Episode #36   The Dreaded Demon Dies

In this episode, Rabbi Reinman shows how the Men of the Great Assembly set the course of history for the entire Imperial Quadrant.

During the Babylonian captivity, the Jewish people formed a ruling council of one hundred and twenty sages known to history as the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah, the Men of the Great Assembly, a who’s-who of the Jewish elite. Most were prophets, and all were outstanding teachers of the Torah. The older sages, such as Baruch ben Neriah, Mordecai, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, Ezekiel, Zerubavel and Ezra, still remembered the First Temple. Others, such as Nehemiah and Shimon Hatzaddik, were born in exile.

The work of the Assembly had an enormous impact on the future of the Torah and the Jewish religion. They also effected a seismic change in the human experience that would determine the future course of the history of the world.

The assembly began its work in exile, because the elderly Baruch ben Neriah, the foremost disciple of Jeremiah, was unable to travel. The sages remained at his side[1] until he passed away in 348 b.c.e., and then they left for Jerusalem with the brilliant and dynamic Ezra at their head. Darius, the Persian emperor, gave them his blessing, extended them royal protection and exempted them from all taxes and levies.[2]

When they arrived in Jerusalem, their immediate concern was the betterment of the existing community. For nearly two decades, the infant community of Jerusalem had been in virtually suspended animation because of the interruption of the Temple construction. They had lived in constant peril and uncertainty without a clear goal and without the strong Torah underpinnings enjoyed by Babylonian Jews. The community had eroded, and some people actually took pagan wives. Intermarriage, even if rare, jeopardized any prospects for a national revitalization.

With their enormous prestige, the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah quickly effected the separation of the intermarried couples and organized a public and community-wide pledge of fealty to God and His Torah.[3] They also solidified the Torah infrastructure of the budding community and tended to its various organizational needs. Then they turned to the critical concern of securing the future.

The sages were faced with entirely new circumstances that presented more unknowns than precedents. Politically, the return to Jerusalem could not be viewed as a resumption of a briefly interrupted historical progression. The Jewish people had not been allowed to reconstitute their kingdom and recover their political independence. They had merely been allowed to resettle as Persian subjects in the Persian colony that stood on their ancestral lands. Moreover, most of the people had remained in Babylon and the other scattered communities of the exile. Clearly, the future spiritual guidance of the Jewish people would not derive from political institutions such as the Davidic dynasty.

Furthermore, drastic changes in the geopolitical situation were hastening the end of the age of prophecy, another pillar of pre-exilic Jewish society. Prophecy required a certain serenity of mind and spirit as a prerequisite for the temporary transformation of the human mind into a transcendent channel for divine communication.[4] In former times, despite the occasional outbreaks of war, society had been stable enough to allow people to attain such a state of mind with fair regularity. But the increased frequency, ferocity and sophistication of war throughout the Imperial Quadrant had destabilized society so that a person never knew what tomorrow would bring. Prophecy could not be expected to survive indefinitely in such a high-anxiety environment.[5]

It seemed obvious to the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah that in order for the Torah to survive it would have to be equipped with a doctrinal sheath that would make it virtually self-propelled. When leadership faltered and prophecy faded, the Torah itself would carry its bearers forward to their rendezvous with destiny. The Torah had commanded the Jewish people not to “deviate to the right or the left from the directives of the sages,”[6] thus conferring Scriptural authority on Rabbinic ordinances designed to safeguard but not alter the Torah.[7] This legislative power had been exercised from time to time to a limited extent,[8] but now it would have to be brought to bear with great urgency and broad scope. The Anshei Knessess Hagedolah prepared to “build a fence around the Torah,”[9] a protective wall to withstand any violent assault that might emanate from the arsenal of history. There was no time to waste.

