Rabbi Pinhas said in the name of Rabbi Hoshaya: There were four hundred and eighty synagogues in Jerusalem before the destruction. The number came from a single verse — "filled with justice" (Isaiah 1:21) — because the Hebrew letters of meleti, written without the alef, add up to exactly 480. Every one of those synagogues had both a school for Bible and an academy for Mishnah (the earliest code of rabbinic law). All of them were demolished.
"The Lord demolished and had no compassion for all the abodes of Jacob" (Lamentations 2:2). The rabbis read "abodes" as "pleasant ones" — meaning the great scholars who perished: Rabbi Yishmael, Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, Ben Azzai, and others. An entire generation of sages, erased.
Rabbi Akiva once looked at the rebel leader Bar Kokhba and declared: "This is the messianic king." Rabbi Yohanan ben Torata answered him: "Akiva, grass will grow in your cheeks and the messiah still will not have come." The rabbis reread the verse "A star shall arise from Jacob" (Numbers 24:17) — not kokhav, star, but kozav, fraud.
Eighty thousand soldiers besieged Beitar. Bar Kokhba had two hundred thousand fighters, each so fiercely loyal they had severed a finger as a pledge. The sages rebuked him: "How long will you make Israel into blemished men?" He relented and instead tested courage by requiring each recruit to uproot a cedar from Lebanon while riding on horseback.
When Beitar fell, the emperor Hadrian slaughtered so many that the blood flowed in torrents. The rabbis said the blood reached the nostrils of the horses and carried boulders into the sea. Hadrian's soldiers found the children of Beitar wrapped in their Torah scrolls and burned them. The Romans made vineyards from the carnage — they did not need to fertilize their fields for seven years.
Rabbi Yohanan said: "Happy is the one who witnessed the downfall of Tadmor, because that city played a role in both destructions" — supplying eighty thousand archers for the first and forty thousand for the second. Two Temples. Two betrayals. The same accomplice.