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A Year Later, Back to Moshe's Final Words of Blessing -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 1

On Simchat Torah morning, after we parade with the Torah scrolls, we gather around to read the very last words of Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher. The man who could hardly speak departs with an original song – his words, not God’s. And his last sentence in life begins: Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha. Happy are you, O Israel. Fortunate are You, O Jewish people. Who is like you. (Deuteronomy 33:29)

Ashreicha Yisrael. You might recognize the word Ashrei. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people. What must it have been like for Moshe to make those his final words. Moshe, who was born at a time and place when it was against the law for him to live. Whose first recorded words were “Why are you beating your neighbor?” Who faced down Pharaoh, led his people into freedom, brought them to Mt. Sinai. All the desert crises of food and faith Moshe had gone through with them. After all that, Moshe sees his people endure, finally get their act together, and now, they are sitting still one last time. Knowing that what’s just ahead for them is a future and a fight – Moshe sings: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. Mi chamocha – there is no people quite like you.

Last Simchat Torah, October 8, knowing what we knew, we had to decide how we would sing those words. Should we just hurry through and get out of here? And what about our children? Most years our kid-friendly Simchat Torah is a quick early evening on a school day. But last year it was a Sunday morning, with no rush, so we had bigger plans. Would parents even bring their kids here on October 8, knowing what we knew?

We decided to stick to our plan. With our broken hearts, and overwhelmed, we would dance with the Torah for our kids, and for Israelis who already were begging us not to let anyone reach across the ocean and take this too away. Amazingly, parents brought their kids. And after dancing, right down there in this aisle we rolled out the Torah on a table all the way to the back. As the kids were gathered next to the Torah, I got to the chanting of Moshe’s final sentence: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. I so wanted to sing it; to promise it to our kids as Moshe promised the generation he was about to launch. I was overcome with tears, and only thanks to the kids could I sing the words at all.

As hard as it was to sing Ashreicha Yisrael, Moshe’s final sentence has more words. I don’t emphasize them generally because they are not as inspirational. Am nosha b’Adonai, magen ezrecha asher cherev ga’avatecha… ”Fortunate are you, O Israel, who is like you, a nation saved by the Divine, your helping shield, whose sword is your pride. Your enemies shall recant themselves to you, and you on their high places will tread.”

But as I croaked out those words too, I had this terrible thought: not a single part of this Torah verse was true. Not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. An enemy far from recanting, far from going back on its essence -- and who was treading on whom that day.

Was the Torah itself being kidnapped and used to mock us? How could we go just minutes later and begin the Torah again, and with rockets in the sky declare that God created the heavens, and that in the deepest darkness God said “Let there be light”?

Yet, with all the unrelenting loss and pain of the past exhausting year – and even with the escalations of the war this past week and the attack from Iran these past days – I say to you that the critical spiritual thing for us in this new year is to get back Moshe’s final words: Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people, who is like you. We need to believe that this is as true as ever, and true even as never before. Our future here depends on it.

Obviously atrocities and war are in no way fortunate. And I do not mean it is easy to be Jewish just this moment. Only that we are profoundly fortunate to be the Jews of this moment, of this era in Jewish history.

Now believe me, part of me wonders if I’m crazy to say this today. I really just want to reach out and envelop you all in a hug, and allow us to cry together among people who know the many layers of our weeping. Our congregation has many Israelis, and we are closely connected to several families who have lost people on or after October 7, and to at least five people who were taken hostage. Last fall two Beth Abraham families had their Israeli kids here in town taking refuge. We have college students too. My own daughter is a student at Barnard College of Columbia University, so we know painfully what it’s like for a child to live within an institution and a community ripped apart over the past year. Some of our tears are for the loss of dreams of peace, delayed at least for now.

Yet I keep coming back to this thought: we need Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate we are to be this unique Jewish generation, the Jews of America of this era. 

We need to say those words to ourselves. We need to carry ourselves that way outwardly in the world. I thought about talking today about any of particular things on people’s minds right now: the immediate war itself, or questions about our relations with other people here in America and anti-Semitism around us, or concerns about the ethics of the military actions we are connected to, or about Israeli policy toward Palestinians. But before we can talk about or work on any of these, we have to think first about seeing ourselves once again in the light of Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. 

Look what we have built so far. In less than 150 years, Jews have gone from a tiny presence in the United States, having gotten here in flight just like from every other place we have been in exile, to a flourishing community. Here we have not just carved out a corner for ourselves for a while. We have been essential to making our host country into a home, for us and for everyone. From Justice Brandeis to Justice Kagan, American law has been infused with our commitment to law and justice. From Philip Roth to Dara Horn, American literature has been infused with our creativity and our concerns. Healing, science. Comedy. The equality and freedom of people is infused with our ideas and achieved partly with our legwork. The best of America’s story and the best of the American Jewish story are completely intertwined. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute said this summer that even though we have always been a small percentage of the population, the bigness of America drew out the bigness of Judaism. 

In this year’s election, the candidates are a former president whose daughter is a committed Jew, and a sitting vice-president whose husband is a committed Jew. There has never been a diaspora Jewish community like this in all of Jewish history. 

That litany used to be my Ashreicha Yisrael. But in March, Franklin Foer wrote an article in The Atlantic called “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.” His main evidence is the year at many universities, the turning against many Jews as well as against all these aspects of America that Jews have helped build, by many people who will be tomorrow’s American leaders. Foer argues that the conditions that made us happy and fortunate here seem to be going away.

Well he is right that the conditions are not the same. But that is not the determining story. In the past, in other places, it might have been. But there are new seeds of new strengths we have, and they too have been uniquely visible actually in this past year. I’m just going to talk about a couple.

Many of us experienced the year through the words and leadership of the Goldberg-Polins in Jerusalem, Rachel and Jon, parents of Hersh, zichrono livracha. Hersh was kidnapped from the Nova music festival after saving some lives in the attack, and his parents have urged us to advocate for their son and all the hostages every single day in every way possible. His murder a month ago along with five others was crushing.

But how Jon and Rachel have advocated is so dramatically different from what Jews like us have been used to. They hardly talk about Hamas – even in their eulogies for Hersh, they didn’t name the group. They talk about us, and what it means to value and rejoice in human life. 

In July, the Goldberg-Polins and their close circle decided that alongside their political advocacy, it was important to spend a week flooding the world with Torah and mitzvot.

So they organized a study of the whole Hebrew Bible around the clock and around the world, and a concluding international study event. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They organized an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona, a hip outdoor venue in Jerusalem. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages in Jerusalem, and if you weren’t nearby to post on their web page acts of chesed you would be doing all week anywhere. Right away you could see some 200 things, from challah making to opening up one’s swimming pool, to cultivating patience, to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel. It was like they were forcing the World to Come onto this world, and forcing us all to force it.

The Goldberg-Polins speak and act in this personal and international crisis as though the primary center of our destiny is in our own hands, and in the hands of any Jew with power. Of course there is a context. But for Jon and Rachel even hard-core advocacy for the hostages is about what is inside us, no matter the context. 

All year every day they have used the language of this season –  teshuvah, accountability, and forgiveness. At Hersh’s funeral they begged his forgiveness for what they did not do to save his life, though what more could they possibly have done. They have asked us directly as they have asked themselves over and over: What have you not done yet. Who are you, they have asked world leaders and Israeli leaders, and all of us Jews and all Americans.

They described Hersh at his graveside as someone who forced them to open their eyes and their hearts wider than they had known how to. 

In the past, even in the Golden Age, at difficult times we would mainly point our fingers outward. The Goldberg-Polins have showed us that we as Jews are strong enough to make ourselves the moral center of any story, even the most difficult story, even one where other people are also wrong and wronging us.

To have leaders and teachers like this in the Jewish crisis of a generation – Ashreicha Yisrael, how fortunate we are. That we have become a Jewish people strong enough at a time like this to respond to Jon and Rachel, to ground ourselves in both advocacy and mitzvah at the same time, to ask something both from the world and from ourselves – Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. This is what Zionism was supposed to do – in the era of Jewish self-determination, we take responsibility on ourselves as makers of history, even though we are small.

It’s only in this generation that we are starting to learn how to do that. For the first time, our bigger Jewish response has been much more than Never Again.

Some would say like Franklin Foer that this year the strains between Jews and our allies finally broke. But I saw something different up close here in Southern New Hampshire, specifically with my colleagues in the clergy.

My mission for sixteen years in the Nashua Area Interfaith Council has been to press beyond the simple sentiment of “there are many roads to God.” So that when push comes to shove, we’ll know whether we are really there for each other. This year was a big test. 

In October when I heard from almost none of my cherished colleagues, I began to write to them, to tell them what it was like to be a Jew now and also my worries about what would happen to Judaism if they gave us reason to close in on ourselves. Each one of them responded. I have been president of that group for almost a third of my time in Nashua and I was disoriented for a while. At first I just asked them to listen to me, and to pray for us, for the people we’re connected to, as they were praying for the Palestinian people their churches are connected to. They all said yes, of course.

I said at a meeting in the fall that I think the biggest difference between me and most of them is not Jesus but Zionism. A few days later, one of my colleagues reached out to ask me what I meant, and this opened up an amazing conversation about our seminaries and what we each know about the Holy Land. 

I bought about 25 copies of Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which includes Palestinian responses back and I have given it to many colleagues. They have read it; some have shared it in their congregations. Some have opened up to me about their reflections about the role the Christian world has played in pitting Jews and Muslims against each other. Most of our Christian friends have brought more nuance to their words and their discussions in church about Israel-Palestine.

I have done this work not from supplication but from strength, from a foundation many of you have built over decades in Nashua, and immodestly I will say I myself have built. Ashreicha Yisrael – it is fortunate right now to be a Jew in the interfaith community of Greater Nashua. 

And it is good for us to be in the middle of the difficult moral conversations that serious people are having. Because I pushed to see if my colleagues and I could talk this way, I could open my ears more too. So I also can and must say that we here are connected to at least one Palestinian family in New Hampshire who lost many people in Gaza very early in the war. 

It’s not easy, at all. But we can handle it; we are maturing as a Jewish community within America. Our friendships, alliances and our power are still robust, even though the conditions don’t make it as easy. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi chamocha – we are a unique generation.

And part of Ashreicha Yisrael is simply us here now. Doing what we do. Here sustaining one another, singing and thinking and crying together. Gathering as a moral community. Not because we have to, not because it’s as joyful as other years, but because this is who we are.