One can well imagine the weight of the burden borne by these venerable prophets and sages. These men, most of them well into their eighties and nineties, stood together at the crossroads of destiny, a living bridge between an old world that had perished and a nascent world whose character was yet unformed. They knew that the institutions, regulations and guidelines they devised at this critical juncture would determine the future of their people. Amazingly, these elderly sages discovered within themselves unexpected founts of youthful vigor, and they plunged into the mammoth task of building the Torah edifice that has survived intact to this very day.

With the prospect of the decline of prophecy, their first attentions were focused on sealing the Scriptures against any further inclusions. They carefully reviewed all the recorded prophecies and chronicles, and they decided which would be considered canonical; only these books would have the force of Torah revelation to be accepted without question. Thus, the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, written by members of the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah with regards to their own times, completed the Bible and brought the Biblical period to a close. At that point, the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah officially declared the Scriptures complete and forever sealed. This barrier would prove immensely significant five hundred years later when the Christians would attempt to force their Gospels into the Jewish Biblical canon.

The Anshei Knessess Hagedolah then turned to the prayers and blessings.[10] Although thrice daily prayers and the blessings had been a central tenet of Judaism from patriarchal times, there had never been an established liturgical text. During Biblical times, which had been characterized by stellar highs and abysmal lows, the core element “sought God” without the confining strictures of liturgical formulae. They prayed according to an accepted pattern but with an adventurous expansion of the soul in ecstatic communion with God. In spontaneous language that mirrored their emotions, they proclaimed their gratitude to God for His bounty and beseeched His favor for all their spiritual and material needs. But in the diminished state of the post-Biblical period, people could not be expected to achieve ecstasy thrice daily. Instead of their emotions giving rise to their prayers, the prayers were needed to stimulate their emotions.

The extraordinary success of the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah in the formulation of the blessings and prayers is manifest to every Jew who prays daily. One would think that a liturgical formula repeated so often would soon become stale and tedious, that prayer would become rote, but the exact opposite is true. The formal Jewish liturgy is among the most brilliant literary achievements ever. Eternally fresh and endlessly inspiring, it weaves the most moving Biblical passages into the elegant and eloquent patterns of the liturgy and wraps the whole composition around a complex intellectual framework; each segment fulfills a specific role and function so that the whole pulsates with a powerful rhythm that adapts constantly to the calendar, communal events and the needs of the individual.

The Talmud describes many other “fences” and regulations attributed to Ezra and the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah with regards to Torah study, religious observance and community affairs. But perhaps most important of all was their initiation of a program upon which the very survival of the Oral Law would depend.

For a thousand years, the Oral Law, like all vast fields of knowledge, had been taught without a formal lexicon of instruction. For instance, a teacher of medicine or mathematics tries to impart his knowledge in his own words in the manner he deems best. He rarely has his students memorize specifically worded phrases. Similarly, teachers of the Oral Law following accepted patterns of instruction were free to employ their tutorial talents as they saw fit and approach their subjects from any angle they chose. In cases of dispute, however, the teachers of the Oral Law were in a weaker position. A teacher of medicine or mathematics could always refer back to his textbooks, but there were no textbooks for the Oral Law.[11] Instead, the prophets served as the final arbiters of all legal questions.[12] But with the age of prophecy coming to an end, other devices, short of permitting a written record, were needed for the preservation of the integrity of the Oral Law.

Once again, the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah turned to the device of formulation that had served them so well in the reinforcement of prayer. They composed a condensed lexicon that encapsulated the fundamental issues of the entire spectrum of the Oral Law. The formalized lexicon, which was to be memorized by all students, would provide a universally accepted mnemonic for the Oral Law and curtail the incidence of disagreements. It was a compromise between actual inscription and the absolute informality of the Biblical period, preserving the knowledge of the Oral Law while protecting its exclusivity to the Jewish people. With decreasing effectiveness, this lexicon worked as a spoken text for five hundred years when, with some modification, it became the basis for the Mishnah, the fundamental written text of the Talmud.

