1 Kings, Chapter 9 - What Do You Reach For? | Prophets of Israel Daily

[music] >> Shalom friends, welcome back to the Prophets of Israel daily. This is the Book of Kings 1, [music] chapter 9, brought to you by the Land of Israel Network the landofisrael.com. I'm Ari Abramowitz here with Jeremy Gimpel. Shalom, Jeremy. >> Hey Ari, how are you? >> Good. I'm good. I'm good and uh >> Where am I? I am in the hills of Judea on the southeastern tip of Jewish settlement. >> I am broadcasting from our old studio in the holy city of Yerushalayim. >> You mean your parents' basement? >> I do. I'm from my father's office. That's where I'm broadcasting [clears throat] from because there is no space right now on the Arugot Farm. It is so popular. Every room, at least within my responsibility, is taken with people that are enjoying the mountains, looking up at the stars, sleeping in our beds, to the point where I had to find another room to record in, and that's why I'm here. >> Indeed. Indeed. Yes, I know it is quite uh beautiful here and we're blessed to have many, many guests. Anyways, [clears throat] let's dive into chapter 9. It's a big chapter and I cannot tell you I've spent days working on this and I've gone through 57 different incarnations of it because it's about the Beit Hamikdash, the Temple. It's so precious to me and there was a thousand things I wanted to say, but I tried to keep it simple because in the end of the day, right now, it's finished, right? The Temple is built. The dedication is over. Hashem's presence has filled the house. Solomon has finished his prayer and the people have gone home. 20 years of building and now for the first time in two decades, silence. And having three kids under the age of six, six and under, I can tell you silence can be golden or it can be revealing. Uh it can test you. And uh it's exactly in that silence that Hashem appears because maybe the greatest test doesn't come while you're necessarily trying to build something. Maybe it comes after you finally built everything you prayed for. Right? Hashem appears to Solomon a second time. That first time, back in chapter 3, he came to a young, uncertain king and asked, "What do you want? Make a wish." Now, Solomon is at the summit of his life, and this time Hashem doesn't ask. He makes a He makes a statement. Verse 3. I have consecrated this house which you have built to place my name there forever, and my eyes and my heart shall be there all the days. Now, hold on to that. Hold on to that, Jeremy. Hold on to that, my friends around the world, because it's so important. Those words are so important. Not only my name will always be there, but my heart will always be there, Hashem says. Adonai Olam, forever. Kol Hayamim, all the days. Not as long as you maintain it, not as long as you keep it clean, not as long as the building even stands. All the days. And it's important It's important because in four verses, it's actually going to become very relevant, because then, immediately, comes the condition. Verse 4. If you walk before me as David, your father, walked with wholeness of heart and with uprightness, then the throne stands forever. You know, I just have to stop here right now just to talk about that pasuk. All right, thank you for everything. But, if you listen to that, the word if is the entire difference between Judaism, between the Torah, between the Beit Hamikdash, and every other temple in the ancient world. In the pagan world, the whole point of a temple was to appease the gods, bribe the gods, build the god a house that you bring offerings to, and now you got them in your pocket. It's like a control game. Here, Hashem says the exact opposite. It's like, "I will place my name here. I will place my heart here, but I dwell in holiness and in righteousness. If you become evil, I can't dwell with you. You built the house, but you don't own the God who dwells in it. That's the revolution, and that's why our connection to this land was never about deed or a document. Ownership isn't the question. The question has always been, how do we live on it? >> That's exactly right. And that's why what comes next is so challenging. At the peak of the glory, with the gold still glimmering, and the incense is still in the air, Hashem describes exile. Verse seven, "Then I will cut off Israel from upon the face of the land which I have given them, and Israel shall become a proverb and a byword among the peoples." And then verse eight, "And this house, which was so exalted, yet elyon, it was so exalted, everyone passing by it shall be appalled and shall whistle." Do you understand what just happened there? Tisha B'Av, the ninth of Av, the day both temples were destroyed, is written into the blueprint of the temple. And I don't think that's because the destruction was inevitable. I don't think it was. It's because from the beginning, Hashem was telling us that having the house would never exempt us from the covenant. You don't get to build Hashem a magnificent house and then say, "There, we're safe now. All's good." Right? That's not it. The temple doesn't protect our covenant. It's the reverse. Our keeping of the covenant is what sustains the house of Hashem. But now go back to verse three. Ad olam kol hayamim, forever, all of the days. My eyes and my heart shall be there all of the days. Do you hear what that means? He told Solomon that his heart would be there always. And then, he allowed the building to fall. But his heart never left. For nearly 2,000 years, there was no temple on that mountain. There was rubble and ash. There were foreign empires and other people's