So Simchat Torah this year will be different, no question. We will have to honor what happened last year. But at some point we will dance and we will finally arrive again at Moshe’s last sentence.

And we will have a choice. All of us, whether what grips you most right now is anger or sadness or fear about the fighting, or the broader future of Jews and anti-Semitism, or the ethics of the conflicts. We are all like Moshe, looking out at a future that has both purpose and war.

We can say that things for Jews in America are going to be like they have been everywhere else for us in exile. And then that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or we can say Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. We are fortunate to be the Jews of this era. Whose future is not determined; who have the possibility through our choices and efforts to define who we are. And rise to the occasion like no other generation of Jews has ever before.

When Moshe composed his final words, he reached back to the first song he taught the people along with his sister Miryam. You might know the words Mi Chamocha from the prayers, and it got there from the Torah’s Song of the Crossing of the Sea (Exodus 15:11). Back then, Miryam and Moshe asked us to look to the heavens and say: Mi chamocha ba’elim, Adonai? Who is like you among the powerful, O God? Now in his final words, Moshe looks up at us and says: Who is like you, O Jewish people. You are powerful, finally, among all the powerful. You are blessed and a blessing. 

In this time of war and heartbreak, may we find a way to hold each other up and see all of our power and all of our blessing. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha – how fortunate are you, O Jewish people, there is no one like you.

Shana Tova.

D'var Torah for Balak: Saying We Are Blessed

It's Friday and here is my current draft of a D'var Torah for Shabbat morning on Parashat Balak, Numbers 22:2-25:9:

In the parasha this week, an enemy of the Jews asks a man of powerful words to curse Israel. To say bad things about us in a way to bring us harm.

And it doesn’t work.

Balak, the king of Moav, fears that Yisrael is going to conquer his land, which is just across the Jordan River east of Eretz Yisrael -- but he has no actual justification for that fear. He doesn’t seem to know that the Divine regards his people as a kind of cousin-people to Yisrael, and even though they are presumably pagans and aren’t necessarily all that friendly, there is no reason why Yisrael and Moav can’t coexist. Which doesn’t prevent Balak from spreading this libel to others and from trying to enlist Bil’am, a sorcerer from the region who has the power of blessing and cursing, and in the Torah those are the kind of words that make things happen, sometime immediately.

It doesn’t work, and the Torah has a lot of fun with both Bil’am the sorcerer and Balak the king, making them look foolish and giving us some laughs at their expense. Bil’am has of course the talking donkey, who sees Divine messengers better than Bil’am does, and Balak looks ridiculous running Bil’am around to different places hoping if they find the right scenic overlook Bil’am will be motivated to issue the curse.

In the end not only does Bil’am not curse Yisrael, but in fact blesses us. I’m not sure we really needed Bil’am’s blessing, but Balak thinks it’s powerful and tells him basically to stop talking -- if you can’t say something bad about someone don’t say anything at all.

One of the remarkable things about this parasha is where it is in the Torah, in particular at this point in Sefer B’midbar (the book of Numbers). We have been reading about problem after problem. The past four weeks have been complaints about hunger, and thirst, and inadequate battle readiness, and unfair leadership, and plagues, and leaders at their wits’ end. A lot of people have died. This is the Torah speaking about us. This is Divine word and it’s not been terribly complimentary about us. Some years it’s fun to read those stories at arms’ length and really revel in how wise and the Torah is about group dynamics and political processes. This year not so much, it’s been very on the nose.

My point is that the Torah and Moshe himself say some pretty horrible things about our people, and they are frustrated words and include some pretty accurate criticisms, and in fact we are bogged down in the midbar (wilderness), not getting anywhere. And then the Torah switches it up. Just when you could think it would be the perfect time for outsiders to pile on and their curses would work at a time of our weakness and weariness -- the Torah says no: We are blessed. You can’t curse us. You can try. But no matter where you position yourself, you can’t curse us. You can want to, you can pay someone to, it just doesn’t work. This people is blessed.

And for a couple chapters it’s not even a struggle. Even a donkey can figure it out, can cut through the political dynamics and the money being spent and say -- don’t go that way. This people is blessed, and there is nothing you can do or say that will change that.

This year, people began trying to curse us since before the sun even set on October 7. I remember talking about this in the fall, it was Parashat Lech L’cha when the Torah first says to Avraham that he will be blessed and through his descendents all people will be blessed, and in my D’var Torah just three weeks after October 7 I was already talking about how we needed to hear those words, because so many people were saying the opposite, about Israelis and about Jews here. It felt so unrelenting already back then, and it has continued these past nine months.

So it’s important now to listen as the Torah says we are blessed, and this is not only the Divine point of view or our point of view but also an outside point of view -- if not an enemy leader, at least a powerful religious figure outside of our own.

It is Bil’am the foreign sorcerer who says: Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov mikenotecha Yisrael. How good: all the places you live, Yisrael, and the places you gather to pray, all the places where you draw in the Shechinah and where you find shalom with yourself or with family, and where you connect among yourselves.

Every time we walk in here the first thing we do is to sing the words of an outsider who blessed us. Who affirmed for us our sense of being blessed or our dream of being blessed.

Now I have to say it is not enough to be blessed from the outside, to have some relief from those trying to curse us, and it’s not enough even to hear words of Divine blessing. We need to bless ourselves and each other.

We have spent these nine-plus months reacting to the curses of others --  pushing back on them; our mood and sense of wellbeing defined by them. When we have heard a blessing we have felt better -- whether from the president of the United States, or seeing our symbol projected in light in Berlin!

We have been in a pattern dictated in this country by the attempted curses of other people, and in Israel profoundly shaped by that dynamic as well.

But being Jewish today means being able to say our own blessings about ourselves in our own words, from our own observations and convictions.

On Monday I participated in a siyyum, a completion of a one-day worldwide reading of the Tanakh, the whole Bible, which was organized by the Goldberg-Polins, the family of Hersh who is a Yerushalmi still captive in Gaza. His parents, Rachel and Jon, said that while they and other hostage families have been tirelessly speaking to the outside world, and lobbying their own Israeli leaders and powerful people around the world for the hostages’ release, they also decided it was important to spend a week flooding the world with Torah u’mitzvot.

So they organized this Torah study. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They had an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages with Leket Yisrael, and to post on one webpage acts of chesed people would be doing this week all over the world. There are at least 200 things pinned to that page, mitzvot of all kinds from taking the challah offering from bread to opening up one’s swimming pool to lots and lots of feeding to reaching out to call friends to cultivating patience to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel.

At the online siyyum, with about two hundred people, Jon and Rachel spoke about their faith, their conviction that Hersh and the others will come home and lead good lives, and they spoke those words toward him. They talked about how the Bible is showing them right now how to be resilient and hopeful. They talked about the importance of peace and safety for Jews and for all people.

This is how we are a blessing. It’s not a one-dimensional thing. It’s so much richer than the one word curses or the short phrase curses that the Balaks have been trying to get repeated over and over, from hill to mountain. And no one can say it quite like us. Bil’am says Ma tovu -- we say Hinei mah tov umah naim, shevet achim gam yachad: look how good and how more than just good, what we are all together.

And we don’t have to be perfect to bless ourselves nonetheless. The whole book of Numbers is still there, all the problems, and in fact immediately after the Bil’am-Balak story the Torah brings us back to ground level and more trouble with Israelite behavior. Rabbi David Kasher proposes that this was going on while Balak and Bil’am were watching from above. But still, says Rabbi Kasher, Bil’am proclaimed that we are blessed.

We are quite good at criticizing ourselves in real-time as Am Yisrael, and we don’t hide away the self-critical parts of the Torah either. But criticisms are not curses. As Rabbi Kasher says, they do not destroy our covenant or block Divine love for us, and they do not prevent Bil’am from noticing that we are blessed.

It would be great to have others stop trying to curse us. But mah tov, how good, if we would also bless ourselves and each other. Mah na’im, how delightful and how sweet we are, just here today on Shabbat. What are the good things you have to say about yourself as a Jew right now? What are the things you are proud of when you look out on your people, your community, your fellow Jews? Say it, and your heart becomes a mountain, and all of us will blessed.

Shabbat Shalom.

An Invitation From a Zionist to Non- or Anti-Zionists: Talk to Me

For the non-Zionists or anti-Zionist in my circle, a sincere set of questions from a Zionist.

I’m actually looking to understand where you are coming from, so these aren’t gotcha questions. I’ve been working on this for a week or more, but held off posting so as not to intrude on people’s marking Yom Hazikkaron, Yom Ha’atzmaut, or Nakba Day. This all came to me after I posted a comment to someone else's Facebook post, and that back-and-forth got me thinking.

I’m not looking for comments here from Zionists (other than myself). I will delete comments that are Zionists’ critiques of anti-Zionism (other than my own), and please don’t take that as a judgment of whether I agree or disagree. I am experimenting in a particular kind of exploration here – a Zionist convening a conversation with non- and anti-Zionists. I am trying to use those labels neutrally and you can tell me which one you prefer, or something else. I think this will be helpful (at least for me and maybe for some who “listen in”), among other things to get a clearer view of the the anti-Zionism-and-anti-Semitism issue.

I worried briefly that by writing these things down I might be giving air to “dangerous” ideas or commitments. But I realized first that I don’t have that kind of power. Everything I am writing is already out there, there is not an original idea here, and it’s better to be in a discussion about them even if I’m not going to change my mind today and neither are you. One of the problems with some of the campus protests is the notion that by even letting someone speak an opposing idea you are normalizing it. It’s all normalized already.

I am also not trying to use a conceptual discussion to divert myself from war, suffering, and moral accountability for myself or anyone else. I hope this might serve in a small way to advance peace.

So first, to check if I understand the bottom line:

An anti-Zionist holds that the entire area in dispute should be governed by either one state based on Palestinian nationality, or by one neutral state based on equal rights for everyone who lives there. (Obviously both those formulations beg a bunch of questions too.) Israel should ideally be replaced by one of those two things immediately or soon or eventually.

I am using the term “state” to refer to a sovereign governmental entity, and “nation” to refer to a specific group that has a common background and is tied to a territory.

Have I got it right so far?