The work of the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah was complete. They had sealed the Scriptures against falsification and manipulation; they had built protective “fences” around the Torah; they had secured the efficacy of prayer; and they had planted the seeds of the Talmud which would guarantee the preservation of the Oral Law. They had also encouraged the proliferation of yeshivahs and a broad dissemination of Torah study.[13] The Torah was sinking deep roots in the revived Jewish community in a form designed to weather the unpleasant surprises the future so often brings. The future seemed assured.

It was time for the Assembly to turn its attention to the dreaded demon that had plagued the Jewish people for close to a thousand years.  One of the salient features of Jewish nationhood had been the battle against pagan influences. The annals of the Periods of the Judges and the Kings chronicle with almost dismal monotony the ebb and flow of this incessant struggle for spiritual survival. Indeed, the Talmud intimates that the idolatrous influences were so powerful in ancient times that even the sages of the Talmud would have been hard-pressed to resist.[14] This burning issue now faced the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah. How could the Jewish people be protected from the terrible trap of idolatry even as its leadership and political situation declined? What good were all the “fences” and reinforcements to Judaism if the people remained vulnerable to the siren call of idolatry?

This problem had troubled the leading sages of all earlier generations, and their solution had been to fire up the national zeal, to strengthen the adherence to the Torah and its commandments, to “seek God” in every aspect of life. Bitter experience, however, had shown that such levels of intensity could not endure indefinitely, that revivals were almost always followed by relapses. And although new revivals eventually followed the relapses, each relapse took a horrendous toll on the Jewish people.

The Anshei Knessess Hagedolah understood that the debilitated Jewish community, subservient to pagan masters, was too fragile to withstand the pendular swings that had characterized the days of independence. In desperation, they resorted to drastic measures that the sages of earlier generations had never contemplated.

As the Talmud relates, the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah beseeched God to remove the human inclination to idolatry, to lobotomize that part of the human psyche, so to speak. They were successful. A fiery lion emerged from the Holy of Holies, and one the prophets in attendance declared, “This is the inclination to idolatry.” At the same time, they also considered the removal of the sexual drive, but they realized that to do so would bring an end to procreation.[15] This brief passage in the Talmud, which draws a parallel between the inclination to idolatry and the sexual drive, sheds tremendous light on the entire Biblical period.

The human psyche is composed of many drives and impulses, some logical and some not. For instance, hunger and thirst, which seek to replenish vital stores of the body, are logical drives. The sexual drive, however, has no logical rationale, and if it did not exist, it would be difficult for a person to fathom that such a thing were possible. Nonetheless, God instilled this instinct in people to induce them to procreate, and thus the survival of the species would be assured.

Some impulses, such as the acquisitive impulse, may seem logical at first glance but are actually not. One might think that, since people need material things to survive, it is reasonable for a person to accumulate as much material wealth as he can. But people driven by the acquisitive impulse are inclined to accumulate far more than they will ever need. “One who loves money,” Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes, “is never sated with money.”[16] In other words, the passionate desire for material possessions is an illusion. The greatest exhilaration of the acquisitive experience is undeniably in the anticipation and the first brief period of possession. Then the thrill is gone; the satisfaction of the chase is dissipated by its fulfillment. If the object of the chase had been something of substance, however, surely the fulfillment should have been sweeter than the chase.

We must conclude, therefore, that the acquisitive drive, like the sexual, is an illogical instinct instilled in people by God to stimulate the growth of civilization. Like the sexual drive, it is a constructive force if channeled properly and a destructive force if uncontrolled.

In ancient times, there was another human instinct we may call the devotional drive. God instilled this potent drive in people to facilitate enhanced states of spirituality. But like the other impulses, it was a dangerous tool. Properly channeled, it could bring a person remarkably close to God; it could be an angel that illuminated his life. It could be the force that propelled a person to the highest spiritual levels, even prophecy.[17] But if a person lacked discipline and character, it could become a dreaded demon that drags him into wanton idolatry. It could become a compulsive obsession comparable to the sexual and acquisitive obsessions we find easier to understand. How else are we to explain the Canaanite practice of child sacrifice? Would a mother or father in our own times throw a child into the flames to feed a hungry god? The ancient pagans were driven by psychic forces we cannot fathom because they no longer exist.

