Fast of the Tenth of Teveth - So Far Away

 בס"ד

Times for the Fast of the Tenth of Tevet in Israel

Starts: Tuesday, 5:14 am, Ends: 5:07 pm

The Tenth of Tevet is one of the four fast days that mark the destruction of the Temple. On the tenth of Tevet, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon began his siege on Jerusalem. The siege ended two and a half years after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah, the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the First Temple. The fasts also apply to events that occurred on the 9th and the 8th. Also the tenth of Tevet, has been designated by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel for a general kaddish in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, whose date of death is unknown. Related practices would be the study of the Mishnah,the lighting of  yahrzeit candles, the recitation of Kaddish, and prayer for the souls of those who perished. 

According to the Shulchan Aruch, on the ninth of Tevet, "something happened, but we do not know what it was...". The selichot liturgy for the day states that it is the yahrzeit of Ezra the Scribe, the prophet of the return of the Jews to the Holy Land from Babylonian exile, and who ushered in the era of the Second Temple.

On the eighth of Tevet in the 3rd century BC, Ptolemy, King of Egypt, ordered the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, a work which later became known as the Septuagint. Seventy two sages were placed in solitary confinement and told to translate the Torah into Greek. The legend is that all of the translations were identical, including them all making the same 13 editorial changes. This was reckoned as a miracle. The Tanakh was to be placed in the Great Library of Alexandria, which was the highest learning institution of its day.

The reasons given why it should be a fast day rather than a day of joy tend to be difficult. There are religious sources that say that any translation of the Tanakh is inadequate. However, to go so far as to declare a fast day strikes me as extreme. Opinions are stated that the problem was that the translation was made for the Jews. It seems to me that this was the time that Hebrew became a dead language for the masses including for the most fundamental of religious texts. 

לע"נ  האמא מלכה בת חיים ז"ל נלב"ע טז ניסן תשנ"ח

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