“Bar Kochva emphasized ‘my strength and the strength of my hand’; his words

The one who dealt a lot with this matter is the Rabbi R. Aviad Neiger The author of ‘Yalkot HaShevati Akhmat’ has been obsessively dealing with this issue of ‘pushing the end’, which (according to him) the Zionist movement, the Mizrachi movement which supported it from the beginning, has gone through.

We had the privilege of publishing Rabbi Neiger’s Torah words on this stage from the “Vahiya bichziv bladta” he wrote about Bar Kochba, and stunned the Torah world when he wrote black on white, that Rabbi Akiva made a bitter mistake when he believed that Bar Kochba was the Messiah.

These words of Rabbi Neiger caused him to go to his grave in Tiberias to ask for forgiveness, since he feared that he might have written too strongly about the divine provision, his teacher and rabbi of the Rashbi, the author of the Zohak.

In a holiday interview on the occasion of Yoma Dehilula of the Rabbi, LJ Baumer, I talk with Rabbi Neiger about this issue.

Recently I have been dealing with the issue of the Bar Kochba rebellion, and I would like to share two points with you.

A. Some of the Israeli sages admire Bar Kochba, compared to a considerable number who oppose him. I was a teenager as well as an old man, and I am aware of your late article ‘Seventy Faces to the Torah’, but the polar opposite on this issue is too extreme.

B. In this issue, there is a kind of “collaboration”, between researchers from the academy who come from the left side of the map, and between ultra-Orthodox thinkers from the side close to Satmar Hasidism, and both of them deny the personality of Bar Kochba, and accuse him of destroying the Jewish people and murdering hundreds of thousands. Both sides believe that the State of Israel, in its wars, causes Jews to be killed, and that it should sign a peace agreement and return entire parts of the Land of Israel, which Bar Kochba did not do and caused hundreds of thousands of Jews to be killed.

Rabbi Neiger: “This is not a matter of scholars from the academy who are affiliated with the left, or with rabbis today who are close to the Holy Rabbi of Stamer ZA who are not ready to claim that Rabbi Akiva sent his students to fight, or that the Rabbis turned him into a ‘boy of a false bar’.

“Refer only to the sources. In the Song of Songs Rabbah, the Sages emphasized the prohibition of delaying the end, which Bar Koziva violated. Also in the Ta’anit Yerushalmi and Icha Rabbah emphasis was placed on the horror of the murder of the uncle of Bar Koziva Hatana Rabbi Eliezer Modai at the hands of what was then called “the Messiah”.

“Bar Khoziba emphasized my strength and strengthened my hand when he spoke out and said, “You shall not feast nor take silver” which means “Do not benefit and do no harm” (see Yerushalmi, tractate Ta’anit page 24, 1) and his words which mean ‘I will destroy the Romans with my own power, without help from you, and only Don’t disturb me’, is mainly heresy.”

I’m stopping you with the understanding that you know the defense attorney of Rabbi Kook for his statement that in fact Bar Kochba only wanted to encourage his soldiers not to believe in the miracle.

“I don’t want to refer to the above. Our gentlemen disagreed with him completely. It is chilling to think that “Messiah” murdered his uncle Rabbi Elazar al-Modai (see Yerushalmi, Ta’anit, 4, 5), and it reminds of the Zionist movement that murdered its Jewish opponents (Altenalana, and many other examples).

“The Babylonian treated a false bar as a false messiah. This is not a matter of Beit Midrash politics or national politics, but a matter of Torah opinion. Sages explicitly stated that a false bar was invalid. And it is forbidden to take him and treat him as a role model, which the Zionists did in order to spur the masses of the people to push for the end, contrary to the order of the Sages.”

Rabbi Akiva’s distinguished student, Rabbi Akiva, quotes the Divine Testament by his name: “When Rabbi Akiva saw Bar Kochva, he would say: This is the King of the Messiah” (Yerushalmi, 24, 1).

