Rabbi Ben Ezra

“ He, too, sets up insurmountable barriers between the divine and the human, and thereby weakens both his religious and his moral convictions. His moral inspiration is greatest just where his religious enthusiasm is most intense. In Rabbi Ben Ezra, The Death in the Desert, and The Ring and the Book, there prevails a constant sense of the community of God and man within the realm of goodness; and the world itself, "with its dread machinery of sin and sorrow," is made to join the great conspiracy, whose purpose is at once the evolution of man's character, and the realization of the will of God. ”

“ When, however, it is sought—as several have done—to work out the identity in detail, the effort fails. The poet clearly meant to prevent any such error. For in Holy-Cross Day, he introduces a Rabbi Ben Ezra as singing a “Song of Death” quite different in tone from the poem in which Rabbi Ben Ezra unfolds his scheme of life. [Pg 270] Browning obviously meant us to infer that Ben Ezra was no one in particular.
Browning’s Hebrew knowledge was probably good; like his wife he was apparently able to read the Bible in the original. He also had dipped into curious, out of the way books on Jewish lore. ”

“ Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same.”
The following account of Rabbi Ben Ezra, I take from Dr. F. J. Furnivall’s ‘Bibliography of Rober Browning’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part II., p. 162) :—
“Rabbi Ben Ezra, or Ibn Ezra, was a learned Jew, 1092-1167 A.D. Ibn Ezra and Maimonides, whom he is said to have visited in Egypt, were two of the four great Philosophers or Lights of the Jews in the Middle Ages. ”

“ We cannot see the meaning of the wheel and the touches of the potter’s hand and instrument; we know this, and this only,—our times are in His hand who has planned a perfect cup.—I am indebted to Mr. A. J. Campbell for the following notes, the result of his researches in endeavouring to trace the real Rabbi Ibn Ezra in the poem Rabbi Ben Ezra. His fellow-religionists say of the Rabbi that he was “a man of strongly marked individuality and independence of thought, keen in controversy, yet genial withal ”

“ The sarcasm of the speaker reaches a pinnacle of bitterness when he accuses the Christian bishops of being men he had helped to their sins and who now help him to their God. From scorn toward such followers of Christ, he passes, in the contemplation of Rabbi Ben Ezra's death song, to a defence of Christ against these followers who profess but do not act his precepts, and a hope that if the Jews were mistaken in not accepting Christ, the tortures they now suffer will be received as expiation for their sin. ”

“ The poem touches the borderland where art and religion meet. The Toccata of Galuppi left behind as its relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory existence. The extemporising of Abt Vogler fills the void which it has opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.
Faith, victor over loss, in Abt Vogler, is victor over temporal decay in Rabbi Ben Ezra. ”

“ When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of Ben Ezra. ”

“ Why does Karshish work up to his story so diffidently? Why has the incident taken such hold upon him? What do you conceive to be his character and worth as a man?
What of Lazarus? What change has been wrought in him? Is he in any way unfitted for this life? To what does Karshish compare him, with his sudden wealth of insight behind the veil of the next world? Which of the two men is better fitted for the condition in which he is placed? What religious significance does the story of Lazarus come to have to Karshish? What parallel ideas do you find in Rabbi Ben Ezra and in this poem? ”

“ He is praising his god, and well he may."
"Go thou to the priest at Jerusalem," he heard the rabbi from Nazareth say to each in turn of the men who had been cured. "See thou tell no man."
"What meaneth he?" thought Ulric. "Have not all we seen with our own eyes this which hath been done? I would I were healed of something, then would I know what is this secret between them and their god. He is a strong one. What will Ben Ezra now say about his Jehovah? I think this may be a stronger god, for Jehovah doth not well guard the Jews from the Romans." ”

“ He shall come with the clouds of heaven ; if they be not righteous, then He shall come lowly, and riding upon an ass."
With the exception of Rabbi Moshe ha-Kohen (quoted by Aben-Ezra, who applied the prophecy to Nehemiah) and Aben-Ezra (who applies it to "Judas, the son of the Hasmonean ") all the Jewish commentators apply it to the Messiah. Rashi says, "This cannot be explained except of King-Messiah, for it is said of Him, And His dominion shall be from sea to sea ; but we do not find that such a one ruled over Israel in the time of the Second Temple." ”

“ We have loitered long with Yehuda Halevi, and still not long enough, for we have not yet spoken of his claims to the title philosopher, won for him by his book Al-Chazari. But now we must hurry on32 to Moses ben Ezra, the last and most worldly of the three great poets. He devotes his genius to his patrons, to wine, his faithless mistress, and to "bacchanalian feasts under leafy canopies, with merry minstrelsy of birds." ”

“ But Ezra had a clear perception of what there was for Israel to do. That religion, which in former times had been mainly the collective expression of the nation's relation to God, must now be realised as the personal concern of each individual. What the prophets had taught about God had so far produced no corresponding result in personal piety and conscious service. What had been declared by Moses as the will of God had been by no means fully taken to heart and wrought into the acts of daily life. There was divine teaching in abundance, and had been for centuries ”

“ Now that the alarm is taken the people begin to be sensible of the mischief, and to lament it, a spirit of repentance seems to be poured out upon them, and they are all thus humbling themselves before God for it, now there is hope that God will forgive, and have mercy. The valley of Achor (that is, of trouble) is the door of hope (Hos. ii. 15) ; for the sin that truly troubles us shall not ruin us. There is hope now that Israel has such a prudent, pious, zealous governor as Ezra to manage this affair. ”

