The King Who Set Zion on Fire and Came Back to Rebuild Her

There is a way the world consoles the grieving, and the sages who shaped Pesikta Rabbati knew it cold. A widower stops weeping when a friend reminds him that another man buried a wife just as beloved and lived. When a great city falls, God sets it beside another fallen city, Nineveh paired with Alexandria, so each ruin can comfort the other. Misery wants a match. Grief is bearable only when you can point to someone whose loss equals yours.

Then they came to Jerusalem, and the method broke.

The Grief With No Equal

This homiletical midrash, assembled in the Land of Israel and reaching its final ninth-century form, opens its meditation on consoling Zion by searching the whole earth for a second Zion to set beside the first. There was none. No city had ever been chosen the way she was chosen, so no city's fall could measure against hers. The usual comfort had nothing to stand on.

So God refused to send a deputy. When Israel went into exile, the sages imagine, He offered them an honor guard of the mightiest dead, raised from their graves to walk them into Babylon. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses and Aaron. David and Solomon. Israel looked at that procession of patriarchs and kings and turned it down. We want none of them, they said. We want only You, for You are our Father and our Redeemer from of old. And He answered that for their sake He would go down to Babylon Himself.

The One Who Kindled the Fire

The midrash drives the point home with a parable that stings. A king sends his barren wife away, but grants her one mercy: take the single most precious thing in the palace. She walks through the treasury, past the gold and the gems, and carries off the sleeping king himself, because he is the only treasure she will name.

Then the consolers line up, and each one fails. Abraham tries and is rejected, because he fathered Ishmael. Isaac, because he fathered Esau. Jacob, because his own house was reduced to slavery. Moses, because he wrote the harsh decrees of the covenant curses. One by one the giants step forward to comfort Jerusalem, and one by one she sends them away. Only when all of them have failed does God speak the line the whole piska has been circling toward. The one who kindled the fire must be the one who pays for it. I set her ablaze, He says, and I alone will rebuild her, and I will become for her a wall of fire round about.

Stones of Sapphire and a Gate of Pearl

What that rebuilding looks like is one of the most luminous passages in all of Midrash. Reading the prophet Isaiah's promise to the afflicted, storm-tossed, uncomforted city (Isaiah 54:11), the sages hear God pledge to lay Zion's foundations in sapphire and set her gates in stones of fire. Rabbi Levi catches the hidden grammar of hope: every time Scripture says a woman has none, she secretly does. Sarah had no child, and bore Isaac. Zion has none seeking her, yet a redeemer is coming to her.

To prove the gems are no metaphor, the midrash sends a young sailor, dispatched by Elijah, to lead Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi into a cave at Lod where the kadkod stones blazed so fiercely the whole town lit up. A scoffer once laughed at Rabbi Yochanan for teaching that the future Temple gate would be hewn from a single pearl larger than any stone alive. His ship sank. At the bottom of the sea God opened his eyes, and he watched angels carving exactly that stone for exactly that gate. The vision closes on the gentlest justice imaginable. In the days of the Messiah a debtor will reach Jerusalem's border, find the road paved with jewels, hand his creditor one stone, and hear only this: the King forgive you.

The Mourners Who Refused to Stop Weeping

Rebuilt stones are not the same as a rebuilt people, and the midrash knows it. Reading Zechariah's call for the daughter of Zion to rejoice (Zechariah 9:9), the sages stop first on the people who earned that joy: the mourners of Zion, who wept morning, noon, and evening for the ruined house and were despised and mocked for it by everyone around them.

The end, when it comes, is harsh before it is sweet. The decrees of the final year arrive one after another with no pause, and only then do the mourners begin to suspect the King Messiah has come. Their hearts still will not settle until famine grinds them down, until their faces are like the blackened bottom of a cooking pot. Then the righteous of the generation throw their prayer flat on the bare ground and confess that, like sheep, they have strayed. The answer is not thunder. I forgive you, says God, and He kisses each of them and sets a crown on every head.

Riding Low for the People With No Merit

The mockers get their reversal. When the days of redemption come and destroying angels move through the world, the mourners of Zion walk in among them and out again untouched, like a guest leaving a friend's house. Those who once laughed sit down and admit their laughter was wasted breath.

And the king at the center of it all is read here as the afflicted Messiah, the one who sat in the prison-house and was mocked by the very people he will not abandon. He calls them his children. He rides low, on a donkey, precisely for the sake of those who have no merit of their own to ride on, leading them home on a road where they will not stumble. The God who lit the fire keeps His word. He comes down personally, He pays the debt Himself, and He does not stop until the last of the mourners is crowned.