What We Asked For: Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and the Art of the Possible

In the 1970s, a young engineer walked into the boardroom at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, and presented an invention that would change everything: the digital camera. Kodak's leadership understood exactly what he was showing them; an inflection point. To take the risk of change, or persist in a familiar model. Kodak made the infamous choice; to shelve the technology instead of commercializing it, because doing so would have disrupted their extraordinarily profitable analog photography business.

We know how that story ends. Kodak loses market share to digital photography, and the Rochester economy is devastated in ways that are still being felt today.

I think about that boardroom whenever I study the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Both are stories about a moment when everything changed — when the old paradigm broke — and the people inside the system had to decide: do we hold fast to what has always worked, or do we reimagine everything? In Rochester, the leaders chose the short view, and a great institution collapsed. In Jerusalem, a rabbi chose the long view, climbed into a coffin, and saved the Jewish people.

The story of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai is one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in Jewish history. But before we can understand what he did, we need to understand what he was up against.

The Problem of Space

Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his luminous work The Sabbath, offers a distinction that illuminates all of Jewish history: the difference between the problem of space and the problem of time. “Living in space,” he writes, “is characterized by having, owning, controlling. Living in time is characterized by being, giving, sharing.” The question of where we belong — where is our space, our land, our safety — has haunted Jewish history from Abraham's first journey out of his homeland. We fight for space. We lose it. We fight for it again.

But Heschel argues that what Jews truly own is time. The first commandment given to the Jewish people as a nation is not about land or law — it is about the calendar. This month shall be yours. We are commanded to mark the new moon, to sanctify time together, to build a shared temporal framework that could travel with us anywhere in the world. Because space can be taken from you. Time, until your last breath, cannot.

In 70 CE, the Romans had come to take our space. They had been conquering the ancient world with remarkable efficiency, and the Jews were, in the Roman view, an awkward thorn in the side of empire. But the Jews had survived this before. The First Temple had been destroyed, the Babylonian exile had come and gone, sovereignty had been reestablished, and the Second Temple rebuilt. We knew this playbook. These people come, these people go. We endure.

What we did not fully reckon with was that this time, we were no longer dealing with a temporary occupier. Rome was an industrial occupier. Rome had scaled the apparatus of conquest and empire in a way the world had never seen. Our playbook was obsolete and we didn’t yet know it.

Three Factions, One Crisis

Jerusalem in the year 70 was governed by a political tripod — king, priests, and rabbis — and riven by three competing factions who could not agree on what to do as Vespasian's legions surrounded the city.

The first group I think of as the normies. Ordinary people, farmers and craftspeople and parents, who wanted the same things human beings have always wanted: enough to eat, their children safe, a tomorrow that resembles today. Profoundly relatable, largely powerless.

The second group were the Zealots. They were not interested in negotiation. They believed, with genuine and compelling fervor, that God was on their side. Temple worship was divinely mandated and therefore could not be surrendered, and that the Romans would be defeated as other enemies had been before. The playbook from the destruction of the first temple. When Vespasian offered to leave Jerusalem untouched in exchange for a symbolic surrender — one bow, one arrow — the Zealots refused. More than refused: they burned the food storehouses of Jerusalem, a walled city now under siege, to eliminate any temptation toward compromise. They were, in their own understanding, choosing faith over fear.

It is easy, from our vantage, to dismiss them as fanatics. But I want to resist that. Anyone who has ever stood close to someone in the grip of absolute conviction — who has watched that clarity of purpose move mountains — knows how compelling it can be. The Zealots were not fools. They were people who had looked at history and concluded that God's promises were literal and operative, that Jewish survival had always required this kind of all-in commitment, and that half-measures were a form of faithlessness. In another historical moment, they might even have been right.

The third group were the rabbis, and they saw things differently. Judaism, they argued, is not a death cult. We have precisely three things we are commanded to die rather than transgress: murder, idolatry, and sexual immorality. Rome is not on that list. Temple worship is not on that list. The Torah is unambiguous: v'chai bahem — you shall live by the commandments, not die for them. The rabbis were not advocating capitulation out of cowardice. They were advocating survival as a theological commitment.

