Of Churbans and Nakbas

How do you respond when something devastating happens to your nation?

When the state of Judea fell two thousand years ago in the churban, there was certainly plenty of blame to be placed upon the Romans. Still, while you find condemnation of Rome in Jewish writings, that’s not the emphasis. The emphasis is on figuring out where the Jewish People went wrong and what they could perhaps have done differently. For a nation that sees Divine control of the world, there was a contemplation of which Jewi...