If so, it seems to me there are various arguments one could make for why one or both of these non-Zionist scenarios is superior to the existence of Israel even as one of two states. Which one or ones of these below are your position? Am I missing anything or any nuance or variation? Here’s what I’ve got so far, in no particular order:

#1 Jews are not allowed by God to establish a sovereign state until the Mashiach (Messiah) comes. Unlike Israel, that state will be led by a descendent of King David.

#2 Zionism is bad for Judaism. Whether Judaism is a religion or a culture or whatever it is, as soon as it is wrapped up with nationalism it becomes corrupted and unable to sustain the Jewish people in our ethical, spiritual, or cultural quests and obligations.

#3 Nationalism is inherently problematic for anyone anywhere. It either is or tends toward racism or some form of supremacy. No state should be defined on the basis of any primary nationality.

#3a Zionism/Jewish nationalism is the paradigm case of racist nationalism.

#3a.1 Zionism is both the paradigm of and the prime feeder for racism and racist nationalism in other places.

#4 Unlike #3, a nation is a correct basis of a state (maybe: a nation is the best basis of a state). However, Jews are not the kind of group we mean when we use the term nation.

#4a Some Jews in Israel-Palestine could be defined as a national group, but the Jews who came after some point, maybe 1917 (Britain’s Balfour Declaration during World War I), never had the right to be there and are not part of a legitimate nation. They are or are descended from settler-colonialists.

#4b Jews are and continue to be a national group, but their claim to nationality is not as strong as the claim of Palestinians.

#5 The nation-state paradigm is particularly bad for territories with multiple national groups where one is not the clear majority and/or where there is a history of conflict between two or more groups. The paradigm of a majority with rights for the minority doesn’t work well enough in most such places, nor do arrangements that divide up and assign powers at the wholesale level between specific groups. Therefore no nationality should be the basis for sovereignty in any part of this particular land.

#6 A nation-state can be legitimate at one point but forfeit its legitimacy. Zionism was at some point no better or worse than any other nationalism, but Jews have forfeited the right to a nation-state based on their actions since then. (This might be the same as #3a above.)

#6a Zionism is the paradigm of a nation-state that has forfeited its right to statehood.

So again to pause and check, have I got all the varieties of anti-Zionism? If not, in the comments add a #7 or a variation of one of the others. I’m trying hard to be calm as I write these things down.

What’s next are my follow-up thoughts and questions on each of the above. Again, looking for someone who holds any of these positions to respond and make the case for any of those statements and against my critiques where I have them below. I’m a Zionist and you writing back are not, and we are not going to persuade each other today. If you don’t want to see my critiques or questions, but just respond to my formulations so far, that’s fine and thanks for reading up to here! If it’s more comfortable to message me privately that’s good also.

Probably you’ll have to scroll back and forth to follow my thoughts. I’ll give a capsule of each argument as I go but they are better explained above.

#1 (no Jewish state except by divine intervention) is the forceful position of religious Jewish groups such as Neturei Karta. I think there is a version of this among charedi (“ultraorthodox”) Jews who treat Israel as the regime that they live under and whose laws they follow, but who do not regard the state itself as having Jewish significance.

#2 (Zionism is bad for Judaism) is an argument that in my view only Jews can make. It’s for Jews to decide what the role of Zionism is or should be for us.

Now immediately I ask myself: Am I consistent here with relation to the Christian nationalism that affects me in the United States? As a Jew I guess I can’t argue that a Christian isn’t being true to their Christianity when they say that the U.S. is a Christian nation. That’s an argument Christians can have among themselves. I can argue against that as a statement about the U.S. but not as a statement about Christianity.

Back to the Zionism part of this, I will note that the past few years have been the first time I have spent significant time talking with Jews who hold this #2 position about Judaism and Zionism.

#3 (nation-states are inherently bad) is a principle I understand based on a lot of examples. Already in the 18^th century, this question was very hot in political theory, both within the classical liberal and utilitarian tradition and in the Schmidtian critique of that tradition.

This #3 is something I find hard to apply consistently in the world of today. Even though I live in the U.S., which is not a nationality-based state, very many of the countries in the world are. (Side issue – some on both the anti-racist left and the blood-and-soil or Christian nationalist right argue that the U.S. is or functions as a nation- or faith-based state, and that’s a terrible thing or a great thing. I disagree with both versions of the premise.)

I tend toward what I think I’ve heard Michael Walzer argue, which is that the nation-state is in most but not all places today the best imperfect way to secure human life and prosperity, and in many places human rights as well. The nation-state is certainly not universally just, so this is a sociological question worth asking here and anywhere. To me it’s a pragmatic question, not one of universal principle.

#3a (Zionism is the paradigm of racist nationalism) is the position that has been widely identified with anti-Zionism in the world since the 1960s. It is the version of anti-Zionism that I think people have foremost in mind when labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic. If this is your position, say more, because I can’t understand it as an objective comparison of nations and nationalisms. There are so many nation-states (and other states) which are violent or biased against some group within them or some outside group, with consequences at least as bad as in Israel-Palestine.

I would also note that the mirror version of #3a is what some Jews have said about Palestinian nationalism – that it has been uniquely violent in its actions and rhetoric, in both its nationalist and Islamist forms. I have worked hard to overcome this in myself as a characterization of Palestinian nationalism and nationality. The equation of Arab and/or Muslim with “terrorist” in American culture and politics is horrendous. Using “Zionist” as a slur is the same thing and it’s an anti-Semitic slur.

#4 (Jews aren’t really a nation) is a cousin of #2. To me it is also one of those things non-Jews can’t say. National groups are the ones who attest to their own experience of the things that define nations – common land, language, culture, history, etc. This is the very mistake that many Jews have made toward Palestinians when we have claimed that there is no such thing as Palestinian nationhood or that Palestinian nationhood was invented only recently. I can’t make that argument vis-à-vis Palestine, and others can’t tell Jews that they/we/some of us don’t have the right to define ourselves as a nation.

#4a (Israelis are settler-colonialists) -- a few types of thoughts, and maybe too much to put on this theme in this post, but I will anyway.

One is that groups are more than their individuals, and Jews have had a presence in the land continuously for more than three thousand years, and a consciousness of that presence and a longing for the land even when the numbers of Jews there has been small. If a people have roots in a land, they have roots in a land. To deny a universal Jewish connection to the Land of Israel would be anti-Semitic.

Second, Jews are not in Israel primarily as a Western project. Yes, there are Western Christians who have come to believe there is a role for the Jewish return in their Christian story. Yes, some Western powers have at different times supported Zionism, though not all of them and not all the time. Every single Middle Eastern group has had an imperial or imperial-style power allied with it or against it in the past two centuries.

But Zionism is a Jewish project. Jews drove the migrations to Israel on our own, because of our own ideas and situations. Jews were rejected in Europe as un-European, un-white, un-Christian, etc. They were not organized by the European authorities, but often in spite of them. British policy during the Mandate supported the Jews’ immigration for maybe half the years of their administration, and then turned against the Jews.

The other empirical thing, which I think goes here but I’m not sure, is that the flow of people and groups in and out of the land in question is something that has happened throughout its history since biblical times. Groups have gotten bigger and smaller and bigger again. Significant numbers of Arabs from elsewhere immigrated into Mandate Palestine between the wars, and became Palestinian at that point. Not as many as Jews from elsewhere, but somewhere from 100,000-200,000 Arabs. That doesn’t make them non-Palestinian. I think this kind of argument about who came when works better as a rationale for reuniting Palestinians in Palestine than for removing Jews from Israel or cutting some of them off from Israel.

And in the particular case of Israel-Palestine, coming up with objective indices of indigeneity is even harder. One study found that DNA found by archaeologists from biblical Canaanites correlates more of less the same to Arabs in and around Palestine and to Jews including Ashkenazi Jews (Jews who lived for centuries in part of Europe). Take that for whatever it’s worth ethically or scientifically.

I will say that the rhetoric of expelling Jews from Palestine is not generally what I have heard from the pro-Palestinian activists in my local community. More so in the campus protests. I’d like to know how this point plays in your own non-/anti-Zionist thinking or circle.

#4b I am not sure if I’ve heard this argument articulated much. If it’s your position I’d love to hear more.

I will say that there is a mirror of this argument made by some Jews about Palestinians, and it’s wrong in that direction just as much. When people say that the Arabs have all these countries and why do they need one more, or that Jordan is already the Palestinian state because of its large Palestinian population -- that’s a way of saying the Palestinians aren’t enough a nation to warrant their national rights. The argument doesn’t work for either Jews or Palestinians.

#5 This is a position like #3 (not #3a) that I take more seriously.

It’s one of the reasons I actually am for the two-state principle, with rights for the minorities who remain in the territory for either state. Two states are an attempt to make sure each nation is in a state where they are the vast majority, in order to reduce though not eliminate the tensions between groups. That was a rationale of the 1947 UN partition plan.

You could say #5 is also a critique of two states, linked to argument #3. That neither state will work with any minority within it, given the history and that a completely neutral state is best.

I would also say that if #5 is an argument against Zionism, it could equally be applied to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and possibly Jordan. Each has a different constitutional arrangement and some are not functioning well at all. I wonder if those who hold #5 as the main anti-Zionist rationale have thoughts about those other countries or are as upset by the carnage and death in those places in recent years.

Lebanon is a state that for a long time has tried to assign specific powers to each of its major subgroups, and it has not worked to generate a unified or functioning state. I don’t think any of us, Zionist or not, recommend it as a model for other places.

#5 can be a serious sociological and political science argument and I don’t see anything anti-Semitic about raising its questions. To push that only Israel among the nation-states of the world should give itself up unilaterally as a real-world test of this kind of argument, that’s one of the things one could argue is anti-Semitic or at least unfair.

#6 (Israel has forfeited its prior legitimacy as a nation-state) seems to me like one of the main arguments fueling the intensity of anti-Zionism right now. But tell me if I’m wrong.

If #6 is a good argument, then other states like Germany or Turkey would have long ago forfeited their right to exist and would have been replaced. That is not how the world ever saw it, though it’s true that Germany had a probationary period before essentially getting its independence back. But in fact Israel itself beginning in the 1950s established a relationship with the Federal Republic of Germany, so close to the end of the Shoah (Holocaust). One of the things that gives me hope about Israel-Palestine is the ongoing and uniquely positive relationship that Israel and Germany have.

So one critique of this argument, from the anti-Semitism angle: Since this has never been applied, even in the worst cases, why is it applicable only to the Jews?

