The 10th of Tevet marked the beginning of the end of the First Jewish Commonwealth.

 Ever since the yearly cycle of Torah readings was standardised towards the end of the Second Temple era, and the fixed calendar as calculated by Hillel II (Hillel ben Yehudah, Nasi or head of the Sanhedrin) was adopted in 4119 (359 C.E.), Parashat Vayiggash is invariably read on the Shabbat either immediately before or immediately after the fast of the 10th of Tevet.

This year 5784 the connexion is closer still: the 10th of Tevet falls on Friday, so the first half-hour or so of Shabbat, from sunset until nightfall, is still the fast.

This leads to a strange situation: when the sun sets and Shabbat comes in, we are forbidden to eat or drink until complete nightfall. We have to wait for darkness before making Kiddush. Though it is Shabbat, during twilight we are still fasting and mourning.

What is the reason for the fast of the 10th of Tevet? What historical event does it mourn? And is there any connexion between the 10th of Tevet and Parashat Vayiggash?

Let us begin with the 10th of Tevet and its background:

Tzidkiyahu [Zedekiah], the very last king of Judah, had ascended the throne in 3327 (597 B.C.E.) [1], at a turbulent period of Jewish history. 122 years earlier, Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. The southern kingdom, Judea, would survive for another century-and-a-third before finally being invaded and conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.

Tzidkiyahu’s father, Yoshiyahu [Josiah], had ascended the throne when he was just eight years old, and in his 31-year reign tried desperately to repair the spiritual ravages that his predecessors had caused to the nation:

He renovated the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, which had not been maintained properly since King Yehoash [Jehoash], eight kings and over 200 years previously; he restored the Torah to Judah; he destroyed the idols; he dismissed the priests of idolatry and destroyed the rooms that they had maintained within the Holy Temple; he destroyed all the idolatrous altars throughout the Land; and he restored the Pesach-sacrifice, which had been neglected for centuries.

His reign came to an abrupt end when Pharaoh Neco wanted to traverse through Judea on his way to fight Assyria. King Yoshiyahu would not tolerate a foreign army on Judean soil, so he confronted the pharaoh in Megiddo. In the ensuing battle, Pharaoh Neco killed King Yoshiyahu, whereupon the masses anointed his son Yehoachaz [Jehoahaz] as king.

Yehoachaz, however, was an evil king. After reigning for just three months, the pharaoh captured and exiled him, reduced Judea to a vassal-state, and put his brother Eliakim on the throne, changing his name to Yehoyakim [Jehoiakim]. Yehoyakim, also an evil king, reigned for eleven years, first as a vassal of Egypt then of Babylon. Eventually, a Babylonian-Moabite-Ammonite alliance attacked Judea, inflicting terrible damage. Jehoiakim died, and his eighteen-year-old son Yehoyachin [Jehoiachin] became king.

Yehoyachin was just as evil as his father, and after reigning for just three months Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, besieged Jerusalem, pillaged the treasures of the Holy Temple, exiled tens of thousands of Jews, and took King Yehoyachin into captivity in Babylon.

The king of Babylon then crowned Yehoyachin’s uncle, Mattaniah, as vassal-king of Judea, changing his name to Tzidkiyahu.

And then, after nine years of autonomy in the Babylonian Empire, the Babylonian army began its siege on Jerusalem on the 10th of Tevet.

It was the last stage before the final obliteration of Jewish independence. Two years and eight months later, on the 7th of Av, Nebuzaradan, the chief executioner of Babylon, would arrive in Jerusalem. Two days later, on the 9th of Av, he burnt the Holy Temple.

So the 10th of Tevet marked the beginning of the end of the First Jewish Commonwealth.

Now for Parashat Vayiggash:

Parashat Vayiggash records the beginning of Egyptian exile. After Joseph revealed his identity to his brothers and they were reunited, Joseph despatched them back to Canaan to bring the rest of the family to Egypt to live out the remaining five years of famine.

Jacob began the journey from Hebron southwards towards Egypt – “and when he came to Beer Sheva he slaughtered sacrifices to the G-d of his father Isaac” (Genesis 46:1).

Why does the Torah specify that that his sacrifices were “to the G-d of his father Isaac”?

– Various Midrashim (Sechel Tov and Lekach Tov, among others) suggest that this is because a generation earlier, when another famine had struck Canaan and Isaac had considered seeking refuge in Egypt, G-d had specifically instructed him “Do not go down to Egypt, dwell in the Land which I told you” (Genesis 26:2).

So now, when Jacob, too, faced a famine which he sought to escape by going down to Egypt, he sought reassurance from G-d that this was the right thing to do.

This is the explanation favoured by the Radak and the S’forno in their respective commentaries to Genesis 46:1.

G-d’s response to Jacob was: “I the G-d, G-d of your father; do not fear going down to Egypt, because I will make you a great nation there” (Genesis 46:3).

Clearly, the inference of G-d’s reassurance “do not fear going down to Egypt” is that going down to Egypt is inherently something to be feared: after all, you only reassure someone when there is ostensibly a reason for fear. No one says, “Don’t be frightened of my hamster”; they might say, “Don’t be frightened of my Rottweiler”.

So what did Jacob have ostensibly to fear from going down to Egypt?

– He knew only too well of the בְּרִית בֵּין הַבְּתָרִים, the Covenant between the Parts, which G-d had forged with his grandfather Abra[ha]m 220 years earlier: “Know with certainty that your offspring will be strangers in an land which isn’t theirs, they will enslave them and oppress them for four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13).

All this time, this guarantee of a grim future had hung over the Hebrew family. Jacob saw that this horrible period of exile was about to begin – worse, he himself was about to initiate it – hence his doubts, his fears, his foreboding, his reluctance to leave Canaan and go down to Egypt.

