Fast of Tevet 10

The Jewish holiday of Tevet 10 is a minor fast that falls seven or eight days after the conclusion of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah. The Tenth of Tevet commemorates the onset of the siege that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon laid to ancient Jerusalem, which eventually led to the destruction of Solomon’s Temple (the First Temple) and Babylonia’s conquest of southern Israel’s Kingdom of Judah. The Jewish holiday also commemorates two additional days of spiritual darkness, 8 Tevet, the day of King Ptolemy’s decree to translate the Torah into Greek (circa 200 BCE) and the passing of Ezra the Sofer on 9 Tevet (exact year is unclear). In some traditions, the Jewish holiday is also a remembrance for the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

The Siege of Jerusalem

“And it was in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth (day) of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon came, he and all his hosts, upon Yerushalayim, and he encamped upon it and built forts around it. And the city came under siege till the eleventh year of King Tzidkiyahu. On the ninth of the month famine was intense in the city, the people had no bread, and the city was breached.” (Second Melachim 25).

As it is written in II Kings, on the tenth day of the tenth month (in 588 BCE), Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King began the siege of Jerusalem. Three years later, Nebuchadnezzar broke though the city walls, and the siege ended with the destruction of the temple three weeks later. This would ultimately result in the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon and in the creation of the Jewish Diaspora.

The Translation of the Torah

On Tevet 9, around 200 BCE, King Ptolemy ordered 70 rabbis into solitary confinement and demanded they create the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. It was assumed that with 70 sages working independently, each translation would yield a different result, thus rendering the Torah meaningless in the eyes of the Greeks. Miraculously, all 70 rabbis independently made the same exact translations! However amazing the miracle, many rabbinical sources see the events as tragic because after translation, many of the deeper meanings and legal codes in the Hebrew Torah were lost. This further helped to damage the Torah’s legal supremacy, being that many laws were drawn based upon very specific Hebrew wordings.

Ezra the Scribe

The Jewish holiday also commemorates the death of Ezra, a highly-respected priestly scribe who helped return over 5,000 Jews to their homes in Jerusalem after the destruction of the First Temple. His ability to interpret the Torah is seen as equal to Moses and he also created The Great Assembly, a group of scholars and prophets, as the authority on matters of religious law. Ezra is also credited as establishing the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Holocaust Remembrance

In the State of Israel, many rabbis have designated the Jewish holiday a day of remembrance for those who perished in the Holocaust, although it’s not to be confused with the Jewish holiday Yom HaShoa. This designation stems from the traditional reading of the Kaddish (a prayer for the deceased whose date or place of death is unknown) on the Jewish holiday Fast of Tevet 10.

Fasting on Tevet 10

Fasting on the Jewish holiday begins at dawn and continues until sundown. The fast does not include any restrictions on clothing or bathing, as with some Jewish holidays, and the ill, pregnant or nursing women and all children are exempt from the fast. The purpose of the fast on the Jewish holiday is not the grief or mourning evoked by the lack of food, but to awaken the heart towards repentance for our own evil deeds and those of our fathers. The fast should work to subjugate our evil inclination by the restriction of pleasure and to heed the call to a return towards the good and divine mercy.

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