Gedaliah: Forgotten But Not Gone

The Jews of Israel are facing a complex, totally daunting set of decisions. The neighbors are either violently hostile, apathetic, or disengaged. None of those nations’ national leaders is precisely as advertised; all are bound up in a dozen different, not entirely compatible, alliances and less formal relationships. The Jewish citizenry, having known defeat, now must decide whether to attempt to snatch some version of scaled-down victory from its voracious jaws. And the questions that churn and roil at the core of the matter are easy to formulate but almost impossible answer with any sense of certainty. Should the concept of living in some sort of acquiescent peace with the nation’s enemies be described as the only practical choice left, something akin to plucking a brand from the fire before it too turns into ash and then being content with something instead of nothing at all? Or would such a devil’s compromise more reasonably be qualified as act of serial betrayal: first of the nation’s dead, then of its vanquished army, after that of its royal family, then of its foundational principles, and finally of its own national destiny? Those were the questions facing the surviving citizens of Judah in the first decades of the sixth century BCE after the Babylonians successfully razed Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s Temple, exiled thousands upon thousands of citizens to distant towns across the desert in what today is called Iraq, and then forced the king of Judah to watch on in horror as his own children, the natural heirs to his throne, were slain before his eyes…after which he himself was blinded so that his sons’ lifeless bodies would become the last things he would ever see in his lifetime.

And now a new personality appears on the scene, a fellow of whom we haven’t heard in any of the narratives surrounding the last decades of the Kingdom of Judah. He comes from an illustrious family, this Gedaliah. His father, Achikam, was an intimate of the prophet Jeremiah and is credited with having saved the latter’s life on at least one occasion when the government was after him and intent on ending his career as Israel’s prophet of doom once and for all. His grandfather, Shaphan, was an intimate of Chilkiah, the High Priest of Israel during the reign of King Josiah, the last great king of Judah and both the father of three of its last four kings and the grandfather of the fourth. But of Gedaliah himself we know nothing other than as regards the series of incidents which, at least in the end, made him famous. His personal seal, however, has survived as testimony to his real existence as a historical personality.

After the military defeat of the national army and the removal of the king from its royal throne, Judah was—to say the very least—at a crossroads. That it was henceforth to become a mere province in somebody else’s empire went without saying. But to what degree of self-governance the surviving, non-exiled citizens of decimated Judah could still aspire—that question was very much still up in the air. As was the degree to which the nation’s surviving leadership could or should be prepared to compromise without crossing the line from political flexibility to treason.

Particularly daunting for those of us looking back on all of this through the mist of history is the obligation to consider to their situation without allowing what we know would eventually happen to color our perception of the situation as it existed in what was for them the present tense. Yes, we know that Babylon’s days were already numbered, that not fifty years later their own empire would be seized by Cyrus, king of Persia, and folded into the Persian Empire. We also know that the exiles and their children still in the east would be permitted by Cyrus to return home—his declaration permitting that constitutes the final sentence in the Bible—and that there would yet be an independent Jewish state in the Land of Israel, albeit a short-lived one that only thrived until the Romans decided that Israel would make a worthy addition to their own empire. But, of course, the people facing the future as the ruins of Jerusalem were still smoldering knew none of any of this…and so had to make their decision about the future based solely on what they actually did know. That’s how history works when you’re actually living through it and not contemplating its vagaries from the comfort of a well-appointed undergraduate seminar room.

The Babylonians, having exacted their tribute and incorporated Judah into their empire, were ready to grant the survivors some version of home rule. Why not? The victory was theirs. The nation’s riches had been carted off as the spoils of war. The king of Judah was their prisoner and his heirs had been executed, thus making it more or less impossible for any attempt to re-establish Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel to succeed. So why would they care if the Jews looked after their own affairs—home rule would only lessen the burden on their “real” masters! And so Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon and now master of Israel, somehow found Gedaliah ben Achikam and made him governor of Judah, now the Babylonian province of Yehud.  To keep him safe (and no doubt also to keep an eye on his doings), Nebuchadnezzar also installed a company of Babylonian soldiers at Mitzpeh, a town near Jerusalem. And Gedaliah got right to work too, encouraging people to work the fields, to re-establish the nation’s vineyards, to attempt to re-invent the nation’s commercial life. What he really thought about his own situation, who knows? But he saw a chance to preserve at least some version of Jewish life in the homeland of the Jewish people…and he took it.

