Join | Print Page | Report Abuse | Sign In
News & Press: The President's Desk by Andrés Spokoiny

When Power Replaces Principle: Lessons from 2,000 Years Ago (Tish B'Av 5785)

Monday, July 28, 2025  
Posted by: Andrés Spokoiny

The long road to the origin of Tisha Be’av, the day in 70 CE in which the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, started decades before, during the reign of Alexander Yannai. Yannai was the grandson of Simon Maccabee, a charismatic leader who commanded the respect of Jews and Gentiles and who seemed, for a time, to unite the different factions of the Jewish People.

Yannai started his reign on the proverbial right foot. He was from the priestly class and thus had affinity for the Sadducean faction, but he married Salome, the sister of the leader of the Sanhedrin and prominent head of the rival Pharisean faction, Simon Ben Shetach. He expanded the borders of the hitherto minuscule Judean state, occupying the coastal plain, the Galilee, and parts of Jordan. The prospect for Judea looked bright. But things started to go South quite fast. Yannai, who was not a descendant of King David and thus couldn’t claim kingship, received the title of ethnarch and high priest. That honor soon became insufficient for him. At first, he called himself “basileos” (king in Greek) and claimed that it was necessary to deal on equal footing with foreign monarchs. A year later, he did away with pretense and minted coins that said “Yehonatan Hamelekh,” Yannai the King in Hebrew.

The Sanhedrin, like the Supreme Court today, was ancient Judea‘s counterbalance to the power of the ruler. But Yannai abhorred checks and balances. In an episode recorded by both historian Josephus Flavius and the Talmud, Yannai stripped the Sanhedrin of its independence. He then established the norm that the king was to be immune from legal action.

His early military achievements gave way to drawn-out quagmires. He annexed Idumea and converted its population to Judaism by force, resulting in an internal, hostile, nominally-Jewish population inside Judea that demanded rights and benefits. Notably, what was meant to be a war to punish the city-state of Gaza for harassing Jewish shipping out of Jaffa ended up in a two-year quagmire that Yannai didn’t seem willing or able to win. Yes, that happened circa 95 BCE.

Finally, Yannai’s façade of “unifier” was revealed to be hollow. The Gaza war, perceived as aimless by the people, had been widely criticized, with the Pharisees leading the outcry. Tired of this liberal-minded and democratic-leaning faction, Yannai definitively sided with the Sadducees. During the Sukkoth ceremony, Yannai slighted the Pharisees. The people revolted, pummeling the king with the only missile they had: etrogim. Yannai brutally quashed the revolt and the ensuing civil war.

Josephus had written of mass executions, though later historians thought it to be exaggerated, not believing that a Jewish king would order the mass murder of his people. Alas in 2018, during the building of the new Betzalel Academy in Jerusalem, workers found the common graves of hundreds of Pharisees executed by Yannai. Archaeologists proved that Josephus hadn’t exaggerated one bit. One find was particularly gruesome – fetal bones, proving that pregnant women had been murdered as well. It was as Josephus told, entire families were killed together.

Yannai managed to keep his seat, and the country as a united polity, with iron and blood. But after his death and that of his wife, all hell broke loose. Yannai’s children started fighting for the throne. There were no strong institutions to arbitrate the conflict because Yannai had neutered the Sanhedrin, so both contenders had the brilliant idea of asking the superpower of the time, Rome, to intervene on their behalf.

Pompey Magnus obliged and took the whole country as payment. Jewish sovereignty had ended. Later, the Romans, trying to maintain a false semblance of Judean independence, appointed Herod, a chieftain of the Idumeans that Yannai had annexed and forced to convert, as puppet king.

Although the Temple took many decades and a great Jewish revolt to fall, the seeds of the destruction started with Yannai and his dictatorial reign. Jewish sovereignty was lost when Yannai decided to weaken the country’s social and institutional fabric to amass more personal power.

Netanyahu’s critics compare him with Yannai, but this goes beyond the policies of an individual government. This has to do with strategic challenges that are structural, and that any leader would face. It was certainly true of the Israel of 2,100 years ago, and the same four strategic challenges remain today.

1 – Governance.

The governance of Israel, its separation of power between executive and judiciary, and its institutions and norms were fragile then as they are now. Rather than bolster them, Yannai did what the current Israeli government is trying to do: deprive the courts of independent power.

2 – The management of Jewish diversity

Jews were, and are now, a fractious people. Yannai deliberately chose to exacerbate and exploit divisions instead of uniting the people and being equanimous towards all streams of Judaism. The result was civil war. As I write these lines, and even in the middle of a war, the same dynamic is at play.

3 – The relation to the non-Jews of the land.

Like now, the Land of Israel included many non-Jews. Just as now, Judea had acquired territories through defensive wars, and those territories had other peoples living in them. Yannai opted for the solution favored by many in Israel today: annexation. Like today, Yannai was left with two bad options: equal rights for the Idumean or making them of “citizenship” status. He rightfully feared that, with the latter, the Idumean would live in permanent revolt, and so granted them the former. Many warn today that, as we wound up with an Idumean king back then, we’d find ourselves with a Palestinian Prime Minister if we annex the territories.

4 – The relation to the superpower.

Rome had been the ally of the Hasmoneans since the Maccabean revolt. Judea needed Rome as an insurance policy against Egypt, Parthia, and the Seleucid kingdom to the North. But Yannai, and later his children, mismanaged that relationship in grotesque ways. First, they took that relationship for granted, attempting to take sides in internal Roman politics, earning them powerful enemies. Then, Roman legates were invited to intervene in internal Judean politics, not unlike presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, at the behest of local factions, opining on Netanyahu’s legal problems and dictating what Israel can and cannot do.

Tisha Be’av is a time of mourning; a time to lament and reflect on why and how we lost our sovereignty and suffered the longest exile in human history. It’s not controversial to state the obvious: the Israel of today, despite its magnificent achievements, is dangerously close to failing in those four strategic challenges that cost us the state back then. There’s little evidence that we’ll be any more successful than Alexander Yannai, and the “solutions” we are considering to those four challenges are ominously similar to those that brought us ruin 2,100 years ago. The astonishing success of Israeli Air Force against Iran’s genocidal tyranny removed a major threat, but they don’t erase the existential structural challenges that remain. We can’t bomb our way out of crises that are primarily internal and of our own making.

There are many days on which we celebrate the miracle of modern Israel, a small country in permanent danger that manages to be a light unto a world indifferent to its plight; to marvel at how a desert bloomed and how swamps became skyscrapers. However, there are also days like Tisha Be’av, somber and reflective, on which we strive to learn the lessons of the past.

There’s an enormous advantage to being a 4,000-year-old People. In the face of most of the things that happen to us, we can say that we’ve been there before. The only question is, will we repeat our mistakes, or will we endeavor never again to lament our folly?


JFN Headquarters

Phone: +1-212-726.0177
Fax: +1-212-594.4292
jfn@jfunders.org

JFN Israel

Phone: +972-9-9533889
jfnisrael@jfunders.org

Connect With Us