The Builders of Our Survival: A Lesson for the Three Weeks

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 collapsing state. But the Talmud entirely ignores the political noise and his brutal assassination. The Sages chose to immortalize him for one thing only: he built an educational infrastructure for children. Yehoshua ben Gamla looked at a crashing world and realized that if the centralized sanctuary fell, Jewish continuity could only survive if it was carried inside the minds and hearts of individual children. He even regulated class sizes so no student would be overlooked.

A Modern-Day Sanctuary of Continuity

This timeless lesson from the Three Weeks – that we combat destruction by building schools – is exactly where our history bridges perfectly into the life of Dr. Blanche Sosland, who passed away this week in Kansas City.

During the 1990s, I had the immense privilege of serving as a congregational rabbi in Greater Kansas City. It was there that I came to know Blanche and her husband, Neil, as the absolute definition of communal anchors. Though my family and I made Aliyah and moved to Israel in 2000, I have carried vivid memories of the two of them across the decades as a constant, brilliant presence defined by a boundless love of learning and Torah.

In the mid-1960s, Blanche and Neil, alongside a handful of visionary couples, looked at the Kansas City landscape and realized that for Jewish life to thrive in the Midwest, families could not be forced to compromise on heritage or academics. By signing the original charter of the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy (HBHA), Kansas City’s Community Day School, they did precisely what Yehoshua ben Gamla did two thousand years prior: they built a sanctuary of continuity.

Blanche took that ancient pedagogical holiness and brought it into the modern era. As a university professor and a champion for the exceptional learner – gifted children navigating learning disabilities – and as a fierce advocate for emotional safety in the classroom, Blanche dedicated her efforts to ensuring the schoolhouse was a protective haven. Like the ancient High Priest, she believed a community is only as strong as its care for its individual children.

From Destruction to Building

Josephus wept for the end of an era when Yehoshua ben Gamla died. But the Talmud reminds us that because of his schools, the era never truly ended. The walls fell, but the Torah lived on.

As we enter the Three Weeks, weeping for what was lost in Jerusalem, we also mourn the loss of our dear Blanche. The timing is heavy, but the message is clear: we do not combat historical vulnerability with despair; we combat it by building.

Rav Hamnuna said: Jerusalem was destroyed only because schoolchildren there were interrupted from studying Torah…Reish Lakish said in the name of Rabbi Yehuda Nesia: The world only exists because of the breath, i.e., reciting Torah, of schoolchildren.   (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 119b.)

Blanche’s life was a triumphant answer to the challenges of history. The institutions she and Neil founded, the books she wrote, and the generations of children she championed are the living stones of a temple that can never be destroyed.

May the memory of Dr. Blanche Sosland – a true builder of Yisra’el – be an eternal blessing, and may her legacy continue to illuminate the Jewish Community of greater Kansas City.

Baruch Dayan HaEmet.