The Man in the Coffin

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was, by any measure, a man with everything to lose. He may have been a kohen, a member of the priestly class — which meant the Temple's destruction would cost him his hereditary status, his communal role, his entire world as it had been structured. He was powerful within the existing system. He had every reason to stay and fight.

Instead, he got into a coffin.

The Zealots had locked down Jerusalem. The only way out of a besieged city was as a corpse. So Rabbi Yochanan arranged to appear to die, had his students carry him to the gate, and when the guards threatened to verify his death by poking his body with a spear — as was their custom — his students protested so vigorously on grounds of rabbinic dignity that the guards relented. He was carried out into the Roman encampment, climbed out of the coffin, and secured a meeting with Vespasian.

There is a version of this story in which Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai is the coward who abandoned Jerusalem while his people burned. The Talmud does not tell that story. The Talmud tells the story of the man who understood, when no one else would hear him, that the city was going to fall, that the Zealots could not be argued with, and that if anything was going to survive, someone had to get out.

What happened next is one of the most consequential negotiations in human history. In conversation with Vespasian, Rabbi Yochanan predicted — and was quickly vindicated — that the general was about to be elevated to Caesar. When the news arrived, Vespasian offered him anything he wished.

The Temple was still standing. Jerusalem had not yet fallen. A different leader might have asked for the city. Might have asked Vespasian to call off the siege. Might have tried to save the space.

Rabbi Yochanan asked for Yavneh.

Give Me Yavneh

Yavneh was a small coastal town. It had a community of scholars. Rabbi Yochanan asked permission to go there, to establish a house of study, and to be left in peace.

This is the moment that saved Judaism.

In asking for Yavneh instead of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yochanan was making a theological wager of extraordinary audacity: that the Jewish people did not need the Temple to survive. That Jewish life could be reconstructed around text, interpretation, and community rather than sacrifice and priesthood. That we could migrate — again — from space into time.

He was right. The rabbis who gathered at Yavneh over the following generations did not mourn the Temple into paralysis. They built something new. They codified the Mishnah. They developed the structures of rabbinic Judaism that have carried us through every subsequent exile and catastrophe, including the ones we are living through right now.

The Zealots, for all their passion and faith, were betting on a miracle. Rabbi Yochanan was betting on a people. He understood, in a way the Zealots could not, that God's promise was not that the Temple would stand forever, but that the people Israel would endure. The Temple was a means, not an end. And when the means was lost, the end could still be served — if someone was willing to think clearly, act decisively, and ask for the right thing.

What Are We Asking For?

We are living in a moment of rupture. The events of October 7, 2023 and their aftermath have shaken Jewish communities worldwide in ways we are still processing. Old certainties have broken open. The questions of space — Israel's security, Jewish safety in diaspora — press on us with new urgency. And within our communities, we are seeing the same three factions that stood in Jerusalem two thousand years ago: those who want only to live quietly, those who demand absolute purity and no compromise, and those who are trying to think clearly about what it means to survive and what we need to build.

The lesson of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai is not that we should abandon the fight for our safety or our land. It is not a counsel of capitulation. It is a counsel of wisdom about what we are ultimately fighting for.

He got into a coffin to save the Torah. He asked for a house of study when he could have asked for a city. He understood that Jewish survival is not primarily a military or political project — it is a project of meaning-making, of teaching, of the sanctification of time. Space matters enormously. We have paid for that lesson in blood across centuries. But it is time — shared, sanctified, purposeful time — that has always been our deepest inheritance.

In every generation, the Jewish people has had to confront the question: what do we ask for? What do we reach for when we are given the chance to choose our future? We are being asked that question again now.

The answer Rabbi Yochanan gave us is still available. It requires the same thing it required of him: the courage to climb out of the coffin, to face what is real, and to ask for what will actually keep us alive.