The Ancient Holiday of 25 Sivan  (June 3, 2015)

  from His Holiness, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson

D'var Yom B'Yomo — The author of this Hebrew book (sefer) gathered the events that are mentioned by our Sages or that are recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, and he sorted them by days of the year.

For 25 Sivan, he notes an event (recorded in Megillat Ta'anit) that was celebrated as a holiday during the later years of the period of 420 years while the Second Holy Temple stood in Jerusalem (the Second Jewish Commonwealth).

On this date during Alexander the Great's conquest of the Holy Land (4th century bce), the larcenous plans of several anti-Jewish groups were fully frustrated, and these groups and their plans disappeared from the political scene (until a recent reincarnation in the form of resolutions in the United Nations which have been promoted by contemporary larcenous groups and their dupes).

As Alexander conquered new lands, he contracted with the locals who would administer each domain under his rulership.  Of course, the primary character of the state of Judea – Jerusalem and its environs – was Jewish.  The region had been independently governed by the Sanhedrin (the Jewish Sages) and the High Priest of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.  However, several colonies of non-Jews had been transplanted into the area centuries before by the Assyrians and Babylonians.  Two of these colonies presented to Alexander rival claims over the Holy Land.  At the same time, an Egyptian delegation proposed that the Jews of Judea make reparations to the Egyptian people for the possessions that their Israelite ancestors had taken away from Egypt some 1,000 years earlier at the time of the Exodus under the pretext of borrowing (Exodus 12:36).

The Jewish Sages deliberated over how to respond to the larcenous claims and who to send to Alexander for the Jews' defense.  Geviha the Hunchback proposed that he make the initial Jewish presentation.  This Geviha was neither an official of the Sanhedrin nor a Temple priest.  He was considered an ordinary person for his time.  (Relative to today's deteriorated standards he would be an outstanding expert!)

His proposed strategy was that if his arguments failed to persuade Alexander, the Judean state could dismiss him as having been unqualified, and then they would present a new case to Alexander.

The first colonists were a group of Ishmaelites who demanded an equal share in the Land of Israel – which resembles today's policy of "partition."  They based their claim on the Torah's account of how Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael.  By right of inheritance, part of the land was theirs.  Geviha's successful defense was to present the complete account of Jewish rights to the Holy Land from the Torah – the rest of the story.  During Abraham's lifetime, he settled the inheritance issue by giving gifts to the son's of the concubines, including Ishmael and his family, and sending them all away from the Land of Israel to settle in the East – Arabia, India, Tibet, and China (Genesis 25:6).  At the same time, Abraham designated Isaac as the sole inheritor (legatee) of his estate (Genesis 25:5).  The Ishmaelites had no defense for this argument.  Alexander was swayed by Geviha's testimony to dismiss the Ishmaelites, who ceased to be heard from as adversaries in the annals of the Second Commonwealth.

The Egyptian complaint was effectively dismissed by assigning the Egyptians the task of assessing the wages that they should have paid to millions of Israelites for labor done under forced bondage for hundreds of years.  This compensation would have offset any compensation that the Jews in turn might owe the Egyptians.  We hear nothing again from the Egyptians (who might still be calculating the requisite figures from their hieroglyphic and cuneiform tablets!)

A third group represented an "Afarite" colony which claimed to have been forcibly relocated from the Holy Land centuries before.  They claimed original descent from the early Canaanites, and accused the Jews of being thieves.  "This land," they said, "was originally the Land of Canaan.  Subsequently, you Jews came from elsewhere, displaced the original inhabitants, and renamed it Israel and Judea."

Geviha the Hunchback asked them where they found the evidence that the land had at one time been called Canaan and had been populated by Canaanites.  "In your Torah," they testified before Alexander.  Geviha answered that this same Torah declared that Canaan, the individual, and his descendants, were to be perpetual slaves to the rest of humanity (Genesis 9:25).  "You Afarites must belong to some absentee master.  Let that master make claim the claim of ownership," responded Geviha.  With the status of their community called into question, these colonists abandoned their larcenous plot and were never heard from again.

Alexander dismissed these spurious claims and recognized Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land.  The Judean state, headed by the rabbis of the Sanhedrin and by the priests (Kohanim) of the Holy Temple, became part of the Greek empire-commonwealth that Alexander was forming.

"Bayomim hahem, biz'man hazeh" — as it was then, so it may it be today.

Note:  The author of the book D'var Yom B'Yomo apparently selected an account of this event that we may no longer have access to.  Our accounts appear in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 91a, Breishis Rabba 62:7 (?), and Yalkut Shimoni 110 (?).

