Someone else gets the platform. The trust of the community. The influence you quietly believed you deserved. And something in you tightens. The story writes itself: they don’t deserve it, the system is rigged, if I don’t push back, truth loses. It feels righteous. That is exactly what a man named Ishmael ben Netaniah felt about a governor named Gedaliah ben Achikam. He acted on it at a holiday dinner, and the Jewish calendar still marks the day it happened. Three days after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, comes one of its strangest fasts: Tsom Gedaliah, the Fast of Gedaliah, observed on the 3rd of Tishrei. The prophet Zechariah lists it among the fasts God promises will one day turn to joy:
Right now, though, it still hurts, and not for the reason you’d expect. This fast doesn’t mourn a fallen wall or a burned sanctuary. It mourns a man, murdered by his own people, because someone else couldn’t stand watching him hold the position he wanted for himself.
It’s also the subject of a brand new course now live on Bible Plus.
Shira Schechter teaches the new course, and she starts with the plain facts. Gedaliah ben Achikam wasn’t killed by Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar had already destroyed the First Temple and exiled the nation’s leadership. Gedaliah was the righteous governor Babylon appointed over the poor who remained, and under him, Jews began trickling back from Moab, Ammon, and Edom. Vineyards were tended again. The prophet Jeremiah stood beside him at Mizpah. For one brief season, something like hope took root.
Then Ishmael, a descendant of the royal house, decided he couldn’t stomach a commoner holding the power he believed was his. A trusted officer warned Gedaliah and offered to eliminate Ishmael quietly before it went further. Gedaliah refused, called the warning slander, and invited Ishmael to his table on Rosh Hashanah. Ishmael got up from that meal and murdered Gedaliah, the guards stationed with him, and whatever peace the land still had left.
The last Jewish leadership in the land didn’t fall to a foreign army. It fell to envy, at a holiday dinner. The Torah names exactly where that starts:
The commandment doesn’t begin with “do not kill.” It begins with the heart. Our sages call this sinat chinam, baseless hatred, and they teach it’s what destroyed the Second Temple centuries later. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook put it simply: if factionalism and envy emptied the land, only love, tolerance, and real kindness will fill it again.
That’s why the fast comes right after Rosh Hashanah, in the early days of teshuvah, the season of return to God. It asks us to stop treating loyalty to our own side as a substitute for truth, and to notice when we’re praying for permission rather than direction, the way the survivors did with Jeremiah before turning on him the moment his answer wasn’t the one they wanted.
Yet the fast isn’t only grief. While Gedaliah lived, a flicker of Jewish sovereignty stayed lit in the land. His death put it out, which is why our sages count this moment, not the siege or even the burning of the Temple, as the true final blow. The course walks through all of it: Zechariah’s fast days, the full account in Jeremiah 40 and 41, and what this moment in Tishrei still asks of us. You don’t need to be Jewish to take it seriously. You need to read the Tanakh as God’s living word, not backstory for someone else’s testament.
Zechariah promised these fasts would become joy again one day. That promise belongs to whoever is willing to love honestly, obey God even when the answer isn’t the one they wanted, and believe the story isn’t finished yet.
To watch the full course, click on the link to join Bible Plus, today!
