Walls and Doors   

IN Teves, the memory of the destruction and suffering wreaked by our entrapment in galus comes to the fore. Zecharyah Hanavi (8:19) talks about the fast of the 10^th of this month as being something observed forever by “Beis Yehudah.” Of the Rabbinic fasts, this is in a way the most stringent. Both the Beis Yosef and the Avudraham posit that if the 10^th of Teves were to fall out on Shabbos, we would nevertheless fast, just as we do when Yom Kippur coincides with it.

We observe a fast on the tenth of the month, but it commemorates three tragedies that occurred in Teves: the death of Ezra Hasofer, the Targum Shivim (the creation of the Septuagint, when the Torah was forcibly translated into Greek), and the beginning of Babylonian and Roman sieges of Yerushalayim. In the Selichos of the day we say, “I will recall the calamity that encountered me, on three days in this month He hit me.”

In his sefer Noam Siach, Rav Shneur Kotler elaborates on the shared message of these events. Ezra Hasofer died when he was still in the process of giving over Torah shebe’al peh. He was taken (by Hashem’s plan, of course) before finishing what he’d set out to accomplish. This caused many years of toil and confusion and created a huge pegam — I’d like to translate that as “deficit” — in the Torah.

Translating the Torah into Greek also created a deficit in the Torah. I recall one of the baalei mussar writing that it was like taking the Torah and removing its clothing in front of the world. The ramifications of this are still felt. By making the Torah accessible to everyone, not just those who spoke Lashon Kodesh and were sensitive to its holiness, the Torah became vulnerable to contortion and criticism. It also enabled non-Jews to torture and antagonize the Jewish People, which they justified by distorting the Torah to support their hateful intentions.