#6a The labeling of Israel as a genocidal state across the generations is a way of saying this is the most evil, worst form of nationalism imaginable. This justifies on its terms singling out Israel as the one state on the planet that should not be a state.

I do not regard Israel’s actions as genocide. If you do, I don’t expect me to persuade you otherwise in a paragraph. I do understand why Palestinians are worried about their continued existence as a people and I don’t question the urgency with which this is raised and pressed. When I say it’s not genocide, I mean that I do not see Israel trying to annihilate all Palestinians, eliminate the Palestinians from the land, or remove all traces of their culture. To be clear, I do think Israel is guilty of very serious wrongs against individual Palestinians and the collective. It is also clear that there are powerful Jewish figures who dehumanize Arabs and do in fact want to remove Palestinians from part or all of the land. From within my own Zionism and Judaism, I have to work against those things.

Terms like “genocide” and “anti-Semitic” are meant to be descriptive, or at least to sound descriptive. They aren’t always. They can be ways to justify shutting down conversation, or delegitimizing or radically othering. So I’m in the position of both acknowledging why people raise the issue of genocide, and why it’s a conversation I have to be willing to have with people -- and also wanting others to see why calling Israel a genocidal state lands as an anti-Semitic move to single out Zionists/Jews in a threatening and dangerous way.

And again, I am noticing the ways many Jews single out Palestinian nationalism as having a uniquely cruel and violent history of terrorism that justifies turning away from all Palestinian national claims. If I turned around what I wrote in the previous paragraph, I would say both that Palestinians have what to answer for morally and politically, and also that other groups in the world who have fought for self-determination have engaged in horrible violence and yet their opponents have acknowledged them and made agreements with them, and coexistence has been possible despite the violent history (e.g. Northern Ireland).

So, there you have it. That’s my attempt as a Zionist to understand the arguments against Zionism, and some of my commentary on anti-Zionism. Your turn now, anti-Zionists and non-Zionists, speak to me if you like. Whether you are Palestinians or linked most directly to Palestinians, whether you are Jewish, or however you’ve come to that position in a way that is urgent for you. Thank you for listening so far, and reply to me or engage with me if you wish.

Yom Hashoah Remarks 5784 (2024)

This is what I said at the ceremony of lighting candles at the end of our annual Holocaust Remembrance Program in Nashua which the Jewish community holds at Rivier University in conjunction with the school, our Catholic partner in remembering. After the thank you's I said this:

We came here this evening to learn and to mourn. We learn to pick up lessons, and charges -- but we mourn just because. Not because everyone whose memory we honor was righteous or heroic or resilient. But just because they were ours.

We comfort each other, and we comfort especially those who are mourning a loved one whom you knew, or whom you might have known if not for the Shoah.

How many candles we could light. If we wanted to recite the names of every Jew who was lost and began today and did not stop, we would be here until the start of next spring.  We honor the memory of six million Jews and millions more – Roma, LGBTQ+, disabled, political opponents of the Nazi regime. We weep for every person who lost a life, and we weep for those who survived but lost loved ones, or whose body or soul was wounded forever by those who acted and those who stood by. 

As Jews we are grateful for you who have come to sit with us and around us as we grieve. Because alas, even our mourning has become contentious. We Jews have been told this year by too many that we cannot simply mourn our dead. That we cannot share the names and faces of our dead and our captives. That our pain is not significant enough. Among the many shattering things about last October 7 is that survivors of the Shoah had to go through it or see it, in Israel and here. So it is precious to have not just our own Jewish place but a public place, where we can mourn.

This year the charge of genocide is being directed against us. Jews in Israel are not engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people. Jews here are not supporting a genocide against Palestinians.

I am an educator and a member of the state Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education, so for those who say something else than what I jsut said and want to talk about it I offer myself to listen, to hear the pain of others and not just hear it but acknowledge it and the mourning and anger with it, and also to explain why I just said that the death and terrible suffering in Gaza is not genocide. If you need to have that conversation, or know someone who maybe does, if you have a young person in your life for instance, please come get my number or share it.

We often ask ourselves as Jews how much to devote our energies to the safety of Jews everywhere and to anti-Semitism, which has increased in all directions, and how much to work as allies to other groups who experience bias and intolerance and more, and need us with them. There is yet another part: As Jews we have to deal with the racism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias within us.

I have them, in ways I know and in ways I continue to discover. We have people within our Jewish collective who are powerful who dehumanize Arabs and who do not hide their wish actually to  remove Palestinians from their communities in many parts of the Land of Israel. We have to take responsibility for that. We have to live with the knowledge that in our hands are the lives, dignity, and freedom of another people. Not in our hands only, to be quite sure -- but still, much of it in our hands.

We have been insistent that the people of this country learn to see anti-Semitism is not just its overt forms but its most subtle forms, not just its physical forms but also its ideological ones. We have achieved support for that at the highest levels of American society and government. We have succeeded in passing a law in New Hampshire that every young person explore these things, even if they know not a single Jew personally, just because they are American. How could we not ask the same kind of thing of ourselves.

We have set a high standard for observation and nuance. We cannot be the one group not in the kinds of conversations everyone is having, with that level of nuance, even though we are in such pain and it is so hard.

Nor should we want to be. Looking at ourselves, doing our teshuvah, is not a reward to terrorists. It has absolutely nothing to do with them. It is on the contrary about who we see when we look at ourselves with the glorious third eye that sees us as the Divine sees us. It is how we know after the Shoah that we are still here. It is how we know, after everything, who, we, still, are.

We came here tonight for hope, in the story of people who were here for us when that took tremendous courage. We have heard a story that makes us less lonely as Jews, and it’s a story that might inspire us to be more courageous ourselves. This is an evening to see glimmers and sparks and beacons, not only in the past. To feel love and understanding across difference in this very room.

And we came here tonight to remember, to light candles because flame is both destruction and light. Let us light these candles, and bring to light again the beloved souls we are remembering here.

 

Being Jewish Is More Than Anti-Anti-Semitism

This was my D’var Torah for Shabbat morning, March 23, 2024.

This is my closing address for our six-week conference of the Society for the Advancement of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy.

Today is Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat that comes before Purim. Shabbat Zachor is the dark set-up for a zany festival.

Zachor means “remember.” We are charged in the Torah to remember the particularly brutal attack on us by Amalek in the desert, and that single attack gets a treatment that even Pharoah doesn’t get for his years-long campaign of killing and enslavement. How on-the-nose is that for this year. Zachor in our era became a watchword for the Shoah, for Never Forget.

Of course in the Torah zachor means other things too. It’s in the Ten Commandments as zachor et yom hashabbat, l’kad’sho – remember the day of Shabbat to make it holy. It’s l’ma’an tiz’k’ru at the end of the Shma -- remember the mitzvot and do them. And often it is remember the Divine who rescued you from slavery and brought you to a land flowing with milk and honey. Zachor is also a prayer we fling at God in the Torah – remember us, your covenant, our ancestors and their kindness and loyalty. Remember, God, to be who You are supposed to be in this world.

“Remember” as a concept in Torah is about bringing something to the forefront that is fundamental, but that we might have lost track of. All those zachors are hyperlinked with each other. So Shabbat Zachor is about bringing to the fore what it fundamental about us as Jews, when we are re-experiencing the confrontation with Amalek. Amalek is a symbol of physical threat and also represents our opposite: the ones who do not have awe for the Most Awesome One, and who choose the weakest to attack and kill rather than to help. The thing is: How do we pour energy into remembering Amalek without forgetting who we ourselves are.

Or to put it more simply – during a year of anti-Semitism like this, how do Jews remember to define ourselves as more than anti-anti-Semites.

There are three verses in the Megillah that I want to use to suggest an answer. One is from the beginning of Haman’s plot, one is the moment Esther decides to act, and one is after it’s all over.

Here is how Haman sells his plot to King Achashverosh, in chapter 3 of the Megillah (3:8-9): There exists one nation, dispersed and spread out among the nations, and their laws are different from every nation, and the laws of the king they do not do, and for the king there is no value in letting them be. If it seems good to the king, let it be written to make them vanish and I will weigh out ten thousands kikar of silver….

There is something perennial in this description of Jews are not fitting – not even fitting into categories of group that describe anyone else. We’re not in one place, we’re not just a religion, we’re not just a nation, and therefore we are hard to understand. And there is something so modern about Haman’s ancient description too. Noah Feldman recently described anti-Semitism as “shape-shifting”: “In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment. In antisemitic discourse, Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live.”

So for many of those who regard capitalism as the fundamental evil of the world, Jews are identified as the secret bankers or by now the not-so-secret ones. For those who see immigrants as the big threat, Jews are the organizers of the “great replacement”, squeezing people of European origin and arranging to bring in people of color from Africa or Latin America. But for many who regard racism as the essential problem in America, the Jews through the Israel Defense Forces are the master trainers behind the most brutal practices of the police. If it’s imperial, Western exploitation that is the root of all evil, then Jews are the paradigmatic white colonialists. If it’s the corruption and weakness of Arab governments that are the problem, it’s because the Jews are occupying al-Aqsa or buying out Arab leaders, or manipulating the Americans. Etc., etc.

In each case, it’s like Haman said about the Jews – they are everywhere, they do what they want, and what would make our world better is exactly what these people don’t want. So it would be better if they were gone.

And there is always someone of stature who will listen because they are threatened by whatever that core problem is and desperate for an answer, or because there is money in going along. And once this gets out, there are plenty of people who buy into the problem statement and never thought about the real solutions, so they want to be on board and they will kiss Haman’s ring. And you never know when a Haman will speak to an Achashverosh and set all this in motion again in a dramatic way, as we are experiencing now.

Anti-Semitism isn’t about real Jews, but the reality is that we are the ones who attract Hamans all the time, and they aren’t just talk.

It’s real, and all of the anti-Semitisms I described are active and more, and not only in connection with Israel. I don’t pretend to be certain about what it means for us this year entirely. I was really sure that once Thanksgiving was over the campus protests would be over, and boy was I wrong.

Each time there is another anti-Semitic happening we are retraumatized, some of us even more than others, and each time our dreams of redemption absorb a blow.

We have to act, but the question is who are we when we do. Does zachor just mean to point these things out to other people relentlessly and keep our anger going to power us through?

