[Avodah] 10 shevatim

[T613K at aol.com]

From: Micha Berger _micha at aishdas.org_ (mailto:micha at aishdas.org) 

>>Why does  everyone speak of the 10 lost shevatim?

Didn't Malkhus Yehudah include 3  shevatim -- Yehudah, Binyamin and
Shim'on -- plus the majority of  sheivet/non-sheivet of Levi? <<
 




>>>>>
The claim has been made (I don't know where) that individual  members of all 
12 (13) tribes lived in Yehudah and were exiled to Bavel at  the time of 
Churban Bayis Rishon -- and returned to E'Y at the time of Binyan  Bayis Sheni.  
But they lost their tribal identities and just kind of  assimilated into Shevet 
Yehudah, except for those who had a distinct  memory/family tradition of being 
from Shevet Levi.  
 
Mordechai in the Megilla is identified as being from Shevet Binyamin and  yet 
he is called "Ish Yehudi" so evidently he lived at the time when tribal  
identities were becoming blurred and everybody was just being included in Shevet  
Yehudah.
 
It could be that when Moshiach comes, Eliyahu Hanavi will reconstitute all  
the tribes by telling each Jew exactly what Shevet he is /really/ part of, ben  
achar ben.  Maybe the "lost" tribes will never be "found" because by now  
they have been goyim for too many generations.  But we will still have  twelve 
tribes, just by correctly identifying all the Jews who have been wrongly  
assigned to Yehuda all these years.
 
At any rate, we have two identified tribes remaining today, Yehudah and  
Levi, which by simple arithmetic suggests that *ten* tribes have been  lost.  
(Unless you want to say that there were really 13 tribes, if you  count Menashe 
and Ephraim as two and also count Levi.  In which case, 11  tribes are "lost," 
but most people would count Menashe and Ephraim as one for  this purpose.)
 


--Toby  Katz
=============






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