Israel Feasted While Jerusalem Burned and Tobit Refused to Eat

The Feast in Nineveh

They were feasting.

The Temple had been destroyed. The people were in exile. The holiest structure in Jewish life lay in ruins in the land they had been torn from. And the exiled Israelites were eating and drinking and playing harps and making merry, not grieving, not praying, not mourning. The Book of Tobit opens with this image and does not soften it.

The Sin Was Not the Eating

Tobit names what was wrong by reaching back to the prophet Amos: they drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with fine oils, but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. Amos used that image in the eighth century BCE to condemn the comfortable classes of the northern kingdom, the ones who had enough to eat while the covenant frayed around them. The Book of Tobit deploys the same image centuries later to describe exile. The sin is not the feast. It is the not-grieving. It is choosing pleasure over the witness of one's own catastrophe, turning away from what the loss of the Temple means long enough to enjoy an evening's entertainment.

Against that backdrop of collective numbness, there was Tobit. He would not eat with them. He walked through Nineveh on the feast of Shavuot and found a dead man lying in the street, a man no one else had stopped to bury. He buried him. This was, under Assyrian law, a punishable act. The king had decreed that the bodies of Israelites who had been killed were to remain exposed as a warning. Burying them was defiance. Tobit did it anyway, because to leave a man in the street was its own kind of not-grieving.

Two Prayers Heard at Once

What Tobit did not know, when he stood in his grief and his fatigue and his blindness in Nineveh, was that at the same moment in Ecbatana a young woman named Sarah was standing at her window asking God to kill her. Sarah had been married seven times. Each husband had died on their wedding night, killed by the demon Asmodeus before the marriage was consummated. A servant girl had said the cruelest possible thing out loud: you are the one who kills your husbands. Sarah could not disprove it. She prayed for death because continuing to live meant watching an eighth man die because of her.

The Book of Tobit records what happened next with precision: at that time, the prayer of them both was heard before the throne of glory. Two separate prayers, born of separate sorrows in different cities, rising at the same moment and arriving together. God answered both by setting the same solution in motion. He sent the angel Raphael.

The Weight of Memory

Sifrei Devarim, commenting on Deuteronomy, reads Israel's cry in Egypt as an echo of a much earlier silence. The suffering in Egypt was not just physical. It was the accumulated weight of years in which the covenant had been maintained by some and ignored by others, in which the communal memory of who they were kept fraying and being gathered back. When they finally cried out, the cry reached something that had been waiting to respond.

That cry, and what it came from, is what separates Tobit from the feasting crowd around him. He did not have power. He had memory. He knew what the exile meant, what the Temple meant, what the body in the street meant. The feast was louder than he was. The feast is always louder. But memory does not require volume.