Aside from the fact that these different aggadot address slightly different facets of the event, the actual dates of the event and holiday vary.  However, it is possible to consider that the event occured on 25 Nissan (as the Talmud records, for example) but that the holiday (Yom Tov) was postponed two months.

a) The entire month of Nissan already has holiday status,

b) it may have been deemed inappropriate to celebrate a holiday during the mourning period of the subsequent month of Iyar (although it seems to me that the mourning status of the month would have begun only some 300 years later, at the time of Rabbi Akiva),

c) the first days of Sivan through Shavuot and the Completion Days up to 12 Sivan also have holiday status, and

d) the holiday was postponed another two weeks to give all the Shavuot pilgrims time to return home, as is done for the rain prayers after Sukkot and Shmini Atzeret.

I maintain that "B'nei Afrika" (in the Talmud's account, Tractates Chullin 34b, Sanhedrin 91a) were colonists who had formerly lived in Phrygia.  Phrygian, their language, is a member of the ancient Greek family of languages.

Linguistically, it seems to me that we English speakers have inherited the Phrygian-Greek word tōt, meaning 'two', in the form of the English word 'total' – a sum of more than one, added two figures at a time – 'tot + all'.  Phrygian is also a Japhetic people/language ("Yaft Elokim l'Yefet," etc.).

Concerning our Torah's word tōtaphōt – tefillin which are placed on the head – it traditionally means "two-two," the tōta part of this word seems to me to come from the above Phrygian word tōt.  The other part of the word tōtaphōt seems to come from the Coptic/Egyptian word pōt which means "together" – a situation of having been divided into "two."  'Coptic' is my translation of the Hebrew's name for the country called katpei.  I have already explained that the Hebrew name afrikei refers to the Phrygian language.

It is clear in the tradition of the Torah that the word tōtaphōt is a compound of words which come from languages other than Hebrew.  In fact, without the help of this tradition, we would not understand how the tefillin which are placed on the head are constructed as they are, with four compartments for each of the four parchment Torah sections which are placed inside the black tefillin boxes.  For all this, see Rashi on the Chumash, Shmos 13:16 and Devarim 6:8;  from Rabbi Akiva in Tractate Chullin 34b, Sanhedrin 91a.

According to modern scholarship, Romans named what we now call the African continent after the then-prominent sub-Saharan tribe of Afars (or Afarites), who lived in the region of present-day Ethiopia.  After the Punic Wars, the Romans renamed Carthage, the primary city of North Africa west of Egypt, to blot out the memory of their former adversaries.  The Romans salted the land of Carthage so that it would never even be used for agriculture.  Similarly, when the Roman Legions conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Holy Temple, they renamed the land of Judea and Israel as Palestine.  'Palestine' is a Greek usage for the region of the Holy Land – at least part of its sea coast – as we find in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus.  The name 'Palestine' did not derive from 'Phoenicia'.  Herodotus uses the name Phoinikē for this people and their coastal land.  Phoenicia, for the Greeks, was located approximately where the historic Philistines lived, except that by Greek times, Phoenicians had also established port cities along the Mediterranean coast.  In the Levant, Tyre (in today's Lebanon), Ashdod (Azotus), and Gaza were the primary Phoenician port city-states.  To the west, the Phoenician colonies were Carthage (from the Aramaic words Karta-Tav'ta, "good city"), Cartagena (from the Aramaic words Karta-Hein, "graceful city"), and Cádiz (from from an unknown [to me] Aramaic derivation).  Córdoba, an inland city, also derives its name from Aramaic words, Karta-Tova, a variation for "good city".

Incidentally, Alexander was generally not a despot.  He checked "which way the wind was blowing" and tested the waters to determine the fate of his conquered lands.  When an existing regime was willing to pay taxes, submit the requisitioned levies, and promote the general welfare of Greek commerce, industry, and culture, he gave official recognition to that regime.  We see this in a possible interpretation of the word "demosnoi" that the Jewish sages used to describe the larcenous claimants.  In Greek, demos means people, popular;  nō'os means the mind.  We have derived the English words 'democracy' and 'paranoia' from these two Greek words respectively.  Accordingly, these "demosnoi" were public relations minions rather that serious litigants.

Later rabbis tell us that demosnoi is the public acknowledgment that a serious legal claim has been dismissed – the accused has been fully exonerated (He'Aruch).  Again, the "public mind" has been finalized in favor of the defendant.

"Bayomim hahem, biz'man hazeh" — as it was then, so may it be today.

Notes and Pronunciation