This week, the Jewish world enters the Three Weeks—the solemn period of mourning marking the breach of Jerusalem’s walls and the eventual destruction of the Temple. It is a time when we look back at historical ruins and the catastrophic collapse of our ancient state.

But if we look beneath the tragedy of this season, we find a startling blueprint for Jewish survival, engineered by a man named Yehoshua ben Gamla.

The High Priest of Education

In the Talmud (Bava Batra 21a), the Sages eternally bless Yehoshua ben Gamla, declaring that without his decree mandating schools in every single town, “the Torah would have been forgotten from Yisra’el.”

We often imagine him as a quiet rabbi in a peaceful house of study. But the first-century historian Josephus reveals a gritty, high-stakes reality: Yehoshua ben Gamla was actually the High Priest (Kohen Gadol) during the chaotic, bloody final years of the Second Temple. He lived and breathed the exact period we mourn during the Three Weeks. He was an aristocratic leader trying to hold a fractured society together before being tragically murdered in a violent civil coup.

Josephus wept for him as a political casualty of a........

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