Nechemyah was a powerful leader and influential adviser in the Persian government. He advised Darius, King of Persia, who Jewish tradition identifies as the son of Ahasuerus through Esther, which makes Darius, halachically Jewish. Nechemyah received from the king the right of police power and the right to bring weapons and contingents of armed men with him when he arrived in Jerusalem. He and Ezra planned the program that would provide physical security to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, lay the basis for a primarily agrarian economy and address the deteriorating spiritual and moral climate of the society.

Ezra was a cohen, a sofer, a scribe and the greatest Torah scholar of his time.

He foresaw that the survival of Israel depended upon the Jew’s understanding of and loyalty to the Oral Law.

With the end of the period of prophecy in Jewish life, the masses could no longer rely on the prophets for moral and traditional guidance. Only through understanding the imperative of the Oral Law’s supremacy concerning Jewish practices and values, even in the absence of prophecy, could the Jewish people retain their spiritual creativity and be able to contend effectively with the foreign cultures now swirling around them.

Ezra stayed behind in Babyonia initially after the building of the second Beis HaMikdash. He was worried about the fate of the Babylonian Jewish community if all its spiritual leaders left for Jerusalem. Through his efforts, Babylonian Jewry was left whole, strong and w/o problems of questionable Jewish identities and pedigrees.

When he did move to Jerusalem he found it in a shambles. The walls of the city were in ruins, the markets were open and operating on the Sabbath and knowledge and study of Torah was mainly ignored. Intermarriage had become socially acceptable. Ezra rallied the people to his banner and declared and enforced the supremacy of Torah.

Nechemyah was a member of the AKHG and was E’s companion in leadership. Together they forced the closure of the markets on Shabbos, proclaimed the supremacy of Torah and tradition over other factors in Jewish life, pushed to eliminate every vestige of paganism from Israel’s mist, reintroduced the Hebrew language as the spoken language in Israel, eliminated the Babylonian and Persian, though not Aramaic tongues and forced the dissolution of marriages with non Jewish women throughout Judah.

All of this was accomplished despite great opposition even within the Jewish community itself. It is impossible to imagine the people of Isreal, Jewish survival and Torah life w/o recalling these two great men.