The prophets and sages of earlier times were undoubtedly as capable as the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah of effecting the removal of the devotional impulse, but they chose not to do so. The devotional drive was too precious a tool to relinquish. But times had changed, and in the opinion of the Anshei Knessess Hagedolah, the risks of keeping it were simply too great.[18]

A new human race now faced the future. There was no longer a visceral impulse that propelled people toward a higher force. People had two choices. They could accept the existence of God intellectually and philosophically or because they heard about Him from their parents and others, and they could seek Him with their cerebral and emotional faculties. Their world would still be centered on God, but without the assistance of the devotional drive and the connection of prophecy. This was the pathway the Jewish people chose to follow and which their daughter religions, Christianity and Islam, chose as well.

Alternatively, people could turn away from God altogether. They could embrace some form of atheism, something that was unthinkable before the demise of the dreaded demon of devotional drives. Even if they entertained a basic belief in God, they could deny divine providence and render Him irrelevant to history. They could become secular and center the world around the human race. In other words, they could embrace secular humanism. This was the pathway the Greeks and all their successors chose to follow.

Until that point, the struggle that shaped early history was between the Jewish idea of worshipping the transcendent, infinite, unknowable God, the one and only God who brought the universe into existence, and the pagan idea of worshipping the multitudinous god race.

From that point on, the constant clashes between these two pathways are the map of all future history in the Imperial Quadrant. The clashes would take place in the world of ideas and also on the battlefields. Empires succeed not only by military might but also, and perhaps even more important, by the strength of the ideas they represent. The seductive allure of Alexander’s secular humanism fueled his conquests in the ancient world. The Jewish ideas Mohammed had appropriated inspired his conquests in the modern world.

The Greeks and their successors would become the implacable adversary of the Jewish people for all future history, changing form in subtle ways that could not have been imagined at the time.

[1] Megillah 16b

[2] See Ezra 7:7 and 7:24. Rashi, Bava Basra 8a, explains that this refers to the Men of the Great Assembly. Therefore, we can assume that the Assembly was already constituted in Babylon, although its most famous works were executed in Jerusalem.

[3] Ezra 10:3. “And now, let us make a covenant to the Lord to send away the women and all the children born to them …” This is a clear proof that Jewish identity is established by matrilineal descent. The unconverted children born to Jewish men and their pagan wives were, therefore, not Jewish, and they were sent away along with their mothers.

[4] See II Kings 3:15, wherein Elisha listens to the soothing strains of music in order to attain a state of mind capable of prophetic communication.

[5] Meiri, Introduction to Avoth

[6] Deuteronomy 17:11

[7] Berachos 19a

[8] For example, the Solomonic regulations for the purposes of ritual purity, as mentioned in Shabbos 14b.

[9] Avoth 1:1

[10] Bab. Tal., Berachoth 33a

[11] A full discussion of this restriction appears in Chapter 3.

[12] Meiri, Introduction to Avoth

[13] Avoth 1:1

[14] Sanhedrin 102b

[15] Nehemiah 9:4, explained in Sanhedrin 64a

[16] Koheles 5:9, rephrased in Koheles Rabbah 1:34 as “whoever has a hundred wants two hundred.”

[17] The end of prophecy coincided with the death of the dreaded demon.

[18] Looking back from the vantage point of the distant future, we see a coincidence between the demise of the devotional impulse and the end of prophecy. Perhaps we may even venture to surmise that there is a connection, that the removal of the devotional impulse somehow diminished the connection between man and God and hastened the end of the fading age of prophecy.