Nehemiah: Statesman and Sage by Dov S. Zakheim, Maggid Books., New Milfored, CT, ©2016, ISBN 978-1-59264-369-1, p. 246, $27.95
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California – In 586 BCE, Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, overlooking the city of Jerusalem, capital of the Judean monarchy, standing on Mt. Scopus, the present home of the Hebrew University, watched as his soldiers lay waste to this sacred Jewish city. About a half-century later Persian King Cyrus vanquished Babylon and soon after, from his summer home in Ecbatana, in what is today western Iran, he granted permission to the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild its ravaged walls and wasted Temple. By the same royal edict, he ordered the return of the captured Temple vessels to the Jews.
Zerubbabel led that group of more than 40,000 people back to the Judaean capital, where they rebuilt the altar and celebrated Sukkot. The Samaritans, claiming to be descendants from the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Levi, frustrated the rebuilding efforts, going so far as to write to the new king Artaxerxes to demand stoppage of the work. He confirmed, however, that his predecessor granted permission to the Jews to return and rebuild, and the work of reconstructing the Temple resumed.
Later, Artaxerxes directed Ezra to go to Jerusalem to appoint judges to administer justice to “all who know the laws of your God.” Ezra gathered a large group of Judaeans to return with him to Jerusalem, receiving word along the way that many Jews living in Jerusalem married out of the religion. Appalled, he demanded they send away their foreign wives, and the Jews by-and-large comply. However, not until a party led by Nehemiah, Cup Bearer to Persian King Artaxerxes, a very important administrative position, in the mid-fifth century BCE, did the Jews see any real progress in the restoration of the city and its Temple.
Rabbi Dr. Dov Zakheim, former Under Secretary of Defense in George W. Bush’s administration and an expert in national security issues, Jewish History, and Jewish law, parses the Book of Nehemiah’s thirteen chapters to garner the larger historical impact and personal goals of its eponymous author in his book Nehemiah: Statesman and Sage.
In his analysis, Zakheim finds likely motivations from Nehemiah’s terse prose, covering the historical origins driving Nehemiah to leave the king’s court for a backwater town filled with entrenched powerful players and political intrigues, even comparing Nehemiah’s timing and actions with those of Esther and Mordechai.
Nehemiah’s practical and military acumen are brought to the fore through Zakheim’s examination of the methods Nehemiah employs to motivate Jews, both rich and poor, to quickly carry out the reconstruction of Jerusalem’s wall; defuse economic inequality protests; and mitigate Samaritan military intimidation threatening to end Nehemiah’s life, thereby derailing the rebuilding project. Zakheim skillfully calls on his background by associating Nehemiah’s harrowing position with those of modern Israel and his actions with modern military tactics.
Nehemiah is undoubtedly a wealthy man; yet, to resolve Judea’s income inequality, Nehemiah uses the “bully pulpit” and leads-by-example, rebuking Judea’s nobility for not dispensing charity, foreclosing on mortgages and loans that should not have been made in the first place. When Nehemiah said to the nobility, “Give back at once their fields, their vineyards, their olive trees, their homes and (abandon) the claims for the hundred pieces of silver…”, Zakheim insightfully makes analogies between Nehemiah’s situation and situations in which other world leader find themselves, noting that Nehemiah made himself an enemy of his own class, “and in this he was like certain later leaders: Gladstone, Theodore Roosevelt in the early twentieth century, and his cousin Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s all evoked the deep and underlying hatred of the upper classes precisely because they were traitors to their ‘own kind.’”
The rabbis prefer Ezra to Nehemiah, perhaps because of Nehemiah’s greater assimilation into Babylonian life. Nonetheless, it is Nehemiah who literally laid the foundation for rabbinic Judaism by bringing Jerusalem and its Temple up from the ashes. The biblical Book of Nehemiah is more than a story of reclamation and rebirth, it is a timeless book about the indomitable Jewish spirit, which Zakheim makes very timely.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Public Education in Camden, NJ: From Inception to Integration; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. The author may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)