Q&A: The Jewish People and Their Survival
The Jewish People and Their Survival
Question
Hello Rabbi. It comes up here on the site quite a lot (and also in your fifth notebook) that if the Jewish people survived, then they are a heavenly people.
But something here is puzzling. Let’s speak practically: who exactly survived? Only remnants of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The Ten Tribes were lost, destroyed, and disappeared completely, and we have no way of knowing where they are today. Let’s also take into account that in the near future it seems likely that Jews will assimilate and no Jewish people will remain. So what exactly is supposedly “heavenly” about the fact that the Jewish people survived?
Answer
See the fifth notebook. There is not necessarily anything “heavenly” here. By the way, the survival over the last 2,500 years is that of those tribes alone. They were there and they remained. What existed before, existed before. So there is indeed very impressive survival here. But as I explain there, this is only one consideration within a much broader overall picture.
Discussion on Answer
The division into tribes is just arbitrary (based on the father). The DNA of all of us is almost certainly made up of all the tribes. So there were Jews all of whose descendants did not survive (those who at that time belonged to the Ten Tribes). So what? That is exactly like saying that the “tribe of Germany” was wiped out in the Holocaust, and therefore the Jewish people are currently not in their full composition and so did not really survive.
I didn’t understand… Could you explain yourself better? Are you basically saying that all of us are the product of the twelve tribes? But the Bible explicitly tells us that they were exiled to the land of Assyria.
Jacob had 12 sons. After that, if you were born to a father from tribe x, you were automatically affiliated with that tribe (even if your mother and your father’s mother and all your grandmothers were from another tribe). So there were many cases of someone having DNA from the other brothers, but technically belonging to a different tribe. A few hundred years later, all those who technically belonged to the Ten Tribes were exiled (they were not really any more “Issachar-like” than he was, because of the mixing). That is exactly like 90% of the Jewish people dying today. It would simply mean fewer Jews, not that the Jewish people are not in their full composition now.
The tribe of Benjamin survived, the tribe of Judah (from which David and his house came), and the tribe of Levi. That is the whole point! Warm regards to Rabbi Michi!
Best regards, Benjamin David Levy
May his righteousness be remembered, you keep outdoing yourself every time with this Benjamin David Levy business. 🙂
A.H., not entirely accurate. The tribes did not mix at first, because there is a prohibition against transferring inheritance. Beyond that, this is not a question of evolution but a historical question. Therefore the survival being discussed is not the survival of the gene, but the survival of the people or the group.
Ariel, start looking from the middle of the First Temple period at the last 2,500 years of the history of the people of the Kingdom of Judah. During this period there is a process of rare survival. In the Kingdom of Israel all sorts of things happened, but what difference does that make? Even in the time of the first man, half of humanity killed the other half (Cain killed Abel). Bottom line, the Kingdom of Judah demonstrates a rare phenomenon.
It seems to me that from the time they expounded in Taanit 30b, “This is the thing that the Lord commanded concerning the daughters of Zelophehad” — this matter would apply only in that generation — until the Ten Tribes were exiled, enough time passed for mixing to occur (when they declared a prohibition on marrying Benjamin, they were already used to the fact that the others did marry each other).
If in the Holocaust (and generally over the last 1,000 years) entire communities disappeared, does that mean the Jewish people did not really survive? No. The main thing is that the Jewish people survived as a people.
The evolutionary argument came only to reject the claim that the division into tribes is something different from the division into communities in later times. Neither is really critical to the survival of the people as a people. There is no importance to the fact that the tribe of Reuben no longer exists — the Jews there were exactly like us.
I am really not sure. First, not all that much time passed before the exile of the Ten Tribes. Second, in those generations (even after the permission to marry into another tribe), there were inheritances divided by tribes, and as is well known, in those times people lived where they were born and raised and married people they knew. Therefore I assume that the mixing was not nearly as dramatic as you described.
But as stated, none of this is important to the question at hand.
There is a midrash claiming that the Master of the Universe promised the tribes that their seed would not disappear from the world. For this purpose, a single male line that has survived until today is enough (and it is worth looking at Nadav Shnayerb’s article on male lineages).
The dispute in Sanhedrin over whether the tribes are destined to return or not can be explained as concerning the very identification of each and every Jew according to the tribe from which he came.
All this, of course, has nothing to do with the actual survival of the Jewish people, which, at least according to the Talmud in Yoma, survived only because the fear of the Creator rests upon the nations. This Talmudic passage has a practical implication for the intention one should have in the first blessing of the Amidah, in the explanation of the word “awesome” in “the great, mighty, and awesome God.”
But the full Jewish people means the twelve tribes of Israel, not Judah and Benjamin. So then what is special about this?