This Jewish history will change how you see our future.
This one "what if" could rewrite 2,000 years of Jewish exile, suffering, and persecution. Now, the path to be taken rests on our shoulders.
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In 1969, three American journalists published a chilling work of speculative fiction titled, “If Israel Lost the War.”
Set in an alternate reality where the Jewish state was overrun during the Six-Day War of 1967, the book imagines a world in which the Arab armies defeat Israel, Tel Aviv is occupied, and Jerusalem lies in ruins. Jewish citizens are rounded up, synagogues are torched, and the dream of Jewish sovereignty ends in a nightmare of erasure.
Though fictional, the book struck a nerve. It forced readers, particularly Jews, to confront the fragility of survival and the high cost of complacency. What if Israel had fallen? What would that have meant not only for Israelis, but for Jewish life everywhere?
This kind of counterfactual lens is not just powerful; it’s clarifying. It opens the imagination to how history might have unfolded differently. And so, today, on the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av1 (the Ninth of Av) — in which we commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem — I asked myself a different but equally potent question:
What if the First and Second Jewish Temples hadn’t fallen? What if Jewish civilization had not been interrupted by exile, dispersion, and destruction? What if the heart of Jewish life had continued to beat in Jerusalem, uninterrupted for thousands of years?
Why the Temples Fell: Causes and Cautionary Tales
To be certain, no events have shaped the trajectory of the Jewish People more profoundly than the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.
The First Temple, built by King Solomon, fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The Second Temple, rebuilt after the Persian return and later renovated under Herod, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. These were not merely buildings; they were the beating heart of Jewish civilization, sovereignty, and spiritual consciousness.
According to both historical and rabbinic sources, the fall of both Temples was not due solely to foreign armies. Those armies were instruments, not causes; the real roots lay within.
The First Temple era was marked by internal decay: corruption, idolatry, and social injustice. The prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos) warned that a society that tramples the widow, neglects the orphan, and worships power cannot stand. A little-known detail: The Babylonians first besieged Jerusalem three times before finally destroying it, each time met with empty displays of repentance, but no sustained course correction.
The Second Temple fell not from paganism but from baseless hatred (sinat chinam in Hebrew) among Jews. Factions tore each other apart while the Roman threat loomed. One tragic but lesser-known episode involves a Jewish group burning a warehouse of food supplies in Jerusalem to force fellow Jews into battle against Rome — against their own survival instincts.
The destruction of the Temples, in this sense, were divine or natural consequences of moral implosion. Foreign empires simply delivered the final blow.
An Alternate Timeline: If the Temples Had Not Fallen
Imagine now that both the First and Second Temples had survived — that the people heeded the prophets, rejected corruption and hatred, and unified around shared values. What might Jewish life, and the Jewish world, look like today?
Without exile, Jerusalem might have become not only the spiritual center of the Jewish people, but one of the most continuously influential cities in human civilization. Imagine a Jerusalem that rivaled Athens, Rome, or Constantinople in shaping global philosophy, science, law, and ethics — with Torah and Jewish wisdom at the helm of intellectual life.
Instead of being scattered, Jewish scholars might have remained concentrated in centers of learning built around the Temple precinct. Think of a 3,000-year-old uninterrupted Sanhedrin2 (an ancient Jewish supreme court) developing Talmudic law alongside advancing science, medicine, and technology.
What’s more, the prophets envisioned the Temple not just for Jews, but as a “house of prayer for all nations.”3 Had it endured, the Temple could have become a global spiritual center — visited by pilgrims from every continent, much like the Vatican or Mecca — but built on the radical Jewish ideals of justice, compassion, and monotheism.
Imagine world leaders making pilgrimage not to perform photo ops, but to study chochmah (wisdom), binah (understanding), and da’at (knowledge) from the descendants of prophets who first taught them.
With the Temple still standing as the unifying center of worship, the splintering of Judaism into denominations (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular) may never have occurred. While diversity of thought would still exist, the shared practice of pilgrimage, sacrifice, and Torah-centered ritual would offer cohesion and spiritual centrality.
The Temple would likely have evolved beyond animal sacrifice into a more symbolic or ethical form of service, echoing the prophet Hosea’s words: “Take with you words and return to the Lord. We will offer the fruit of our lips instead of bulls.”4 A Judaism both rooted in ancient ritual and open to modern expression could have emerged organically.
The Temple’s survival may also have catalyzed a different evolution of gender roles in Jewish ritual life. The Temple periods already saw female prophets like Huldah and judges like Deborah. Without centuries of exile-era patriarchy, Judaism could have institutionalized female leadership long before the modern feminist era.
