UNPACKED – Watch The Return of The Jewish Temple
It’s fall again (winter is coming!). We’ve celebrated the High Holidays and in the cycle of the weekly Torah portion we’re right back to chapter one, reading about the beginning of the world, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark and that sort of stuff.
Good stories. Great stories. But what about those stories we never seem to get to?
Stories like “Ezra” and “Nehemia,” aka the last two books in the bible and the subjects of this week’s episode of “The Jewish Story Explained.”
These two men (or prophets or what have you) are important, but uncelebrated, players in the return of the Jewish community from Persia to Judea and the events that followed.
(Major props if you’re asking what the community’s doing in Persia when we left them in Babylon. Glad you’re paying attention!)
So how (and why) did the Jews return to Judea, what happened once they got there and why is it important to how Judaism is practiced today?
They may lack the celeb status of other biblical figures, but Ezra and Nehemiah were major players in the Jewish story. Despite being relegated to the last pages of the Bible, they were men on a mission: Nehemiah to rebuild the ruined city of Jerusalem; Ezra to rebuild the Jewish soul. And they stopped at nothing to succeed.