And that brings me to a second verse, the next turning point, in chapter 4. Everyone knows Haman’s plot but Esther is just finding out about it from Mordechai. He sends her this message (4:14): If you stay completely silent in this time, relief and rescue will come to the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will vanish, and who knows if for a time like this you have arrived at royal power.

Mordechai seems to say: This too shall pass, because it always does. The only variable is how, and whether you be in that story or not. You have arrived at royal power, higa’t lamalchut. The best thing for us is that you be the one to orchestrate our response, from that power.

As Jews we think we are not powerful. Or we are afraid that if we say to ourselves that we are, we will give up the moral authority that comes from being targets and having a history of oppression. And we are afraid that if we act out of our power, we will be identified with whatever is evil about the power structure in our world and vilified even more.

But Esther hears what Mordechai says and she decides that she has power, she has malchut. Yes, it is royal power in a political sense. But in the Kabbalah malchut is also the name for the closest that spiritual power gets to infusing our bodies and our world. Malchut in the Megillah is political power infused with spiritual power.

For four decades, we are more powerful than Jews have ever been. More powerful than the Jews who stood at Mt. Sinai and more than the Jews of the kingdom of David and Solomon. In Israel, to be sure, we are powerful because no conventional army or other group can threaten the existence of the state any longer. In this country, Jews since the 1980s have been prominent whether the administration is Democratic or Republican, not just the Henry Kissinger-type Jews by name only but people identified publicly by Jewish values and religion.

Which means that we are powerful even when we are in danger and when we are attacked. This week in Israel was the funeral of Daniel Peretz z”l, a soldier who was killed on or just after October 7. He had been missing ever since and only just now was there conclusive evidence that he was dead. There was a funeral and his family had only some of his blood to bury; they wait for his body to be returned along with all the hostages. The rabbi at his funeral said, “We are not weak. We are not helpless. Daniel did not fall in Auschwitz, and he did not fall in Bergen-Belsen. He fell as a hero of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

It makes a difference if we see our power, our malchut, even when we are struggling and even when God forbid Jews are killed. Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi said recently that the core thing is the difference between victimhood and vulnerability. It’s impossible after October 8, he said, for Israelis to see themselves as victims anymore. We try to hold onto victimhood as a way to get sympathy from the world, as a way around the arguments about the war. Yet the answer to Hamas and to anti-Semitism in the world can’t any more be our victimhood and it won’t be sympathy.

Because we have malchut, we have allies, some of whom respect us and some of whom love us and some of whom just find value in us instrumentally. Because we have malchut, we can take risks, we can go to places and be in conversations that are uncomfortable, and we don’t have to win over everyone today, or to win over everyone period. Because we have power, we don’t have to fear every single social media post that is ridiculous.

Because we have power, we know that we are not vanishing even when others aren’t seeing us, and we can value ourselves and other Jews no matter what other people are seeing or saying. Because we have malchut, we can even look critically at ourselves while we are fighting, whether that fighting is on the battlefield or in political debate.

It is better, the Megillah says, for us to do that, rather than wait for someone else to protect us or to be the moral voice in this moment that rescues us or forces us to act the right way.

Which brings us to the last verse I want to cite, from Mordechai’s instructions at the end of the Megillah about how Purim should be remembered forever (9:22): As the days when the Jews rested from their enemies, and the month that was turned around for them from sorry to joy and from mourning to festive joy, to make them days of feasting and joy, and sending portions each person to their neighborhood and gifts for the poor.

These verses establishing Purim don’t specifically mention Haman at all, and they don’t revel in the killing of tens of thousands of people to the degree that non-Jews were actually afraid to be seen as not-Jewish.

We are not in the “after” of the war that began on October 7, or the ripples out from that. We are reading the Megillah “during.” We are also eating our hamantaschen and exchanging our treats while people are starving in Gaza, and while a great deal of that responsibility lies with Hamas, we have part of the responsibility for that starvation. We can’t this Purim tell a story that’s over – not for the hostages, and not for any of us. And in the future we won’t be able to tell a simple us-or-them story when it is over -- yes about the day of October 7 but not about the days after.

Mordechai and Esther drop the mitzvot of mishloach manot and matanot la’evyonim into Purim. They are a tikkun, a repair, for the worry that we will read only a story of might against might, and that we will only remember and tell about our vulnerability and nightmares. These practices remind us that the Megillah is not only a story of successful anti-anti-Semitism, but also a story of malchut, of friendship, of solidarity, of prayer, of trusting Esther and each other.

In this vein, at a recent conference in Israel called Hasmol Ha-emuni, “The Faithful Left”, Rabbi Daniel Epstein gave an arresting speech. After saying that even though right now questions of security and strategy are pressing, and questions of life and death, Rabbi Epstein said the fundamental question right now must be: Who are we.

Who are we as Israelis, as Jews, as human beings?

I am who I am because I relate to the other, to the stranger, despite the enormous spiritual difficulty in doing so.

As I would a person like me, someone who deserves freedom, dignity and humanity.

Our Sages taught: “Who is wise? One who learns from every person” -- It is difficult to learn from every person, when your enemy denies you the very title of “person”, and when you do not see in him a person. But in order to learn from every person, you must first see them as a person. This is not surrender, nor is it a magic bullet, it is simply the hard work that is incumbent upon us.

And maybe you will say this is not the time -- but this is exactly the time.

If I am not for myself who will be for me;

And if I am responsible only for myself, am I still even me

So -- if not now, when.

So Mordechai and Esther make sure that in telling the story of Purim, we tell about who we were in the middle of it, when the outcome wasn’t known, about how we found each other again. And they ask us to make Purim a day to stretch ourselves as mensches.

And the Megillah says the Jews accepted this way of framing Purim and will forever remember it this way, that same word “remember” yet again: v’zichram lo yasuf mizar’am (9:28).

*****

We have to work against anti-Semitism, and we have to be more than just anti-anti-Semites. And it’s important for the world to see how do we both of those things. All the zachors of the Torah are hyperlinked. They are heavy responsibilities. But my many months of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy make me hope they might be not heavy so much as hearty. That inside each hamantasch we get tomorrow -- each pastry pocket into which we have transmogrified Haman – we might taste a different zachor, a different sweet and hearty filling. May we get to savor and digest them all.

Shabbat Shalom, and Chag Purim Sameach.

Adar Conversations Continued: Esther and Responding to Anti-Semitism After October 7

Rabbi Karen G. Reiss Medwed and I recorded this conversation last night, and you can watch it on YouTube or listen as a podcast. The Megillah (the biblical Book of Esther) is a story of anti-Semitism set in the Diaspora in a multiethnic empire where Jews were living in peace. How did the Jews of the story see themselves in biblical Persia, according to the biblical text? What were the various ways they responded to being a minority and to anti-Semitism, and how did that unfold? How in particular did Esther view herself, act, adjust in real time? How should we take the end of the Megillah, the forceful and violent Jewish response described there?

All of this hits us differently after October 7. Karen and I walk through each part of the biblical story and reflect on how different parts resonate today and might answer some of the dilemmas we are facing. We recorded a week before Purim 5784/2024, and much of it reflects the year and also the particular moment during this war.

 

 

To read the biblical book of Esther (the Megillah): https://www.sefaria.org/Esther.1?ven=Tanakh:_The_Holy_Scriptures,_published_by_JPS&lang=bi

To continue this conversation with us, e-mail [email protected] and/or [email protected], and feel free to post a comment here as well.

Conversations Toward Purim: Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy for 5784 (And Beyond?)

To listen to this as a podcast recording, click here.

You can watch, or read the same thing just below the video thumbnail.

This is an introduction to a few conversations about the festival of Purim and the months of Adar in the Jewish calendar. I am releasing this on March 7, 2024, the 27th day of Adar Alef in 5784, which I mention because it’s the first Purim since October 7, 2023. I started thinking about this particular Purim even before last Chanukkah was over, in December of 2023. I have always loved Purim, and the chag, the festival, has deepened for me at every stage of my adult life, starting in college. But this winter I found myself both grasping for Purim more than ever, and wondering how we could possibly celebrate this year.

October 7 was itself a festival; it was Simchat Torah in Israel. As I am recording today the subsequent war is still going on, with thousands dead and wounded, Israelis and Palestinians, more than 130 hostages still in captivity in Gaza, and so much human suffering and ongoing trauma. On the one hand, Purim seems so on the nose right now – an attack on Jews seemingly out of nowhere, the mobilization of Jews everywhere in armed response and in advocacy to the world’s superpower, and in some cases Jews have gone back to masking themselves especially at some universities. Usually at this time of year I’d be making or sharing funny videos, like this: [insert]. But the thought of celebrating through all of this seems almost profane.

On the other hand, I have long thought that Esther is the text, and Purim is the chag, that are most true to modern Jewish experience especially in the diaspora. So maybe the Megillah and Purim are here to catch us this year. Maybe there is an Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy that will at least hold up a clear mirror for us, and perhaps even guide us or at least map our situation a bit better. I know how much I need that.

So here is a first sketch of that map, and the ways the story of Esther, the Megillah, and the festival of Purim might be what we need right now. These elements I hope to follow up in conversations with other Jewish teachers between now and Purim.

I want to start with a sort-of cryptic description of the biblical Jews of imperial Persia at the time of Esther’s story, from a midrash found in the Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Shabbat page 88a. You can see it here. But you don’t have to look at it or remember it; I’ll keep going back to it and picking up its components.

The midrash starts with a quote from the story of the Israelites standing at Mt. Sinai about eight hundred years before Purim, give or take. The quote is part of a verse from Exodus 19 about the giving of the Ten Commandments, and it says:

"And they stood beneath the mountain" (Exodus 19:17).

Rabbi Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa said: This verse teaches that the Blessed Holy One inverted the mountain above them like a vat, and said to them:

If you accept the Torah, that's good, and if not, there will be your grave.

Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here there’s a substantial piece of knowledge that is an objection to the Torah!

Rava said: Even so, they went back and accepted it in the days of Ahashverosh, as it is written toward the end of the book of Esther (9:27): "The Jews fulfilled and accepted" (Esther 9:27) -- meaning they fulfilled what they had previously accepted.

End of Talmudic quote. It’s in kind of a code, the analogies aren’t at all obvious to today. But I want to poke and pull at this text because it’s going to be helpful. The starting point is a comparison between the Jews of Mt. Sinai and the Jews of Shushan, the Persian imperial capital at the time of Queen Esther. And in this comparison in the Talmud, it’s the Jews of Shushan who come out way higher.

