building of Herod, who
renovated the Second Temple.
With what materials did he construct it? Rava said: It was with
stones of green-gray marble and white marble [marmara]. Some say:
It was with stones of blue marble and white marble. The rows of stones
were set with one row slightly protruded and one row slightly indented,
so that the plaster would take better. He thought to plate the
Temple with gold, but the Sages said to him: Leave it as is, and
do not plate it, as it is better this way, as with the different colors
and the staggered arrangement of the rows of stones, it has the appearance
of waves of the sea.”
(Sefaria.org translation)
The
Second Temple was built by the returnees of the Babylonian exile under the
leadership of the Nehemiah and Ezra. You can imagine how modest this Temple was
due to the situation of the Jews. Life was hard to reestablish themselves and
make the land that had been ravaged 70 years earlier flourish. If I remember
correctly, the Jews who remembered King Solomon’s Temple wept at how modest this
replacement was. King Herod (born around 72 BCE, his reign from 37-4 BCE) completely
rebuilt the second Temple restoring its magnificence described in the Mishna.
Herod
was an astute politician. He knew that the rabbis really didn’t like or trust him
because his family were converts from in Idumea,
south of Judea and not from the Davidic line. He try to curry their favor by respecting the rabbis’
religious sensibilities. All of the coins he minted were aniconic, meaning no
human likenesses were used as a design. He enlarge the Temple Mount, rebuilt
the Temple, and spared no expense making it one of the most beautiful buildings
in the world. Many of the archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem and around
Israel date back to his reign. Creating employment for all the craftsmen probably
didn’t hurt his popularity. By the way, he sought to find favor in the eyes of
the pagans as well by building pagan temples and building whole port city
Caesarea in honor of Caesar to maintain their support.
Alexandria,
Egypt was a major Diaspora center of Jewish life. Philo an important Jewish
phosphor lived in Alexandria and worked on behalf of its Jewish citizens.
“It is taught in a baraita that
Rabbi Yehuda says: One who did not see the great synagogue [deyofloston]
of Alexandria of Egypt never saw the glory of Israel. They said that its
structure was like a large basilica [basileki], with a
colonnade within a colonnade. At times there were six hundred thousand men and
another six hundred thousand men in it, twice the number of those who
left Egypt. In it there were seventy-one golden chairs [katedraot],
corresponding to the seventy-one members of the Great Sanhedrin, each of
which consisted of no less than twenty-one thousand talents of gold. And
there was a wooden platform at the center. The sexton of the synagogue
would stand on it, with the scarves in his hand. And because the
synagogue was so large and the people could not hear the communal prayer, when
the prayer leader reached the conclusion of a blessing requiring the
people to answer amen, the sexton waved the scarf and all the people
would answer amen.
“And the members of the various crafts would
not sit mingled. Rather, the goldsmiths would sit among themselves, and
the silversmiths among themselves, and the blacksmiths among themselves, and
the coppersmiths among themselves, and the weavers among themselves. And when a
poor stranger entered there, he would recognize people who plied his
craft, and he would turn to join them there. And from there he would
secure his livelihood as well as the livelihood of the members
of his household, as his colleagues would find him work in that craft.
“After depicting the glory of the synagogue, the Gemara
relates that Abaye said: All of the people who congregated in that
synagogue were killed by Alexander the Great of Macedonia. The
Gemara asks: What is the reason that they were punished and
killed? It is due to the fact that they violated the prohibition
with regard to Egypt in this verse: “You shall henceforth return no more
that way” (Deuteronomy 17:16), and they returned. Since they
established their permanent place of residence in Egypt, they were punished.
“When Alexander arrived, he found them,
and saw that they were reading the verse in the Torah scroll:
“The Lord will bring a nation against you from far, from the end of the
earth, as the vulture swoops down; a nation whose tongue you shall not
understand” (Deuteronomy 28:49). He said, referring to himself: Now,
since that man sought to come by ship in ten days, and a wind carried it
and the ship arrived in only five days, apparently the verse
referring a vulture swooping down is referring to me and heavenly forces are
assisting me. Immediately, he set upon them and slaughtered them.” (Sefaria.org translation)
First
of all we have to emend the text by removing Alexander the Great as the
perpetrator murdering all the Jews in Alexandria. Alexander the Great lived
hundreds of years before this incident. What caused this murderous event? Let
me suggest the following from one of my teachers Shaye J.D. Cohen.
“The
Romans realized that Judaism was unlike the numerous other native religions of
the Empire; the Jews refused to worship any god but their own, refused to
acknowledge the Emperor’s right to divine honors, refused to tolerate images in
public places and buildings, and refused to perform any sort of work every
seventh day. Aware of these peculiarities, the Romans, followed the practice of
the Seleucids, permitted Jewish citizens to refrain from participation in pagan
ceremonies… and exempted the Jews from military service, ensured they would not
be called to court on the Sabbath, or lose any official benefits as a result of
their Sabbath observances. In many of the cities of the East, the Romans
authorize the Jews to create polituemata
(singular, politeuma) autonomous
ethnic communities that allowed the Jews to govern their own communal affairs.
“The
mad Emperor Caligula and his legate in Egypt withdrew, or attempted to
withdraw, these rights and privileges. Riots erupted first in Alexandria-the “Greeks”
(that is, the Greek speaking population of the city, most of whom were not “Greek”
at all) against the Jews. Exactly who or what started the riots is not clear.
The root cause of the conflict, however, was the ambiguous status of the city’s
Jews. On the one hand, the Alexandrian’s resented the Jewish politeuma and regarded it as a diminution
of the prestige and authority of their own city. On the other hand, the Jews
thought that membership in their own politeuma
should confer on them the same rights and privileges the citizens of the city
had. The result of these conflicting claims was bloodshed and destruction.
Aided by the Roman governor of Egypt, the Greeks attacked the Jews, pillaged
Jewish property, desecrated or destroyed Jewish synagogues and herded the Jews
into a “ghetto.” The Jews were hardly passive during these events, and resisted
both militarily and diplomatically. The most distinguished Jew in the city, the
phosphor Philo, led a delegation to the Emperor to argue the Jewish cause.” (Roman
Denomination: the Jewish revolt and the Destruction of the Second Temple by
Shaye J.D. Cohen, revised by Michael Satlow, in Ancient Israel: from Abraham
to the Roman Destruction of the Temple, edited by Hershel Shanks, page 275)
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