Ezra's Sages Caged Desire and the World Stopped Laying Eggs

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The Wall the Persians Could Not Bring Down

Babylon came apart in Ezra's last years. The Persians went through it and left almost nothing standing, and everything the prophets had ever shouted at that city arrived, on time, in full.

Two things survived. One was a stretch of wall that no human strength could break, and nobody has managed it since. The other was a patch of ground on the site that no animal will cross. You can lead a beast up to the edge of it and it will not put a foot down, and the only way over is to go ahead of it scattering dust from that same ground, so the animal walks on the place while thinking it is walking on something else.

That was the empire finished. In the same years, and under Ezra's direction, a body of men was quietly doing something nobody had tried.

They Prayed Until the Seducers Were in Their Hands

The Great Assembly sat in the gap where the prophets had stopped and the sages had not yet started, and the fences and prayers they set down became the shape Judaism kept. They also prayed until they had their hands on the things that pull people into sin, and then they held on.

Not a shrine. Not a cult. Not one town's altar. They went after the yetzer (יצר), the drive itself, the appetite that had walked beside Israel from the golden calf to every hilltop pole since, and they got it, and they shut it up where it could do no more mischief.

And that was the end of the desire for idolatry in the world.

It did not stop anyone from bowing to a statue afterward. It stopped anyone from wanting to. The pull that had bent whole generations sideways went out like a draft when a door is shut, and nobody has felt it in the old way since.

The Prisoner Who Warned Them

They had one in a cage. Why stop.

So they came for the second one, the desire for lust, and this one did not go quietly. It argued. It told them plainly what they were doing, and what it said was not a threat but a description.

Make away with me and the world will cease to exist.

Men who have just succeeded do not hear that sentence the way it is meant. They heard a prisoner bargaining. They put it in with the other one and shut the door and went back to their work.

Not an Egg in the Whole World

Three days.

By the third day somebody went to a nest and there was nothing in it. Then somebody else went to another nest. Hens sat on straw and produced nothing. Nothing anywhere had bred, or wanted to, or would. The whole apparatus of continuation had simply stopped, quietly, without announcement, and it stopped in the barnyard first because that is where anyone would notice.

A world of perfect men, and not an egg in it.

They opened the door.

They Plastered Up His Eyes

It did not walk out untouched. Before they let it go they plastered up its eyes, and it went back into the world half blind, and from that day it gave up inflaming men against their own blood relations. That particular fire, the one that turns a man toward his sister or his mother, went out with the eyes. The rest of it they handed back, whole, because the alternative was an empty planet.

As for the men who ran the experiment, the sky over them was empty the whole time. A rainbow is a reminder, put up for a world that has given heaven a reason to think about water again, and in the generation of the Great Assembly the bow was never once seen, because it was never once needed.

The Sage Who Stayed Outside the Cave

Generations later two men sat over a page of Mishna in the Galilee and came to a teaching of Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai that they could not agree about. His grave was in a cave a short walk away. Elijah went in to ask him.

"Who is with you?"

"The foremost figure of the generation, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi."

"Has a rainbow ever been sighted in his days?"

"Yes."

"If a rainbow has been sighted in his days, he is not worthy to see my countenance."

The greatest living sage in the land stood outside a cave in the hills and was not let in, over weather.