That seems crazy, or at least very unexpected. There should be no comparison at all between the Jews in our most holy book and the Jews of the silliest of our holidays. Yeah, both groups are in the larger Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh – but the Jews of the Megillah are just barely in the Bible according to many of the rabbis of the Talmud, who thought of leaving the Book of Esther out entirely.

In the Torah, there are the Jews of the Mt. Sinai generation who received a direct Divine communication, who were eating every day manna, food that came to them in a direct delivery from the Divine down from the sky. The Jews at Sinai were experiencing Torah on a regular basis as a fresh and brand-new teaching full of mitzvot, full of very specific responsibilities. 

In the Megillah there are Jews, but they are so different. The only Jewish thing about them was that they called themselves Jews! Except when they didn’t because they didn’t want people to know they were Jews, and then they named themselves after Persian divinities like Ishtar and Marduk. At the start of the Megillah there aren’t even any Jews mentioned at all –  if it wasn’t in Hebrew you wouldn’t even know it’s a Jewish book. When we do first meet Mordechai, a Jew willing to identify himself publicly, the only substantive Jewish thing about him is that he wouldn’t bow down to another person. The Megillah generation of Jews don’t seem like Torah people or God-connected people at all.

So how could Rava, in this midrash in the Talmud, say that without those Jews, we couldn’t have a valid Torah?

Well for one thing, the Jews of the Megillah live in the Persian empire, a huge area of 127 provinces, each of them culturally and ethnically distinct. Jews live everywhere among all of these peoples, at a time when some Jews also live in Eretz Yisrael, in the land of Israel. The Jews at Mt. Sinai are living in a one-of-a-kind world in the wilderness, all by themselves, not in their land yet and not really anywhere. 

So score one for the Jews of the Megillah as more relevant for us Jews today than the Jews of the Torah. Rava in the Talmud might be saying that it’s easy to accept Torah when God talks to you directly and everyone around you has had that same experience. But it’s Jews like the ones in the Megillah whose commitments are more like our commitments, and until Jews like the ones in the Megillah decide what they are committed to, the Torah isn’t fully here in the world.

Then we’ve got this idea of Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa about God turning the mountain upside-down over the Jews’ head and threatening to drop it on top of them. That’s so weird. But the midrash works in metaphors, and part one of this metaphor is the Hebrew word for inverting, which is kafa, the letters כ פ ה kaf, phay, and hay. It means both to turn something upside-down and also to coerce.

And wouldn’t you know that in the Megillah, one of the key words is a word for turning something upside down. It’s got the same three letters but in reverse order – instead of kafa it’s hafach, ה פ כ hay, phay, chaf – and the way the Megillah describes things in that world is v’nahafoch hu, things got turned upside-down.

In the Megillah, one of the big themes is that everything gets turned upside down, over and over. The story starts with peace for Jews, then comes a threat from Haman (boo) and he gets the king’s support, then Esther gets the king on board on our side. At the start the king gets sick of one queen, Vashti, because she’s headstrong and might provoke a feminist movement, then he chooses a seemingly opposite queen, Esther, who seems hidden and meek, but then she turns into a very powerful feminist mastermind. The Jews are nondescript members of this huge empire, then astonished at what’s happening, and then defend themselves with force. The Jewish world turns upside down again and again.

So why does Rav Avdimi say that Mt. Sinai is the thing that’s upside-down? I think what Rav Avdimi is saying is that there is something upside-down about the way the Torah presents the world, upside-down in a way that can also be oppressive. The Torah makes the world seem very orderly and coherent. Obey these mitzvot and things will go well, or break the covenant and things will fall apart. There’s a mitzvah for every situation and every experience. Even the way the Jews live in the wild, scraggly wilderness for forty years is in a camp organized in a geometric pattern, an order imposed on nothingness.

But Rav Avdimi is saying that’s actually upside-down thinking. The world isn’t like that, and it’s oppressive to think that it is. If all you can think of is that moral behavior gets rewarded and immoral behavior gets punished, you’re going to feel completely topsy-turvy when that’s so obviously not what is happening.  Or, you’re going to feel like a huge mountain is about to collapse on top of you.

In contrast, the Jews of the Megillah know that life is not that consistent or coherent. Jewish experience is unpredictable, and it flips from terror to celebration, and back and forth many times. Morality is not always rewarded. The Divine is not clearly evident in the Esther story; if we seek the Divine, we have to be ready to perceive divinity in ways that are not revelations everyone sees.. It’s more right-side-up to understand all that and accept it, and then to decide anyway to live right because it’s the right thing to do, not because the world always makes sense. So score two for the Jews of the Megillah, who can find a way to be grounded in Torah wisdom even when they don’t know which way is up.

That’s where we are especially this year, when the shock of October 7 and the aftermath, and the shock of how people around us have reacted to it, have been dizzying for months on end.

The metaphor of the upside-down mountain has a part two, and it’s the way that Mt. Sinai is compared to a vat that is held over the Jews’ head. It’s an unusual word in the Talmud, gigit in Hebrew, and it might well refer to a vat of wine.

Why does Rav Avdimi compare Mt. Sinai to a huge open vat of wine about to be dumped out on top of us? You might have said the Torah is the most sober thing in Judaism. Serious business about laws and responsibilities and our history. The Megillah, though, starts off with a six-month drinking party in honor of King Achashverosh, and every time something significant happens in the story there’s drinking.

And in another place in the Talmud, it says that on Purim you’re supposed to get drunk or into an intoxication-like or dream-like state of mind called ad d’lo yada, “until you don’t know.” Specifically: until you don’t know the difference between Cursed is Haman (boo!) and Blessed is Mordechai, Arur Haman (boo!) and Baruch Mordechai. You’re supposed to get yourself that disoriented. 

In the midrash in the Talmud, it’s Mt. Sinai that’s being compared to a whole lot of wine, and Rav Acha bar Yaakov says: Hey, this is a big thing to know about the Torah. Knowing this is connected to not-knowing the difference between Mordechai and Haman (boo!) – it’s the same Hebrew root-word, moda’ah and lo yada. I think Rav Acha is saying that the Torah on its own without the Megillah is overpromising what you can know for sure. The Jews standing at Mt. Sinai didn’t know as much as we think they did. But the Jews in the Megillah were in a constant state of not knowing enough about their situation and even about themselves.

At a key moment in the Megillah (Esther 4:14), when Mordechai gets word to Queen Esther about the plot against the Jews, he tells her: Who knows if for a time like this you’ve become royal. Mi yode’a. He doesn’t say he knows for sure that’s why she’s queen, like it was obviously divinely ordained. Instead he just says who knows, maybe, so act like it’s true because it’s the only way to act that makes sense.

The Megillah says even when you’re not sure, act on the basis of what you can know, which is how to be there for people and for what’s right. Purim is not about getting drunk or escaping, but coming back from those states and getting clear about some things. Recognize what complete moral unclarity feels like, so we can look into our regular messy world with moral clarity. So score a third point for the Jews of the Megillah over the Jews of Mt. Sinai. We have to figure out too this year what it means to act out of solidarity, with Jews and with suffering Palestinians, when we really aren’t sure what our situation is and what our power is.

I’ll say here a quick thing about the Purim theme of masks. The Jews of the Torah were really by themselves in the desert, just them and God, so they didn’t have this issue of deciding how or whether to reveal themselves to other groups of people. The Jews of the Megillah were interwoven with the 127 other peoples of the empire, and were very much in the dance of showing themselves vs. blending in vs. wondering how dangerous it was to be in the open. That’s a fourth way that Jews of Shushan are relevant to us in a way the Jews of Mt. Sinai aren’t as much.

A fifth thing is the figure of Esther herself as a leader and rescuer, along with Mordechai, in comparison to Moshe and the other leaders of his time. I can’t even sum this theme up for this introduction, but I very much want to talk about that and expand on it in one of my upcoming conversations.

But I do want to say something here about the response to anti-Semitism, which is this year the major reason Purim is so relevant. 

For the Jews at Mt. Sinai, it was clear what to do about Pharaoh and about the nation of Amalek, who had attacked the Jews shortly before they got the Torah. Be separate, get away, fight back, trust God. I’m oversimplifying of course, and even if it was clear it wasn’t easy to do these things.

But for the Jews of the Megillah, when the threat came on the scene through Haman (boo!), himself a descendent of Amalek, it wasn’t clear at all what to do or what to think.

Especially in Shushan, the capital, the Jews at first are simply astonished and confused, and we can relate to that this year. They weren’t deciding to separate from their surroundings or to go to Eretz Yisrael, which they could have done with no one stopping them and without an army, unlike the Jews of Mt. Sinai. The Jews of the Megillah don’t say that King Achashverosh is like Pharaoh. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – under Esther’s leadership they eventually make the king their key ally.

Eventually they do defend themselves, and they go on the offensive. This year for the first time I think I understand emotionally what it means in the Megillah that the king could not just rescind his edict. It’s not that simple. In the story no one knows just how supportive all the people of the empire are to the anti-Semitic edict deep down, once it’s said out loud. The Jews certainly responded with overwhelming violent force. All of it is so familiar.

But Esther ordains that when they look back on all this afterward, they can’t just write down all the horrible things that happened, and how they gathered with other Jews and fought back. They would also give meals to their neighbors, mishlo’ach manot, and gifts to poor people, matanot la’evyonim. Somehow they would need to integrate a fierce fighting spirit with a generous one. They would use this story of anti-Semitism and topsy-turvy not to say that self-protection is the whole answer for Jews, not to say that turning inward is the only option, but to build community on the basis of love and to radiate generosity despite it all. And I think the Megillah means not just to other Jews.

Esther’s new festival of Purim would be about the threat to Jews and about Jewish power and about Jewish values. It would be actually a microcosm of the most important things about Jewish community and the ethics of Judaism – a huge threat and the best things about us rolled into one festival.

That’s Rava’s point in the Talmud about why we should see the Jews of Shushan as the ones who really got the Torah, even more than the Jews of Mt. Sinai. It’s why our tradition compares Purim to Yom Kippur, the single most morally intense day of the Jewish year. So score a sixth point for the Jews of the Megillah as relevant uniquely for us today, even more than the Jews of the Torah.