buildings. And for one single day, One single day, that mountain did not stop being the holiest place on Earth. It was never waiting to become holy again. And for 2,000 years, travelers came to Jerusalem, found a broken city, and they asked, "What happened to the nation that lived here?" Verse 9 puts the answer in the mouths of the nations themselves. Va'amru, al asher azvu et Hashem Eloheichem. Eloheichem. And they shall say, "Because they forsook Hashem their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and they took hold of other gods and bowed to them and served them." Listen to that verb, vi'azvu. They took hold. They grabbed. They gripped. It's the language of someone reaching for something to hold on to. Because idolatry was never a philosophy problem. It wasn't people confusing a stone for the creator. That would be a very superficial understanding. Idolatry is about power and protection, rain, security. You made the sacrifice because you wanted the harvest. You did it for leverage. So, maybe idolatry is ultimately a question of what do you reach for when you're afraid? And there's a verse we read a few weeks ago in Samuel that has stayed with me ever since that really illuminates this whole thing for me. But, it's back David is being hunted and says something strange. First book of Samuel, chapter 26. "For they have driven me out this day from cleaving to the inheritance of Hashem, saying, 'Go serve other gods.'" "For they have driven me out this day from cleaving to the inheritance of Hashem." They made me leave Israel, saying, "Go serve other gods." Nobody told David to bow to an idol. So, why does he describe being driven from the land as though someone were sending him to serve idols? There's a lot to say about this. I had two and a half pages, really, about it. But, my answer in the end of the day, it may be uncomfortable to some, but uh one of the sources, you know, that that that confirm it, even though it's intuitively true, it comes from it comes from the book of Ketubot. And by the way, I want to say, I'm saying this from a place of love, not a place of judgment. I would give my life for any fellow Jew, from left to right, secular to religious. This is in Ketubot. Kol Hadar Bechutz La'aretz Ke'ilu Oved Avodah Zarah. Whoever dwells outside the land, it is as though he serves idols. And again, I want to be careful here. I have family in America. I have beloved friends in America. There are sages of America whose Torah knowledge dwarfs mine. It's not about that. The fellowship is filled with people I love deeply, people who fear Hashem, people who support Israel, people who are better than me in every way. The sages are not saying the Jews in the diaspora are idolaters. It's as though they worship idolatry. It's a structural claim about the nature of the exile. Outside the land, Jewish life exists under the sovereignty of someone else. And the danger is that dependence slowly begins to feel like security. That Jewish safety becomes something we negotiate with whoever holds power. And I think that may be one of the greatest idols of Jewish history. Because idolatry is less of a statue and more of a strategy. It's the belief that if we're quiet enough, useful enough, inoffensive enough, well-behaved enough, the ruler the ruler the ruler of that land will protect us. That was the arrangement with the czar or the caliph or the king or the emperor or the president. And sometimes it worked. Torah survived. Families lived for generations in relative peace and submission. And then the ruler changed. The politics changed. And when the winds of history shifted, the mob came. The strategy worked until it didn't. >> You know, Ari, I just the hardest part about what you just said is that the strategy wasn't stupid. That's what makes it an idol. I mean, we picture idolatry now as just obvious foolishness like somebody bowing to a rock and expecting to rain. It seems so primitive. But nobody holds on to something that never delivers. People gripped those gods for a thousand years because it seemed to work. The rain came. The harvest came. God allows idolatry real power because that's what gives us a real choice between good and evil. If it never worked, there would be no test. There is power to the other side. And that's what people need to understand about Israel. Our enemies, they're not political rivals. They're spiritual rivals. An attack on the people of Israel is an attack on the God of Israel. And our enemies are religiously motivated, empowered by belief in their God. That's what's happening right now. >> Yeah, you can tell because of the pathological obsession of their hyperfixation on us above all else. Yes, and that's exactly why what's happening in our lifetime is so hard to absorb. For 2,000 years the nations looked at this place and received precisely the answer verse 9 predicted. They still come. They still ask what this place means. But what they're looking at is changing before our eyes and their eyes, before the eyes of the world. The temple is still not standing. We are not at the end of the story. But look out your window right now, Jeremy. Look at Jerusalem. They see Jewish children running through the streets their ancestors prayed toward from the exile. They see a nation gathering from a hundred countries speaking the language of the prophets exactly as the Torah promised. And they see Jews walking on the Temple Mount again. 