Yochanan's Gamble

Finalist for the 2025 PROSE Award in Humanities: Theology and Religious Studies Some two thousand years ago, as the story goes, a rabbi named Yochanan makes the epitome of pragmatic gambles-wagering the entire fate of the Jewish people. In dialogue with the soon-to-be Roman emperor Vespasian, Yochanan tacitly acknowledges the Romans planned destruction of Jerusalem in return for a plot of land in ...