Picture women as Temple teachers, musicians, sages, or members of a more expansive Sanhedrin, contributing fully to the spiritual and legal leadership of the nation in ways both ancient and evolving.
Without dispersion, and with Jewish sovereignty preserved, Jewish civilization might have led the world in scientific and technological development grounded in spiritual values. Imagine Torah-inspired advancements in medicine guided by the ethics of pikuach nefesh (saving life), or AI governed by tzelem Elohim (the divine image in every person). Imagine a startup culture built around Shabbat: pushing innovation six days a week, and renewal on the seventh.
We might have witnessed the Jewish People as the original value-tech nation, an “Israel” that leads not just in cybersecurity, but in spiritual security for humanity.
As a matter of fact, Shabbat could have become a model for sustainable living adopted around the world, Sukkot embraced as an eco-holiday, Passover as an international celebration of freedom. With the Temple as the cultural and spiritual heartbeat of the world, Jewish values would be far more than niche. They’d be normative.
Without the fall of the Temples and the exile, the Jewish People would not have become a stateless minority subject to the whims of hostile rulers. There would have been no ghettoization, no Inquisition, no Dreyfus Affair, no Holocaust.
This is not to say Jews would have been free of enemies, but they would have had an army, a land, and psychological confidence. They would not be “the wandering Jew,” but the home-rooted Jew, capable of defending both body and soul.
Even in this alternate timeline, Jews likely would have built communities abroad through trade, diplomacy, and exploration. But those communities would be extensions of a strong homeland — voluntary outposts, not exiled or persecuted minorities.
Imagine Jewish communities in Rome, Alexandria, London, and New York, all tied directly to the Temple via emissaries, livestreams of festivals, or annual caravans. Diaspora life would be one of cultural influence, not cultural trauma.
This is speculative, but significant. Christianity emerged largely in response to the destruction of the Second Temple and the perceived failure of Jewish national hopes. Without that trauma, Jesus might have remained one of many Jewish preachers within normative Judaism. The theological split might never have happened. Islam too, deeply shaped by both Judaism and Christianity, may have evolved entirely differently — or not at all.
Without the fall of the Temple, monotheism might have spread globally through Judaism itself, its teachings not replaced or co-opted, but taught openly by a sovereign people in Zion.
Of course, history did not unfold this way. The Temples did fall. We were exiled. But the memory endures. The blueprint remains.
The path forward lies in reversing the mistakes that led to the past:
From sinat chinam to ahavat chinam — replacing baseless hatred with baseless love
From spiritual complacency to ethical courage — heeding the prophets’ call not just in synagogue readings, but in our public and private lives
From disunity to mutual responsibility — seeing ourselves as part of a singular people, across levels of observance, geography, and belief
The modern State of Israel is not the Temple, but it is a miraculous achievement. Israelis recreated sovereignty, creativity, a language reborn, a culture revived, and a chance to shape Jewish life with purpose, strength, and dignity.
The question may not necessarily be: What if the Temples hadn’t fallen? The better, more realistic question is: Will we act now so that our children and their descendants don’t have to ask it again?
Let us learn from the past not just with tears, but with action. The road back to Zion is not paved with nostalgia, but with responsibility. The future of the Jewish People is not just to remember what was lost, but to become once again worthy of what might yet be rebuilt.
Ultimately, the dream of the Third Temple is not merely about rebuilding a building. It is about restoring a way of life rooted in moral clarity, spiritual depth, national dignity, and genuine unity.
The saddest day on the Jewish calendar, commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem — and more broadly, centuries of Jewish tragedy and exile
The supreme Jewish legislative and judicial body in ancient Israel, functioning as both a religious court and governing council — essentially the highest authority on Jewish law, civil disputes, and national affairs during the Second Temple period
Isaiah 56:7
Hosea 14:2
Today's Choice: https://substack.com/@thinktorah/note/c-97714323
Oxford Historian Professor Cecil Roth (1899-1970) concludes his "A History of the Jews," with the following sobering observation:
"Our survey of three and a half millennia of Jewish history is closed. But the story which we have set ourselves to tell is unending. Today, the Jewish people has in it still those elements of strength and endurance which enabled it to surmount all the crises of its past, surviving thus the most powerful empires of antiquity.
Throughout our history there have been weaker elements who have shirked the sacrifices which Judaism entailed. They have been swallowed, long since, in the great majority; only the more stalwart have carried on the traditions of their ancestors and can now look back with pride upon their superb heritage. Are we to be numbered with the weak majority, or with the stalwart minority? It is for ourselves to decide."
(Oxford University: Shocken Books, 1961) page 423
This is a beautiful vision that includes what if the next temple never falls. It does seriously bother me that some of our tribe wants to reinstate animal sacrifices. That would be horrific.