10 years ago on Tisha B'Av, roughly 300 Jews went up to the Temple Mount. This Tisha B'Av, it was 3,703. Last year, nearly 70,000 people went up to the Temple Mount. More than 60,000 already this year. And on the eastern side of that mountain, Jews are praying openly with prayer books in their hands, an offense that we, Jeremy, personally were arrested for just a few years ago, or maybe more than a few years ago. It's 8 years ago, something like that. >> Something like that. >> the Yeah, I mean, look at the direction things are going in. Jerusalem, which for centuries testified to Jewish exile, is now testifying to Jewish return. And I think that is the answer to V'yichazku, and they strengthened themselves on these foreign rulers, because a people that spent 2,000 years reaching for the protection of other men is finally taking hold of something else. A land, a language, an inheritance, a covenant. The God who said his eyes and his heart would be there all the days, that's what we're holding on to. And that God has kept his word. And now watch what happens next. Hiram of Tyre, Hiram of Tyre supplied the cedar, the cypress, the gold, and the craftsmen, and now Solomon settles the account. Not with gold or grain, that would actually make really perfect sense. That wouldn't even be noteworthy. He could have done that. He settles it with 20 cities in the Galilee. Cities of the inheritance of Israel. Handed to a foreign king to close out a construction debt. I really tried to look deep into why he would decide to do that. I really couldn't figure it out or understand. Maybe, Jeremy, you're much more of a Tanakh scholar than me. But I don't know why he did it, but that he did it, there's no question. He paid him 20 cities in the Galilee as a construction debt. But Hiram is not impressed. Verse 13, "Mah arima el asher natata li achi?" What are these cities that you have given me, my brother? And he calls them the land of Cabul. Something bound up, worth nothing. And by the way, there is a town in the Galilee today called Kabul. You can actually drive there. It's east of Akko. 3,000 years later and that insult is still attached to the soil itself. >> You know, and Ari, just to point out, I think that's the test of the success of Israel. I mean, when you're fighting to hold on to the land, you know exactly what it is. It's an inheritance. This is mine. We're fighting for it. And it seems like once you've been established long enough, it can become something that you barter with. You know, just now Israel's government as soon as they rose to power and they were a little bit left-wing, they immediately gave away our oil reserves to the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Like, as soon as they felt secure enough, they immediately let it go. And it's like, come on. You don't lose appreciation for a gift because you hate it. You lose it because you've had it long enough to forget what a miracle it was to receive. That's what Israel's going through. >> Yeah, that's what Israel's going through now and that's what we went through then. And it's not only on a national thing, on a personal thing. It's just so easy to lose those eyes. >> Exactly. And then the chapter ends somewhere very familiar. Verse 26. King Solomon built a fleet at Ezion-geber on the shore of the Red Sea. Ezion-geber beside Eilat. And by the way, Jeremy, you know that's Eilat. That's the same city, the same shoreline, the same water. 3,000 years ago, Israelite ships sailed from from there towards Ophir. And this past Hanukkah, I took my children swimming in that water under an Israeli flag in a Jewish state in Eilat. It's just so cool the way the Tanakh comes alive in our land. And there's one more thing. The Book of Chronicles tells us about cities that Hiram gave to Solomon, which Solomon rebuilt and settled with the children of Israel. So, the commentators understand these to be those same cities. Hiram gave them back and Solomon sort of repented in a way and really settled them. The cities came back, the Galilee came back, the ports came back. It came back then, it's coming back now. The only thing still missing is the thing that was never traded away. Nobody sold the temple. We lost it the way Hashem warned us at the beginning of this chapter that we would lose it by forgetting what it was for. My friends are actually standing now in Elul, the month of return. Jews are returning from Ethiopia, Yemen, Morocco, Russia, France, Argentina, Brooklyn. Jeremy, you're better at standing cities and states and countries off the top of your head. The but the point is we're returning home in the hills of Judea are being planted again. We're I'm recording and broadcasting Prophet of Israel Daily right now from those very hills. I planted this year on a on the hillside our own hillside here in Judea. My children stood in the wine press at harvest jumping on the grapes crushing them with your their feet. We just drank that grape juice this Shabbat. There's nothing theoretical about this anymore. And perhaps the question of our generation is whether we still believe our security comes from the kings of exile or from the king of kings, the king who's bringing us home. My friends, this chapter is about what a person reaches for and what you take hold of. So please consider not just listening, but taking hold of this mission. Every week our fellowship and Prophets of Israel Daily and all together here our network, we gather together live in these hills of Judea. Jews and Christians from countries around the world learning the word of Hashem together while it's [music] unfolding in front of us and really through us. Come and join us on it. thelandofisrael.com check [music] it out. Hazak u'barukh my friends. Please God, we'll see you tomorrow for chapter 10.