And hence G-d’s need to reassure him.

So Parashat Vayiggash and the 10th of Tevet both record/commemorate the beginning of exile: Parashat Vayiggash the first exile, the Egyptian exile, and the 10th of Tevet the second exile, the Babylonian exile.

There is, however, a very fundamental difference between the two:

The first exile began with the Hebrew family being reunited – Jacob, Joseph, Benjamin, their ten other brothers, all with their wives and children, together again at last.

The second exile began with the Jewish nation disunited and fractured, divided into two separate kingdoms, wracked by internal strife.

And the third exile – the Roman exile, the exile which only in our generations is at long last drawing to its end – began with the Jewish nation terribly divided, embroiled in a bloody and vicious civil war. This is the sad postscript to Chanukah:

The last undisputed, indisputably legitimate, and independent Israeli monarch was Queen Shlom-tziyyon (Salome Alexandra) of the Hasmonean Dynasty, who ruled Israel from 76 to 67 B.C.E.

When she died, her two sons, Aristobulus and Hyrkanus, both claimed the Throne of Israel, and the result was a civil war which raged for five years. Hyrkanus eventually made a pact with Rome: General Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) marched into Israel with some 50,000 troops, defeated Aristobulus, and installed Hyrkanus on the Throne.

He was a vassal king, subservient to Rome; Israel or Judea (the terms can be used interchangeably in this context) was a vassal kingdom, controlled by the Roman Emperor.

This continued for a century, until the final king of Judæa (the Latinised spelling), Agrippas (Herod Agrippa), who reigned from 40 to 44. Agrippas attempted to rule Judæa as a Jewish kingdom, and indeed defied Rome on occasion to keep Judæa Jewish.

This made him wildly popular with the Jewish masses – but for the same reason, Rome saw him as deeply subversive. Nevertheless, the Emperor Claudius didn’t dare depose him, for fear of provoking a massive Jewish insurrection.

But when Agrippas died in 44, the Romans abolished the monarchy, and instead installed procurators to rule Judæa, beginning with Caspius Fadus. Even the pretence and illusion of Jewish sovereignty was over.

Roman occupation had begun, and forced mass exile would begin little over 20 years later, as a Roman response to the first great Jewish Revolt (66-73), during which the Romans destroyed the second Holy Temple.

These disasters – Roman occupation, destruction of the Holy Temple, exile, massacres – all began as a direct consequence of the Jewish civil war. These were the almost-inevitable results of disunity, factionalism, and eventual civil war.

Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook z”l, the doyen of religious Zionism, taught that one of the very few benefits of our long exile is that by now, no Jew knows which Tribe he is a member of, meaning the civil wars which blighted so much of our history in the Tanach – Tribe against Tribe – are now impossible.

The confluence of the 10th of Tevet and Parashat Vayiggash, coming so soon after Chanukah, seems designed to infuse this into our national consciousness.

The Haftarah for Vayiggash is Ezekiel 37:15-28, prophesying the eventual reunification of all the Twelve Tribes of Israel, once again “one nation in the Land, in the hills of Israel, and one King will be King of them all; they will no longer be two nations, and they will never again be divided into two kingdoms” (Ezekiel 37:22).

This is of course a fitting riposte to Parashat Vayiggash, recounting the reunification of the twelve brothers – the founders of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The Prophet Isaiah prophesied the era of universal peace which will come with the mashiach, the future King of Israel: “Wolf and lamb will graze together…” (Isaiah 65:25), on which the Midrash expounds:

“‘Wolf’ refers to Benjamin, as it says ‘Benjamin is a ravening wolf’ (Genesis 49:27), and ‘lamb’ refers to the [other] Tribes, as it says ‘Israel is a scattered sheep’ (Jeremiah 50:17)” (Tanchuma, Vayiggash 8, and compare Bereishit Rabbah 95:1).

The Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, France, c.1160-c.1235), too, in his commentary to Isaiah 65:25 understands the imagery of wolf and lamb grazing together to be an allegory of all the Twelve Tribes of Israel living together in unity and tranquillity on their Land.

We – the House of Israel – are as strong as we a unified. We are currently living through an exceptionally difficult time of our wearying history – yet we can all draw strength and comfort from the incredible unity among our nation.

For sure there is dissent among us, and our enemies are doing all they can to exploit it. But they are destined to fail, because the overwhelming majority of Jews understand instinctively that our strength and resilience lie in our unity.

As King David expressed it in his oh-so-familiar words, הִנֵּה מַה טּוֹב וּמַה נָּעִים שֶׁבֶת אַחִים גַּם יָחַד: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together” (Psalms 133:1).

And as Rashi expounds thereon, “When G-d dwells in the Holy Temple with Israel, who are called brothers and beloved friends, then He too is united with them”.

Discord and hatred among the twelve brothers caused Joseph’s descent to Egypt, and ultimately caused the first exile. Yet it was the reunification among those same twelve brothers and their heartfelt repentance for their earlier animosity, which made the first generations of that exile far more comfortable than it otherwise could have been.

It was discord and war among the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the two Kingdoms (Israel and Judah) that caused the second exile.

It was civil war among Jews that caused the third exile.

And it is our unity that brings us back home to Israel, which gives us the courage and determination to defeat our enemies who come to exterminate us.

Chanukah with its tragic aftermath, the 10th of Tevet, and Parashat Vayiggash, coming so close together, inscribe this message of Jewish history on our calendar.

Endnote

[1] There is a 164-year discrepancy between the traditional Jewish chronology and the secular chronology of these events. This is not the place to reconcile the discrepancy; I simply present the years in both Jewish and secular counting, blithely ignoring the discrepancy. In any event, there is no dispute over the sequence of events.