In the Jerusalem Talmud (apart from Rabbi Yohanan ben Torta, who is mentioned in only two sayings in the entire Shas who opposed Rabbi Akiva and said to him, “Akiva, grass will grow in your life, and the son of David did not come”), there is no objection to Bar Kochba, at least in the early days of the rebellion. Hence I asked if they did not Have you heard of the Song of Songs midrash about the prohibition of pushing the end?

And even if we assume in the light of the sources that at the end of his days they all left Bar Kochba, when he was unsuccessful, – my question is about the beginning of the rebellion, how did all the Sages (other than a single Tana), believe in Bar Kochba, despite the sources that Kathar presents about the “prohibition of delaying the end ” and so’?

“According to the Babylonians, after they checked Bar as false that it does not have ‘Morach and Dain’, only then did Rabbi Akiva withdraw from it. And from this it is clear that he was the tzaddik, the divine provision was wrong.”

An exclusive innovation of Rambam that is not mentioned in the Sages

According to the Yerushalmi, everyone was wrong (Zolt Bar Torah), not just Rabbi Akiva…

“In Yerushalmi, it is not stated what the other sages of his time thought, but only a dispute between the Rabbi and Bar Torta. The whole rumor that “he is like him and all the wise men of his generation who is the Messiah King” is an exclusive innovation of Maimonides.

Why is it really not written in Yerushalmi what the other sages of his generation thought? Why did only Rambam reveal this to us?

“So that we don’t once again fall into the situation of false messiahs. The Holy Rambam wanted to convey a message to us that there might be a situation where all the sages of Israel will support a messiah who is actually a lie. We are always obliged to check after him whether he is the Messiah or not.”

How exactly does the Rambam, who omitted the mitzvah of occupying the Land of Israel (and as we know that the Ramban succeeded in doing so), how does he actually get out of the issue of Bar Kochba on the national side who support the opinion that the Rambam supported Bar Kochba and more that was the subject of it?

“It is not correct to say so. The national religious community uses Rambam because of a lack of understanding of his words. They depended on the Risha of his words and not on the Sipa. The Risha said that he was a true bearer, but the Sipa said that he was proven to be a false Messiah.”

In one of the previous articles, we emphasized that this opinion that the Rabbi’s students were Bar Kochba fighters was first published by the educated. One of the readers responded and said that this is actually evidence that this opinion is flawed. However, it is possible that the truth should be accepted from whoever said it, since the famous educated moshe Mendelsohn was among the first to publish the The prohibition to immigrate to Eretz Yisrael because of the three weeks that the sages swore to the people of Israel before their departure into exile, as the Rebbe of Satmar later believed[1].

“Also Shir and Ahar (in the reform book “Venus of Righteousness”) wrote about the three weeks. These scholars do not really come to discuss halakhic. Their starting point is the same as the Gentiles, and their “halachic conclusions” do not stem from fear of God or the salvation of Israel. At one time the reformers were against Zionism and after that they reversed themselves. They are not Mann Dahmer on this issue. It doesn’t matter if one time they got the truth from their interests, and another time they didn’t.

“Leumi religious rabbis these days also quote scholars like Man Damer (including those who oppose the connection between RA students and Bar Kochba soldiers), and this is unbelievable. They are actually continuing the path of the educated.”

So I got one positive word about the Agudath Israel rabbis from you: they do not follow the path of the educated…

“Apparently you are right, but this is only in the generation before the establishment of the state, when there were important rabbis in the council of great Torah scholars, even though they were wrong. In recent generations, the Agodaists also follow the path of the educated.”

Thank you

[1] And so his words: “This should be attributed to our sages, who foresaw and frequently memorized to us in the Talmud the prohibition of thinking about a return by force… They forbade us to take the easiest step that would be aimed at raising the wall and the uprising of the nation without the great miracles and the supernatural miracles promised in the Holy Scriptures (Moshe Mendelsohn, The Book of Zionism – The Heralds of Zionism, edited by Ben Zion Dinburg, Jerusalem 2014 p. 183).

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