Bar Kochba Tiyul - Batya Salomon

On Wednesday February 28, we traveled to Bar Kochba, the location of the Bar Kochba Revolt from 132-135 CE. Relations between Romans and Jews had been okay for a bit, but they started to deteriorate. The Roman leader at the time was Hadrian, and he made a long list of decrees that forbade Jewish practices. It is unclear whether this was a cause or effect of the revolt, but it cannot be debate that they upset the Jews. The Bar Kochba Revolt was the first major revolt since the Great Revolt and the destruction of the Second Temple, but it was very different.

The Great Revolt was extremely disorganized and driven entirely by anger. The Bar Kochba Revolt had been planned out and organized thoroughly. We got to see this first-hand by going into one of the cave tunnels used by the Jews. The tunnels were small but branched out into larger rooms. The rebels would go out and fight a battle, and then they would return to the caves where the Romans couldn't find them. They also stockpiled weapons. They would purposefully make weapons poorly so the Romans would reject them, and then they would keep them for themselves. This showed the good leadership they were under which is also who the revolt was named for.

The main leader was Bar Kochba. His name was originally Bar Kosiba, meaning "son of Kosiba," but Rabbi Akiva and others saw him as very important and even as the messiah, so he was renamed Bar Kochba, meaning "son of star." He led this organized revolt successfully for a while, even gaining Jerusalem, but they were eventually defeated on the 9th of Av in 135 CE, which proved that he was not the messiah. They then called him Bar Kosiva which means "son of disappointment."

After going through the Bar Kochba caves, we went to Beit Guvrin, where there is an amphitheater and a church-turned-mosque. We played a "gladiator game" inside the amphitheater and saw ruins of the place where there were bathhouses and rooms for gladiators to be held before going out to fight. We sat in one of those rooms and learned about Rabbi Akiva.

Rabbi Akiva was and still is extremely influential to Jews. We talked about how he was supposedly illiterate until the age of forty. When he was newly married, he left his wife for seven years to go study Torah. When he returned with 10,000 students, his wife told him to go off again to get more. He became a huge success, and is still considered one of our greatest sages. During the revolt, he had claimed that Bar Kochba was the messiah, but he was wrong. When the Romans banned practicing and teaching Judaism, he refused to listen. For contributing to the revolt and continuing to practice Judaism, he was combed to death with iron in a Roman amphitheater, like the one we were in, along with nine other rabbis.

This tiyul was really fun and interesting, yet it was bittersweet. I love caves, so crawling through the ones used so long ago was really amazing. However, it was sad to think of how the people who lived in these caves were fighting for their culture, and they lost and were killed. Playing a gladiator game where the goal is to knock people's hats off is fun, but to think of how people were put out there to actually kill each other is really surreal. It was even weirder to see the fake people cheering it on and to think about the real people who were there so long ago. Some of the people in those crowds were Jewish.

This leads me to my questions.  Do you think that it was okay for Jews to go to these Roman sporting events and watch people kill and be killed? Was it actually acceptable or just something they did anyway? If you lived back then, do you think you would go?