Was he a Quisling whose primary interest in serving his nation’s masters was to save his own neck? Or was he a practical man who determined that, in the wake of the almost unimaginable catastrophe that had overwhelmed his people, something was better than nothing? Jews in our day will be unable to consider Gedaliah’s situation without thinking of the Jews who served the Nazis as guardians of the ghettos. Were such people trying, in an impossible situation, to create at least some order and thus to make it possible to hope for some version of survival for at least some of the people? Or were they simpler enablers who made the work of the Nazis that much simpler by enforcing even the most horrific of their directives? It’s not that simple a question to answer, not with respect to the Shoah and also not with respect to Gedaliah’s situation all those centuries earlier.

The people who feel betrayed by such willing cooperators—whom they invariably call “collaborators”—tend to vote with their machetes.  It is, for example, widely believed that Chaim Rumkowski, the “chairman” of the Lodz ghetto who oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands from the ghetto to the death camps, including more than 13,000 children, was himself bludgeoned to death by Jewish members of the Sonderkommando after the Nazis, seeing no more use to make of him, deported him to Auschwitz as well. And Gedaliah too was murdered, the story of which is told in detail in the biblical Book of Jeremiah.

It is a sad story and a terrible one, but not such a complicated one. There were people who were not delighted with Gedaliah’s efforts to live in peace with his country’s masters. And one of them, a certain Ishmael ben Netaniah, who was a member of the royal family (and who no doubt saw his own chances of somehow coming to the throne slipping away as a version of Judah without a king on its throne was becoming more and more of a reality with every passing day)—this Ishmael murdered Gedaliah in cold blood and then fled across the Jordan to a neighboring kingdom where he had already been granted refuge. And that was the end of Gedaliah.

Except in our Jewish tradition it wasn’t, however, because the day on which Gedaliah died became a fast day so universally observed that a mere half century later, a different prophet, Zechariah ben Berechia, could refer vaguely to the “fast of the seventh month” as though it were completely obvious to what he was making reference. (It’s true Yom Kippur also falls during the seventh month, but the context makes it obvious that he isn’t referring to that that fast.) And we are still observing it, at least formally rededicating ourselves each year to the proposition that Gedaliah was more of a good man who paid an unwarranted price for his efforts on behalf of his people than he was a fool or a flunky, let alone a traitor.

I’ve been thinking about Gedaliah all week. His issue, after all, is still on our table…and in a dozen different ways. Finding the precise boundary between compromise and self-defeating acquiescence is as challenging accurately to locate now as it was then. Are attempts at compromise wise or foolish when the enemy speaks the language only of brutality and terror? As we pass the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Oslo Accords (and the famous White House handshake between Yitzchak Rabin and Yasir Arafat), does it make sense to work towards finding a middle ground with people who show no signs of wishing to negotiate at all? Or is picking up your own big stick the only reasonable response to someone brandishing a big stick and threatening to hit you with it?

The Fast of Gedaliah is, to say the very least, under-observed. Should it be revitalized as an annual opportunity to remind us always to seek accommodation with our enemies, thus to create the framework for the kind of shared endeavor that can lead, at least sometimes, to a lessening of hostility? Or should we fast on the anniversary of Gedaliah’s assassination to remind us that accommodation is reasonable in defeat—the Babylonians had already completely devastated Judah when Gedaliah was appointed governor over the surviving few—but that victory is always preferable to compromise…and particularly when you are fighting a foe who shows no overt interest in actually living in peace regardless of the terms offered? These are the questions that tradition lays at our feet as a new year dawns and, as we nod at least in passing to Gedaliah’s death, that it invites us to ponder thoughtfully and carefully as we move forward into it.