“ At the close of a century God revived him, and he found all as when he had died; the ass standing, and the fruit unwithered. Then Ezra saw the works that had been executed in Jerusalem, how the walls were being set up, and the breaches repaired, and he said, "God is Almighty; He can do whatsoever pleaseth Him!"
After his resurrection, he went into the holy city, and spent night and day in explaining to the people the Law, as he remembered it. But it had been forgotten by the Jews, and therefore they disregarded his instruction. ”

“ It is high time to put away altogether, as one of the exploded errors of history, the notion that Ezra, by the exaltation of the Torah to the supreme place in Jewish religion, set that religion upon the down-grade. I believe it to be nearer the truth to say that after Moses, and Isaiah (or perhaps Jeremiah) , Ezra is the third greatest man in the Old Testament.
It can scarcely be too often repeated that the Torah, as Ezra understood it, meant divine teaching upon all and everything that concerned [75] religion. ”

“ When the people are gathered about him, he upbraids them for their laxness and secures the appointment of a commission with himself at the head to investigate and put an end to these evil practices. When after three months the community has been purified from this foreign element, the people are again assembled to listen to the reading of the law. Then Ezra utters a fervent prayer in which he sets forth Jehovah's leadership of his people in the past and the disasters which have come as a result of their sins. ”

“ Fight against them who believe not in God, nor in the Last Day, and who forbid not that which God and His Apostle have forbidden, and profess not the true religion of those to whom the Scriptures have been delivered, until they pay tribute by right of subjection, and they be reduced low. The Jews say Ezra is the son of God, and the Christians say Christ is the Son of God. This is their saying in their mouths: they imitate the saying of those who were unbelievers in former times. ”

“ Such a prospect might have been tolerable if there had been nothing left for Israel to do. Some of those who opposed Ezra may well have thought that there was nothing which could demand so hard a sacrifice as that which he would force upon them. Why should they not live in peace with their neighbours, and [11] do as they did? And why could they not keep their old religion, without making it a source of enmity abroad, and a cause of grief at home? ”

“ Moses ben Ezra says of him that he imitated Moslem models, and was the first to open to Jewish poets the door of versification,5 meaning that he first popularized the use of Arabic metres in Hebrew. It is as a poet that he has been known to the Jews to the present day, and admired for the youthful freshness and beauty of his work, in which he may be compared to the romantic school in France and England in the early 19th century. ”

“ They indicate that the Bible is intended to teach us what GOD would have us to do; that we should not merely seek for the promises, and try to get all we can from GOD; but should much more earnestly desire to know what he wants us to be and to do for Him. It is recorded of Ezra, that he prepared his heart to seek the Law of the LORD, in order that he might do it, and teach in Israel the statutes and judgments. The result was that the hand of his GOD was upon him for good, the desires of his heart were largely granted, and he became the channel of blessing to his whole people. ”

“ Ezra, having found in the second year of his government ( [1] and 10) that many of the people had taken strange wives, contrary to the law, and that several of the priests and Levites, as well as the chief men of Judah and Benjamin, had transgressed herein, after he had in fasting and prayer deprecated God's wrath for it, caused proclamation to be made for all the people of Israel that had returned from the captivity to gather themselves together at Jerusalem, under the penalty of excommunication, and forfeiture of all their goods. ”

“ But the former gained the day, and, realizing that the only hope of maintaining a pure worship of Yahweh lay in a forcible isolation from foreign influence, its adherents were prepared to take measures to ensure the religious independence of their assembly. It is related that Ezra, the scribe and priest, returned to Jerusalem with priests and Levites, lay exiles, and a store of vessels for the Temple. He was commissioned to inquire into the religious condition of the land and to disseminate the teaching of the Law to which he had devoted himself (Ezra vii.) . ”

“ In any case, he champions their cause not only with generosity but with insight; for he knows that some of them have faith enough to adopt Israel's God as their God, i. 16, and that even a Moabitess may be an Israelite indeed. Ezra's severe legislation was inspired by the worthy desire to preserve Israel's religion from the peril of contagion: the author of Ruth gently teaches that the foreign woman is not an inevitable peril, she may be loyal to Israel and faithful to Israel's God. ”

“ It is indeed difficult to believe that they would have survived, if the policy of Ezra had not been carried out. And if they had not, what would have become of the Jewish religion? And how would the great spiritual treasure of the prophets (to say nothing of the Torah itself) have become available for those who, in a later age, were to depend so largely upon it? Whether the [70] policy of separation is to be for ever kept up, is a question which the future must decide. But that Ezra saved the Jewish religion and the Jewish people is hardly open to dispute. ”

“ The figure of Ezra, though not without a certain devout energy, is somewhat stiff and formal; but the personality revealed by the memoirs of Nehemiah is gracious almost to the point of romance. Seldom did the Hebrew people produce so attractive and versatile a figure—at once a man of prayer and of action, of clear swift purpose, daring initiative, and resistless energy, and endowed with a singular power of inspiring others with his own enthusiasm. He forms an admirable foil to Ezra the ecclesiastic ”

“ When Ezra came forward with the book of the Torah, he did so not in any sense as an opponent of the prophets, or as making a breach between their ideas and his [65] own. He came forward to enforce their teaching, to apply it, and to get from it a larger result of practical righteousness than it had produced in their time. It was just because the prophets had so splendidly revealed God to Israel, had proclaimed to him the full grandeur of his privilege, that Israel must now be taught to do his part as he had never done it before. The greater the privilege the greater the responsibility. ”