"On the fourteenth day of the first month you shall have the Passover sacrifice; and during a festival of seven days unleavened bread shall be eaten. On that day, the prince shall provide a bull of purification offering on behalf of himself and of the entire population..." (Ezekiel 45:21-2)
This is a special Shabbat--the last of the four special Shabbatot leading up to Pesach (Passover). Called Shabbat Hahodesh (the Shabbat of the Month), it heralds the beginning of the Hebrew month of Nisan, the month in which Passover falls. To mark this Shabbat, we read a special Torah portion from Exodus (12:1 - 20), which tells us that this month, Nisan, is the first month of the ritual year. (It is, I admit, a bit confusing, because this means that Rosh Hashannah--"New Year"--actually comes in the seventh month, not the first. Nobody ever promised that being Jewish was easy.)
In the Haftarah of this special Shabbat, we are taken on a tour of the Third Temple, courtesy of the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel was both a priest and a prophet (there were no concerns about incompatible occupations in those days), which made him uniquely suited to this task. As a priest in Jerusalem before the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, Ezekiel was well acquainted with both the layout of the Temple compound, and the rituals which made up the worship service. And as a prophet, he was able to foresee the Third Temple, which will be built in....well, I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise, but we should expect it any day, now. (For those of you keeping score at home, the First Temple, built by King Solomon, lasted from around the middle of the 10th century BCE until its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The Second Temple was completed around 516 BCE, and destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.)
Ezekiel wasn't actually in Jerusalem to witness the destruction of the Temple; he was in the advance party of exiles who were shipped off to Babylonia along with King Jehoiachin ten years earlier, and he began his prophecy only after he arrived in Babylonia. The last eight chapters of the Book of Ezekiel - from 40 through 48 - are taken up with this tour of the Third Temple, and our Haftarah (45:16 - 46:18) is excerpted from there.
Now in this tour of the Temple precincts and the description of the services, Ezekiel refers to both the religious leaders of the people--the priests (kohanim)--and the secular leader of the people. However, the term he uses for the most part to refer to the secular leader of the people - nasi, usually translated as "prince" - is not the customary term used elsewhere in the Bible, which is melech, "king." (See, for example, the quote from Chapter 45 in the introduction.) And this is what I want to talk about today. Why this change in terminology for Ezekiel? Is it just an idiosyncrasy of his, or is there a message here?
A bit of background, first. The word nasi in Modern Hebrew means "president." That is how the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, is referred to in Hebrew, and that is how the American president, Barak Obama, is referred to. In Rabbinic Hebrew, it is used to refer to the chief presiding officer of the Sanhedrin, the national religious council of Israel. (It is actually part of the appellation of one of the most famous leaders of the Sanhedrin, Yehuda Hanasi--Judah the Prince.) The term is also used throughout the Bible, not just in the book of Ezekiel.
The first biblical occurrence of the term is in Genesis, when Abraham is negotiating with the Hittites to buy a burial place for Sarah, who has just died. After Abraham explains what he wants, the Hittites answer him saying, "Hear us, my lord: you are the elect of God among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial plots... (Gen 23:6) [NJPS translation here and throughout]" What JPS translates as "elect" is our word, nasi. The medieval French grammarian, Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, 1160 - 1235) gives us the etymology of the word, noting that it is a passive form: "... whom God has elevated [my translation, as are the rest of the non-biblical quotations]" from the root naso, 'to lift up, raise, elevate.' Nasi is also the term used to refer to the various tribal leaders throughout the Bible, such as in Chapter 7 of Numbers, when they all bring offerings for the dedication of the Tabernacle.
In these instances, clearly Nasi does not mean king. But there are other occasions which are not so clear. For example, in Exodus 22:27, we are commanded "You shall not revile God, nor put a curse upon a chieftain among your people." Although JPS uses the term "chieftain" to translate our word nasi, the medieval Spanish commentator Rabbeinu Bachya (1255 - 1340) says specifically: "this is the king [melech], who is the elevated one (nasi) over all the people..."
Another ambiguous example is found in Leviticus 4:22, talking about who has to bring what kinds of sacrifice to atone for inadvertent sins. It says there, "In case it is a chieftain [nasi] who incurs guilt by doing unwittingly any of the things which by the commandment of the Lord his God ought not to be done..." There is a discussion of this verse in the Mishnah, in the tractate Horayot (Decisions). In mishnah 3:1 of that tractate, it says of this verse, "and who is the nasi - this is the king [melech], above whom is none other than the Lord his God." And Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (Germany, 1808-1888, arguably the father of modern Orthodox Judaism) in his commentary on the verse, quotes this remark from Mishnah Horayot, and then adds: "Not the chieftain of a tribe, but rather the chieftain [nasi] who stands at the head of the entire people - the king [melech]."
Perhaps the most instructive passage in the Bible - in terms of the difference between nasi and melech--occurs in 1st Kings, when God, upset by King Solomon's idolatrous ways in acceding to the wishes of his foreign wives, announces that He will take the kingdom away from him:
During that time Jeroboam went out of Jerusalem and the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh met him on the way. He had put on a new robe; and when the two were alone in the open country, Ahijah took hold of the new robe he was wearing and tore it into twelve pieces. "Take ten pieces," he said to Jeroboam. "For thus said the Lord, the God of Israel: I am about to tear the kingdom out of Solomon's hands, and I will give you ten tribes. But one tribe shall remain his - for the sake of My servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city that I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel. For they have forsaken Me; they have worshiped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Phoenicians, Chemosh the god of Moab, and Milcom the god of the Ammonites; they have not walked in My ways, or done what is pleasing to Me, or [kept] My laws and rules, as his father David did. However, I will not take the entire kingdom away from him, but will keep him as a ruler [nasi, emphasis added] for as long as he lives for the sake of My servant David whom I chose, and who kept My commandments and My laws. (1st Kings 11:29-34)
The Eastern European 19th century commentator Malbim (Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Weiser, 1809-1879, who lived and served as rabbi in the Ukraine, Romania and Russia), got it exactly right in commenting on this section. He says that in fact, God never did tear the kingdom away from Solomon, who remained king over all of Israel for his entire life. Rather the "tearing" referred to the fact that Solomon never succeeded in bequeathing the kingdom to his son. (It was against Solomon's son, Rehoboam, that Jeroboam revolted and split the kingdom in two, taking away the ten northern tribes to form the northern kingdom, and leaving Rehoboam with only the tribe of Judah, as prophesied by Ahijah.) Thus, Solomon remained only a nasi, and not a melech, because the essential difference is that a nasi does not pass on his position to his son.
With that understanding, we can now come back to Ezekiel and look at what he is saying. I believe the prophet is saying that no matter how good one might be as a leader, there is no guarantee that his sons and his sons' sons will be good. In fact, the Bible is full of examples of this, the prime one being David, his son Solomon and his son Rehoboam. (See also, for example, the story of the priest Eli and his sons in 1st Samuel Chapter 2, or Gideon and his son Abimelech in Judges Chapter 9). And so, in the future, in the time of the 3rd Temple, there will be no more kings. Leaders will rise to their positions of authority on their own merits, not those of their fathers, and will be succeeded by leaders similarly selected, and not by their sons. Considering that inherited positions of leadership have still not been abolished in the world in the 21st century (as in Syria, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, for example), this was a fairly radical idea over two and a half thousand years ago, and may explain why the 3rd Temple has yet to be built.
Now if only Ezekiel had left us advice about how to get political parties to cooperate...
Shabbat Shalom.