I am saying this last part, about anti-Semitism and the Megillah’s idea of how we respond, with far more certainty than I actually have. It’s what I want to believe, what I want to know. But this is the conversation I most want to open up, hopefully in another recording in this series, and with anyone who wants to talk about it more one-on-one or in a group. Drop me a note by e-mail, whether it’s Adar 5784 or anytime you find this.

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So, that’s the map I’d like to explore between now and Purim of 5784, the Purim after October 7. These are the building blocks of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy, which is the support I know I need right now. Read the text of the Megillah yourself, the Book of Esther, with all this in mind. Maybe we can help each other figure out what kind of joyful communal celebration might be appropriate for this Purim. If such a celebration is possible, and not profane in a time like now, what kind of chag would be not just fun for the kids, but right for us – in a way that is true toward the upside-down in our lives right now and in the lives of those who are suffering most, among our Jewish people and among the Palestinians with whom we Jews are so interwoven.

I hope this introduction helps. To be continued, together.

D'var Torah: Questioning and Certainty

This is my D'var Torah for Shabbat, Parashat Va-era, January 13, 2024. It also reminds me of a Rosh Hashanah sermon I gave in 2022/5783, "Right-ology: How To Be Right Better in the New Year"

In August we went down to New York for the simchat bat celebration for our newest grandniece, and when we were hanging out with the family afterward at the synagogue, my daughter Lela was playing with R. and P., and she offered to give them piggyback rides. I think it was R. who got the first ride, so P. began to scream that it was unfair, so Lela said how about I give you two rides. And then of course R. began to scream -- that’s unfair! -- and this went back and forth for a minute when I though I might help.

I tried a trick I learned from Laurie which she learned from her mom, Iris z”l, which is to distract a kid with some other words. And I thought the way I would do this was to bring my moral-educator skills to bear. So I said to one of them, R. I think, “What’s fair?”

And there was a pause for about a second, and can you guess what she said to my question?

R. said: “It’s not fair!”

At which point I left Lela to her own devices.

So R. was right about one particular thing, which I’ll tell her when she’s old enough to get it but I’ll tell you now. In Judaism, we say that we value questioning. We value it a lot, and sometimes we even say that questioning is the essence of Judaism. Questioning what everyone takes for granted, questioning authority, even questioning God. It’s why Jews are often b’gadol, in the big scheme, revolutionaries and social critics, and scientific innovators, and litigators.

What R. was responding to is something else which we also say is the essence of Torah, which is knowing right and wrong. We look to Torah for absolute moral principles, which b’gadol is also why Jews have been among the leading activists for civil rights and human rights, in any country we are in and around the globe.

Questioning and having absolute moral conviction are not the same thing.

R. was saying now is the time for moral conviction, not for questioning.

Sometimes questioning is the opposite of what the Torah wants. When Par’oh says “Who is the Divine, mi Adonai, that I should listen and release the people”, that is not: Ah, Moshe, you’ve brought me an interesting theological perspective I’ve never encountered. I have some questions, perhaps we could discuss divinity and its implications for social ethics.

No, this is Par’oh questioning something we don’t think should be questioned. People shouldn’t enslave other people, period-full-stop.

And even if Par’oh had said: Let’s talk about this God of yours and the implications for our current labor situation -- this was not a situation for questions like that. This was a situation for moral certainty.

It’s not just that certain things should be beyond question. It’s that if what you mostly know how to do is question, it’s hard to build up the commitment you need to follow through, or to stand up for someone. Sometimes questioning can prevent us from believing that we know right from wrong. We think: if you can formulate a question about this conviction, then maybe it’s not a conviction. But you need to be certain about something in order to fight for it, especially when the people who are convinced of the immoral opposite are certain and fight from that certainty.

Let me give you one example from the week, and I want to say something about it from this lens and then come back to from another angle. Israel is right now before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, responding to an accusation that the war in Gaza constitutes genocide.

To me this particular charge is in the category of when questioning is not spiritual strengthening but leads you astray. When you are in a just war, against an enemy that is real and continues to be dangerous on a day-to-day basis, when you make efforts even though they are imperfect to distinguish combatants from noncombatants by helping them escape the fighting so they won’t be killed and giving warning and even a map and schedule of the fighting -- raising the question of genocide is profoundly confused. And Israeli actions to take account of the human rights and humanitarian needs of Gazans aren't a ruse to cover up genocide or genocidal intent. Gaza isn’t some kind of Theresinstadt, that if no one was looking the whole area and all its people would be bombed to the ground.

On this issue there is moral certainty that self-defense is right and a enemy itself genocidal deserves to be fought.

Considering genocide on the part of Israel as though this were a real question, worthy of the international court, doesn’t further any moral certainty at all -- no matter what the court rules, and may they have the wisdom to rule justly. No result of this case, or of parallel actions on university campuses, will strengthen a moral principle in the world or in anyone’s mind.

The parasha and the Exodus story more broadly do teach us about the questions you should ask even in a situation where much is morally clear and absolute. I have this question of my own -- why does God insist so often that the purpose of the plagues is so that Par’oh and the Egyptians will know the Divine? Why doesn’t God say: It’s so they will know that slavery is immoral. Surely that’s a moral certainty that ought to come before anything else.

In fact, while the Torah is teaching us about moral certainty in Egypt, the Torah is also teaching about questioning at the same time.

The parasha begins with this interesting revelation by the Divine to Moshe. God says: I appeared to your ancestors in Genesis as El Shaddai, but by my name, Y-H-V-H, I was not known to them. (Exodus 6:3)

The commentators interpret this to mean that there was something about the One that Avraham and Yitzchak and Yaakov knew with certainty, and that there was something they didn’t know. Rav Ovadia Seforno says that they never stretched what they knew for certain beyond their own experience, and therefore couldn’t really pass on to their children what their moral convictions would mean for their lifetimes.

And Sara Wolkenfeld teaches a midrash from Shmot Rabbah which says the same thing this way: that before Moshe no one who really knew God ever asked questions at all, particularly when what they knew for certain from the Divine was contradicted by what was happening before their eyes.

They never asked why if the land was being promised to them they were continually fighting the people there, or finding it hard to dig a well, or I suppose why sacrificing my son was a coherent thing to do. They never even asked how their enslavement was supposed to be part of the big picture.

But Moshe asked the Divine at the burning bush: Who are You? What’s your name? I know that slavery in Egypt is wrong, and I tried to do something way back but I couldn’t, so what’s going on that you think I can help change this?

This is a questioning which is grounded in moral certainty. Which asks -- if I know this is right and I know this is wrong, how should I apply it? What do I need to do? What don’t I understand yet? What detail about the big principle might I be getting wrong -- or might you be getting wrong? (Even the angels by the way in one grueseome midrash ask God: If this oppression is so wrong, why do You allow babies to be baked into the bricks that Your people are still being forced to make?)

So Moshe reaches a level where he can ground himself in certainty and challenge Par’oh and also continue to ask questions of the Divine, about what flows further from his moral certainty and what he is charged with teaching the people.

And the Divine continues to say in our parasha and next week’s too and beyond that that it’s not enough to say slavery here and today is wrong, but knowing Me means knowing that the Exodus means something forever, in other places and times, and you will have to keep asking each other about that.

So we can and must ask questions about Israel and Palestine, and the war and its conduct and what comes after. We ask them out of our certainties about a Zionism of moral excellence and out of the certainly that all human beings are created B’tzelem Elohim (in the Divine image). Indeed these questions will strengthen and deeper our deepest moral convictions about right and wrong.

We can and must ask about how the Exodus certainties stretch out to civil rights and equality in the United States. What now, and what toward the future, and what have we been missing in this story, all of these we should ask as we mark this important weekend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.

Some of these wise questions might be very challenging ones, ones that feel every bit as uncomfortable as the genocide quote-unquote “question.” But the point isn’t the doubt; the point is to question in service of conviction. This is the questioning of the chacham in the Pesach Seder, the wise child. Who is convinced that there are important testimonies and laws, and wants to dive further. As opposed to the one she-eino yode’a lish’ol, who doesn’t know to ask questions in the right spirit. I know that my grandnieces R. and P. will understand that one day, because of their parents and the great teachers they want for them.

The Torah calls of this throughout the Exodus narrative “knowing the Divine”, Yediat Hashem. To remind us that it’s impossible to know everything we need to about our certainties but that they are highest thing to strive for. Yediat Hashem is where certainty and questioning meet and then stretch higher. That’s the questioning that is indeed at the heart of Judaism, and as one of our most famous questions asks: If not now, when?

Who Were the Baby-Savers of Exodus and Who Are We?

Saving babies, according to the Torah, was the first crack in the oppression of the Israelites by Pharaoh.

In the first two chapters of Exodus, the start of this week’s Torah reading in the synagogue and Jewish study cycle, two sets of people save baby boy Israelites from the death decreed by Pharaoh. First it’s two midwives, then it’s Pharaoh’s own daughter with the help perhaps of her retinue and for sure of Moses’ sister and mother.

What do we know about each of them? Their motivations? Exodus 1-2 are both very schematic and very nuanced, worth a very careful read or re-read for the way stories that might be very familiar were first written out.

The midwives are introduced in 1:15 by name as Shifra and Puah, and they are the first characters given names in the text, other than the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt generations before and had long since died. Pharaoh and all the other actors so far in the present story are described by title and role but not named.  And of course it’s very unusual for women who aren’t ongoing figures in a biblical story to be named, or for women at all in the Bible.

Not only did Shifra and Puah defy Pharaoh in their actions; they also defied him verbally to his face! (Clever talk in 1:19; they say the baby boys lived because the Hebrew women are “chayot”, which Pharaoh would have heard as “wild beasts” but also means “alive/full of life.”)

The first interpretive bump in the text is a brilliant gift made out of the fact that Hebrew is an alphabet primarily of consonants, and in biblical Hebrew most vowels are implied and not written. Generally if you know the rules of Hebrew grammar you know the patterns of vowels. But every so often there are two grammatical possibilities, and Exodus 1:15 is such a case. Pharaoh spoke either “to the midwives of the Hebrews” or “to the Hebrew midwives.” One vowel in one word affects whether they might be Egyptian or whether they are clearly Israelite. The names Shifra and Puah aren’t conclusive -- they sound like they could be Hebrew names, or non-Hebrew names made to sound like Hebrew. (Today Shifra has become a good Jewish name, but that’s no proof about ancient Hebrew.)

