Elliot Cosgrove, PhD March 3, 2012
When it comes to an appreciation of culture, my tastes tend to be more “Big Ten” than “Ivy League.” I will not knowingly go to a movie with subtitles. I like my food to come in a bun. I have never attended the opera without falling asleep, and only under pressure could I tell you the difference between Manet and Monet. In college, I did take an art history class once, literally, dropping it long before it would appear on my transcript. As for recognizing classical music, my range is limited to the melodies on my children’s Baby Mozart DVDs.
So it came as an absolute surprise to me last week in Rome, that I was deeply moved and emotionally taken when standing face-to-face with an ancient arch located halfway between the Roman Forum and the Coliseum. It wasn’t just any arch, but the Arch of Titus, and my heart was pounding as I found myself looking at an image that I had only ever heard about: the frieze depicting the triumphal procession of Roman soldiers parading the spoils of Jerusalem’s Temple through the streets of Rome, carrying them away from Israel. If you have seen it yourself, or know about the image that I am describing, then you know that in the procession, there is one frame to which your eye is drawn: the seven-branched candelabra, the menorah, the icon of Jewish destiny, shown as a trophy in enemy hands following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. It shook me to my very core to see it with my own eyes, testimony of this darkest hour of Jewish history, our sacred Jewish objects depicted as plunder in the non-Jewish archeological record.
This morning, I want to give a different sort of sermon from my usual – more of history lesson than anything else – about the menorah from ancient times to Titus to today. It is a traditional sermon in that it begins with the parashah, but our goal in these few minutes is to track the menorah, real and imagined, in all its vicissitudes. And maybe, just maybe, after this morning you will never look at a menorah – and perhaps even Jewish identity – in quite the same way.
We are first introduced to the menorah in this week’s Torah reading. “You shall make a lampstand of pure gold… Six branches shall issue from its sides; three branches from one side of the lampstand and three branches from the other side of the lampstand.” The central shaft where the branches are joined together forms the seventh branch. (Exodus 25:31ff) While the size of the menorah is unclear, and nobody really knows what it looked like beyond the description in these biblical verses, its pride of place in the desert tabernacle was clear, its light representing God’s continuous and radiant presence. As today’s haftarah relates, it was King Solomon who built the first Temple, beginning 480 years following the Exodus from Egypt. This new permanent structure was on a larger and grander scale than the more modest desert original, and along with other upgrades to the initial design, King Solomon increased the number of menorot from one to ten.
It is here that the story of the menorah really begins in earnest. According to Rabbinic legend, when the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE the menorah was hidden away, to be brought back by the exiles after their sojourn by the rivers of Babylon. More likely, the historians explain, when the Second Temple was built following the first exile, the new menorah in the Second Temple sought to conform to earlier biblical specifications. According the Book of Maccabees, this menorah was removed in 169 BCE by the archenemy of the Hanukkah story, Antiochus, until of course our hero Judah Maccabee replaced the stolen one after he cleansed and rededicated (in Hebrew: Hanukkah) the Temple.
Which brings us to the Arch of Titus itself. We know from the corroborated testimony of the Jewish historian Josephus and the Arch itself, that the menorah was brought to Rome and displayed as part of the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. Dedicated by the Senate and the Roman people in honor of Titus, the Arch conveys the might of the Romans. Josephus reports that Vespasian deposited the golden treasures of the Temple in the temple he had built to a goddess ironically called the Goddess of Peace. From that moment onwards the fate of the menorah is a mystery. From the sack of Rome, Carthage, Justinian, the Persians, the Arabs – who knows? We have no record of its continued existence. When I stayed in the Vatican last week, I was kind of hoping it would be sitting there in my room waiting for me after two thousand years, but given the new carry-on limits on international flights, I was relieved not to have to schlep it back.
