Would You Have Gone With Ezra?

A Torah anytime original series. After the destruction of the first pes mikdash, the subsequent exile into Babylon and the episode with Hmon on Purim, the Jewish people enjoyed relative tranquility and prosperity in Persia. Life was pretty good. One day out of the blue, King Cyrus, king of the Persian Empire, decided to grant the Jews permission to move back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Besamed. So, Miseranas, the royal treasurer, was instructed to go into the royal vault and remove the vessel stolen from the Besamed. Thousands upon thousands of vessels were brought out and Ezra, the leader of the Jews at the time, he excitedly ran to the town square and broke the news to the Jewish people with the Pim story still in their mind. And the basic destruction not not too far away. You would think there would have been a national outpouring of excitement to go back to Jerusalem. They should have been ecstatic. There should have been a stampede to begin the pilgrimage back. But no, there was not. Not even close. Out of the millions of Jews that were living at the time in Persia, shockingly only 42,368 people picked up and marched with Ezra back to Usion. Only 42,000 people. After almost being annihilated by Hammon, after going through the pain of getting exiled and watching the Bikdash burn, we were finally given an opportunity to go back. And yet 95% of us didn't. We liked our life in Persia. Of course, we wanted to rebuild the Bikdash, but only conceptually. We'll send a check in the mail and live comfortably in our homes. We didn't yearn to actually go back in there and build it. The act of such devotion by these 42,000 people picking themselves up without missing a beat to go serve Hashem with elacrity was so praiseworthy in the eyes of Hashem that he did something almost never done in Tanakh. Hashem listed each and every family that accompanied Ezra by name. Hares, Shafia, Arach, Pakas, Yeshua, Yah, Elam, Zatu, Zakai, Bana, etc. These previously unnoteworthy individuals realized the tremendous opportunity they had in front of them. The opportunity to move back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Mikdesh, the opportunity to be one with Hashem and his mitzvah. They were soldiers in Hashem's army. From the big commandments to the small, from the glamorous to the technical, it made no difference. They were marching in lock step with Ezra and therefore in reward their names got co codified for eternity in the most important book in the history of humanity.