Tombeau de Zacharie: Le Secret des Malheurs du Monde - Rav Eliaou Hassan

We are in Arazim again with Rabbi Galam and we are in front of the tomb of Zechariah the Prophet. In reality, this person was a very, very great figure and, according to the Sages and the commentators, all the misfortunes of life that we have today, that we are living through today, are, so to speak, because of him. What happened? Zechariah was a prophet who was himself a Cohen, and during the era of the First Temple, he would offer many, many reprimands to the Jewish people, who were behaving badly, and one day they had enough, and what did they do to him ?

They stoned him, they stoned him. They started throwing stones at him and they stoned him, and he died in the Temple. And so afterwards, they buried him here. Now, what happened when they buried him?

Blood came out of his tomb and started to boil, it boiled and boiled and boiled, and that blood was the blood of Zechariah. Many years passed. Then came to Jerusalem the one who would destroy the Temple, namely Nebuzaradan, who was the general of Nebuchadnezzar, and he visited Jerusalem, but he stumbled upon this tomb here. He saw blood coming out, gushing from a tomb.

He was very astonished. He asked the Kohanim, he said, "What is this blood?" They said, "It is nothing, it is just from a sacrifice.""We made a sacrifice and there is blood like that.""Oh, really?" "Like that, boiling like that, that color, it's strange.""Do a sacrifice here.""I want to see if it's true." So they performed a sacrifice and saw that it was not true. He said, "If you don't tell me what this is, I will kill you all." He was going to kill them all. But well, they told him, "Listen, we had a prophet who was giving us reprimands and the people didn't like him very much, and so we stoned him." And there, Nebuzaradan decided to avenge Zechariah.

What is he going to do? He is going to take the entire Sanhedrin and he is going to kill them all. The blood will continue to boil. He will take all the students, he will take all the rabbis, he will take them and kill them all, thousands and thousands, he will take all the children from the schools and the kindergartens, and he will kill them all on a stone like that, thousands and thousands and thousands.

The blood will continue to boil, it will continue to boil. And there Nebuzaradan says, " Zaria, Zaria, I have killed the best among you.""Do you want me to kill them all to calm you down?" And then, what happened? The blood calmed down; it stopped. And so, this is the man who is buried here.

Now, why do I say that all the world's misfortunes are because of that murder? Uh, because there is a verse. "When a prophet and a Cohen are killed on the same day, then it will be the destruction of the Jewish people." That explains why Aaron, at the time of the Golden Calf, refused to be killed rather than make the Golden Calf with the people. Why?

Because at that same time, there was Hur, who had been killed that day, who was a prophet. And he, Aaron, is a Cohen, so he says, "If they killed him, and they kill me too, it's over for the people of Israel." So he did everything he could to try to survive and not get killed. And unfortunately, it happened later in history, and as the Sages say, all the misfortunes of the world, the destruction of the Temple, everything that happened, everything we experience , all the suffering we have had, is because of what? Precisely because we killed that person.

So, it is a very, very symbolic place.