What we do have, and have had all along, is the Arch of Titus. But the Arch of Titus was far more than the only depiction extant of the ancient menorah. The Arch conveyed the glory and victory of Rome, but for Jews it was the symbol of their defeat, submission and tragedy. In fact during the middle ages, no Jew was allowed to, or would, pass under the Arch. Instead Jews paid a fee to go through a neighboring house. In the 16th century it was at the Arch of Titus that Jews were forced to swear an oath of submission. For Jews, the Arch of Titus came to represent a world that wasn’t, a world of Jewish sovereignty, Jewish self-determination and Jewish pride, a world smelted and smuggled away like the menorah itself.
That is pretty much how things stood for just shy of two thousand years, until February 1949, nine months after the establishment of the State of Israel. The new state was in need of an emblem – a national emblem that would represent a sovereign Jewish nation in the community of nations, an emblem that symbolized the continuity and fulfillment of the Zionist dream. A competition was announced, and 450 designs were received from 164 participants. After lengthy discussions, and in keeping with millennia of dysfunctional Jewish decision making, the committee arrived at a stalemate, threw out all the ideas and began anew. This time around, 131 submissions were received, and in the sixth meeting of the “Seal and Flag Committee,” a proposal by two brothers – Maxim and Gavriel Shamir – was considered. Their sketch was a stylized menorah, a sleek decorative emblem, signaling a shift away from traditional Jewish symbols. As much as they were taken by the design offered by the Shamir brothers, the committee understood the historic weightiness of the decision at hand. Transportation Minister David Remez asked that the modern menorah be replaced with the menorah as depicted on the Arch of Titus. The message would be clear to the world, the menorah of Titus’s triumphal procession had, for thousands of years, symbolized Jewish defeat, powerlessness and exile. The rebirth of the Jewish state would be represented by the return and display of that very menorah. In place of humiliation, disgrace and victimhood would come honor, pride and sovereignty. And so, on February 10, 1949, the Speaker of the Provisional Council of State, Joseph Sprinzak, ratified the new emblem of the State of Israel, which remains its emblem to this day. As for the Arch of Titus itself, when Ben Gurion declared independence for Israel, it is said that the Chief Rabbi of Rome gathered the entire Jewish community to walk under the arch in the opposite direction – symbolizing the return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem, to Israel and to the dream of self determination. Finally, for those with an eye for these things, next time you go to Yad Vashem, be sure to look at Nathan Rapaport’s relief “The Last March” in the main square. With a clear nod to the Arch of Titus, it depicts the return of the Diaspora Jew to Israel following the horrors of the Shoah.
David Ruderman, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, once explained that the unique characteristic of the Jewish historical experience has been its landlessness during most of its existence. No other people, Ruderman says, has experienced the spatial and temporal discontinuities of the Jewish people, lacking a common government, language or land. No other people, while claiming to be a definable group, has been called on to function in such vastly different contexts and under such adverse conditions. From that very first exile, to which we turn our attention in this month of Purim, Jewish identity has been hammered and sometimes hidden, subject to the capricious whims of our host culture. And yet, for all that, we have remained one people, the candelabra of our identity may extend in multiple directions, but we are – through fire and furnace – a single solid piece of metal. And that identity, a badge of otherness for so long, was transformed with the establishment of Israel to represent political honor – restored triumphantly after thousands of years of displacement, dislocation and powerlessness.
To put it plainly, menorahs matter. We may or may not ever know what the original menorah looked like. And we certainly have no reason to believe that the original menorah will appear sometime soon for us to reclaim it as our own. But what we do know is that as goes the menorah, so goes Jewish identity. From the desert wanderings, to the Temple, from the Arch of Titus to the modern State of Israel, to where we put Jewish candelabras on the Upper East Side – the placement of the menorah is as good a litmus test as any for the Jewish condition and Jewish self perception. And thank God we are blessed to live in a time that our menorot are displayed proudly in our community and in the community of nations.
Or hadash al Tziyon ta’ir, v’nizkeh kulanu m’herah l’oro. “Cause a new light to illumine Zion, and may we all be worthy to enjoy its brightness.” May we protect that flame, in our time as days before, radiating anew with an eternal promise of old.