The Jewish People

Rabbi Akiva laughing. Credit: Substack auto-generate

Those learning the daily Talmud portion have just finished the tractate Makkot. The tractate ends with a famous midrash (homiletic commentary). Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya, Rabbi Yehoshua, and Rabbi Akiva…were ascending to Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple:

When they arrived at the Temple Mount, they saw a fox that emerged from the site of the Holy of Holies. They began weeping, and Rabbi Akiva was laughing. They said to him: For what reason are you laughing? Rabbi Akiva said to them: For what reason are you weeping? They said to him: This is the place concerning which it is written: “And the non-priest who approaches shall die” (Numbers 1:51), and now foxes walk in it; and shall we not weep? Rabbi Akiva said to them: That is why I am laughing, as it is written, when God revealed the future to the prophet Isaiah: “And I will take to Me faithful witnesses to attest: Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah” (Isaiah 8:2). Now what is the connection between Uriah and Zechariah? He clarifies the difficulty: Uriah prophesied during the First Temple period, and Zechariah prophesied during the Second Temple period, as he was among those who returned to Zion from Babylonia. Rather, the verse established that fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah is dependent on fulfillment of the prophecy of Uriah. In the prophecy of Uriah it is written: “Therefore, for your sake Zion shall be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become rubble, and the Temple Mount as the high places of a forest” (Micah 3:12), where foxes are found. There is a rabbinic tradition that this was prophesied by Uriah. In the prophecy of Zechariah it is written: “There shall yet be elderly men and elderly women sitting in the streets of Jerusalem” (Zechariah 8:4). Until the prophecy of Uriah with regard to the destruction of the city was fulfilled I was afraid that the prophecy of Zechariah would not be fulfilled, as the two prophecies are linked. Now that the prophecy of Uriah was fulfilled, it is evident that the prophecy of Zechariah remains valid. The Gemara adds: The Sages said to him, employing this formulation: Akiva, you have comforted us; Akiva, you have comforted us. (Makkot 24B)

Incurable optimism? At some point, there must be a limit. Looking at the Jewel of Jewish culture, the Holy Temple, the meeting place between God and his Chosen People, in its absolute destruction, flattened and visited by scurrying wild animals, seeing all that, how could Rabbi Akiva laugh?

Fast forward to 2025. One Jew cries, and one Jew laughs, and they are both the same Jew. Rabbi Akiva’s response was not a result of a personality trait. It was based on a prophetic tradition that during his time, almost two thousand years ago, was already two thousand years old. Akiva’s laugh is the laugh of a believer, a believer in the prophecy received by the first believer, Abraham, who learned that his seed would be enslaved and tortured in a foreign land but would eventually inherit the Promised Land. From the start, Jews understood that tears would be in the offing, all the way down through their history. That is just the way it is and has always been. Through it all, the Jews never forgot how to laugh.

Today, in the Promised Land of Israel, those tears of joy and sorrow in the same body, the body of the People of Israel, fertilize new and holy beginnings. What on the surface may appear as intractable political and social conflicts, sometimes fueled by foreign, non-Jewish interests, are the initial murmurings of a new language being urged into existence by a groundswell of pure Jewish will, demanding what is true and just. The lexicon of this new language is incomplete, and though it seems impossible that any single language can serve to unite a people of such widely disparate worldviews and values, it only seems that way. This is the People of the Prophecy. This is the People of the Impossible. This is the Jewish People.