Aelia Capitolina - Ch. 8

I've commemorated the destruction of the Beit Hamikdash by fasting on the 9th day of the Hebrew month Av...every summer since I was bar mitzvahed. OK so one year I accidently bit into a peach at summer camp but I felt really bad afterwards... 70 CE is a year I've learned from so many people since elementary school, the end of the Second Jewish Commonwealth. Armstrong introduces us to the insanely confusing discrepancy between Mt. Zion and Mt. Sion on page 154. I don't know about any of you, but this confused the hell out of me, I couldn't quite follow my she used both for the rest of the book. During these early years of Christianity, the Jerusalem Church remained primarily Jewish (pg. 155). I don't quite know how to wrap my head around this. Same page, we see  another reference to Judaism as a cult: many Jews rushed to the new church with hopes that a crucified messiah would revive their old "cult." Thanks Kar-Bear. 

According to Armstrong, this is the point at which Judaism as we know it began to develop. The Jews would need all their creativity to adapt to the catastrophic loss (nakhba?) of their Holy Temple. She mentions Yohanan ben Zakkai, a disciple of Hillel, who practically saved Jewish scholarship by establishing a school at Yavneh, which also became the seat of the Jewish governing body, the Sanhedrin. This great rabbi and a few generations-worth of other bocherim gave us the Mishnah, one half of the Talmud. He also preached the revolutionary idea that social justice could replace animal sacrfice. 

This law code, compiled by the Amoraim and the Tannaim, seems to have sprung from nowhere as a novel way of adapting to a radical shift in the Jewish cosmos. Orthodox Jews believe the Oral Torah was given to Moses at Mount Sinai at the same time as the Torah. This was passed down generation to generation. Jews became afraid of losing this valuable knowledge after their second dispersion from their historic homeland, so they decided to write it down. The Talmud represents but one layer in the vast compendium of "Jewish Law." Further codifications released in later centuries were viewed skeptically at first because rabbis worried they would distract the primary sources like the Talmud and Torah. With time, certain compendiums become acknowledged as primary sources themselves. For instance, Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch. 

The second dispossession of the Jews from Eretz Yisrael had broad and deep impacts on the religion. By giving Jerusalem a name after such and such general (p. 161), the Romans attempted to erase the Jewish connection to their spiritual focal point. But the Jews never forgot Jerusalem. Armstrong talks about how the Jewish home, daily prayer, and social justice all became new "Temples" in which Jews could and should experience the divine. But they still never forgot Jerusalem.