And then the Hebrew word for Hebrew itself adds to the ambiguity. “Ivri” means the one-from-across, one-from-over-there, one-from-across-the-river. As a rule of thumb, Israelites are described in the Torah as Ivri/Hebrew either by non-Israelites, or by Israelites in the presence of non-Israelites.

And as if that weren’t enough, the Torah says that Shifra and Puah kept the boys alive because “the midwives revered God” (1:17). You could use that to argue that they were Israelites, worshippers of the One. Or you could say the language calls attention to their unexpected reverence for this particular divinity, a stretch beyond their prior identities.

In terms of what this motivation is in substance, “revered God” sounds like deep spirituality. On the other hand, in the Torah “fearing/revering God” often refers to the most minimal standard of moral decency, and the absence of “fearing God” often means the absence of any moral standard at all. Was this standing up beyond any expectation, powered a strength from deep within the heart, or what any decent person should do?

So, were Shifra and Puah Hebrew midwives, or Egyptian midwives serving Hebrews? Or as some early post-biblical legends have it, Egyptian midwives who because of this experience went over to the Israelites or at least to their God?

Whoever they were, they saved baby boys whose death was an edict of the regime. The act is the same either way, but who they were matters. Did they act because this was their own people? (Later Jewish midrash identifies them usually but not always with Yocheved and Miryam, Moshe’s mother and sister.) Was it because of their guild, their duty to all mothers and babies? Because of their spiritual depth and attunement, or a simple and profound humanity? All of the above? Exodus 1 is a different story depending on the answer.

In the next chapter (2:6), Pharaoh’s daughter is bathing by the Nile when she sees a box floating there: “And she opened it, and she saw him, the boy, and look -- it was a little one, crying – and she took pity on him, and she said, ‘One of the Hebrew children this is.’”

Unlike the midwives, she does not have a name in the Torah. She is Daughter-of-Pharaoh. (Later Jewish tradition calls her Batyah, “daughter of Yah/the Divine.”) At least part of her motivation is clear: it’s a baby! And he’s floating for his very life. “She saw him, the little one” – the Hebrew adds an extra syllable. She saw extra.

What did she mean, “one of the Hebrew children”? It’s not just a surface descriptor, one of the babies who belongs to “them”; it’s a baby her own father has decreed must be killed. Anyone who found him was required to drown him in this very same Nile. No longer only midwives were under this command. Identifying a Hebrew baby boy meant seeing immediately a baby condemned to death.

One view: “She saw him, the little one” – Pharaoh’s daughter immediately saw this about him, a boy not just vulnerable but a specific target of her father. She went to great lengths after saving the baby to see to its care and presumably to hide him and his identity. She broke the law right under her father’s nose. She established a relationship with the baby’s mother across a boundary both geographical (Goshen) and national.

Another possibility: Tali Adler this week wrote something interrogating the meaning of pity, the root “ch-m-l” in Hebrew. Sometimes it’s a problematic term, a selective pity or even a self-serving one. (Tali herself I think concludes that in the case of a baby, one never doubts that “chemlah” is pure compassion.)

But in her general vein -- Why did Pharaoh’s daughter save this particular baby boy? Was this just the only one Pharaoh’s daughter happened upon? Was one enough for her, or would she have saved others? Did her retinue mobilize to hold her back from putting all of them at further risk if they were found out? In any case, Pharaoh’s daughter did this one act and didn’t disturb her father’s system any further.

Or did she? At some point, she gave the boy his name, Moshe/Moses, which works in both Hebrew and Egyptian. She says it’s about her “drawing him out of water.” We know for sure that in the Egyptian language his name locates him in the family of Pharoah. But in Hebrew the name is a charge or a prophecy that this boy will become a drawer-out-of-waters. He will, in a long time.

In the next set of episodes, the text toys with us around Moses’ awareness of his own connection. The narrator and we know he is Israelite, yet we don’t know if he himself does. Read the verses in the last half of chapter 2 very carefully! Moshe is identified later by Midianites as an Egyptian (2:19), and he calls himself a “stranger in a strange land” (2:22), which could mean every place he has ever dwelled.

Was the Daughter-of-Pharaoh the one who gently set up her adopted son to “get it” on his own? Did she play a long game? Did she know how painful it would be for him to discover the oppression around him, that he would have to flee from the situation for decades and then from his own role in the revolution, until he couldn’t say no to the Divine voice any more?

“Hebrew or humanitarian” and the other interpretive questions aren’t just about nailing down the motives of these specific characters. The opening chapters of Exodus are parallel to the opening of Genesis. Genesis has 10+ chapters of creation and the origins of humanity before we get to Abraham and Sarah, the founders of Israel (and others) with their special relationship to the Divine. Exodus 1-2 are a kind of second creation saga. Idioms from Genesis 1 are sprinkled throughout. Humanity as an ethical principle prior to Israel and Israel’s Torah is in play, at least as a possibility.

Encountering this part of the Torah, we Jews are being asked whether this Exodus story is about our liberation alone, or about the nature of liberation in the scheme of the universe generally. It's about whose babies we have to see.

Can the story be ours, and also ours-toward-others, and ours-and-others’? Do we read our liberation story as something that has to finish before we can relate it to other people, or can our stories run ongoing in parallel, or are they actually interwoven?

And what if in one telling we are in a process of liberation, and in a simultaneous telling we play a role in oppression? Michael Walzer argues for this at an early stage in our history. He says  that the biblical prophets saw the Israelite ruling class during the era of the kings as both beset by empires and acting like Pharaohs to their own poor.

For me, all the answers are yes. Exodus liberation is past and present, ours and others’-near-us. The first law the Israelites receive after the Ten Commandments is to liberate their own “Hebrew slaves” (21:2). I would argue this means – the slaves which are Hebrew-to-you, the way you were Hebrew-to-others.

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Now for the harder part, spiritually and morally. I hope you’ll read this part graciously toward me, particularly if you’re a committed Jew or a committed Christian. I hope it might spark some one-to-one or small groups conversations; it’s certainly not my definitive word.

The story of oppression and liberation of the Jews is not over yet for us. The century or less of tremendous Jewish freedom doesn’t mean the process is complete or the book is closed.

About a dozen years ago I first articulated to myself and to the congregation I serve that Palestinian liberation should and will be a Jewish story, a part of our own midrash on Exodus. When Palestinians are free it should be not begrudgingly or in spite of us, but because of us and because of our own liberation.

For a Jew, this focuses the challenge of the babies in Exodus 1-2 and the account of those who first saw them and acted -- what biblical scholar Jon Levenson has called “the universal horizon of biblical particularism.” In the past month, compassion for babies has been at the center of reactions to the Israel-Hamas conflict. The horrors inflicted on babies by Hamas on October 7. The babies in hospitals and homes in Gaza killed and wounded and put at risk in Israel’s military response.

This week how can we Jews not see our own people’s babies and the babies of Gaza at the same time, as we read of Pharaoh’s decree and the midwives and Pharaoh’s daughter? Which of those characters are we supposed to be?

For many Christians recently, there has been another powerful biblical anchor. So many people shared in December an image of or based on a baby doll amidst Gazan rubble set up outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as this year’s nativity scene. How could people not perceive a link between then and now, especially Palestinian Christians and those who have bonds to them?

Yet if Jews face the challenge of “the universalist horizon of biblical particularism”, Christians face the other side of that coin. Call it “the particularlist horizon of biblical universalism.” How might my friends in Christian faith see particularity, multiple particularities, in the universalism of the Christian story?

When I first saw the image from Bethlehem, I was both upset and afraid. I was upset at exclusion. Does this mean you can’t see my babies during your holy season, only yours, only theirs? And also afraid of what happens when Christians map the war this way. If Jesus represents (only?) the Palestinian babies today, then we Jews today are also the ones who are King Herod in the Gospel of Matthew, ordering the massacre of babies, Herod who is described exactly as Pharaoh from Exodus 1-2.

What would happen if this was the takeaway from Advent and Christmas this year, absorbed on social media and in churches in the United States? How would people emerge from that and look at me and my people? That’s an immediate fear. In the wider picture, what would that do to the possibility of a story where Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian liberation are intertwined?

Seeing the Bethlehem image many times, I tried not to let it disturb my own compassion for Gaza, not to let me off from my own Torah imperative to keep Gazans in my view and in my prayers, even as I was fearful and upset for myself and my own. I felt better actually after seeing a Christmas Day post from one of my religious Jewish-Israeli friends visiting the U.S.: “Where I live, we could use hope and miracles. So if you pray today, keep us all in mind.” I had thought of asking that out loud too, and wish that I had.

I know many of my Christian friends in faith did just that. I prayed that the prayers of my friends during Advent and on Christmas would be capacious enough to see the babies of Gaza these past few months and the babies in Israel who were murdered on October 7 or who were present when their parents were killed; the babies and toddlers held underground as hostages, including baby Kfir Bibas, not even a year old, who is possibly still alive in captivity. All of these babies, and older children, who lost their lives or who will have to grow up and live with the trauma of this from their youth. Not to mention the babies of Ukraine during Putin’s bombings, and other places I forget even to think about too much of the time, who need to be in our stories too.

****

I have a strong memory of Mrs. Nussbaum’s Sunday School class at Shaare Shalom Congregation, when I must have been in first or second grade. We were making our own cut-and-paste versions of the Haggadah, the text of the Pesach (Passover) Seder. I remember myself doing a page with babies being thrown into the Nile. I picture it in the traditional old-style Hebrew School notebook, with the picture of Rabbi Moses Maimonides on the front, though that’s probably wrong. Cutting, pasting, maybe even coloring.

We were taught about the babies and assimiliated it very matter-of-factly as Jewish kids. I don’t remember being scared about it at the time. I, who became the father who wanted to shield my own small children from violence of any kind in TV and books as long as possible, who fast-forwarded past the Nazi parts of “The Sound of Music” with my kids.

Today, it’s the story on the shore with Pharaoh’s daughter and on land with the midwives than I’m eager to cut, paste, and color in. These women will help me see the liberation stories in which I as a Jew am involved – our own story, Palestinians’ and our story with them, African-Americans’ and other American’s and our story with them. It’s not only about babies, or even just children.

I can’t say that in any of the liberation stories of our time I have been active like Shifrah, Puah, Pharaoh’s daughter. I haven't saved any babies. I am perhaps most like Pharaoh’s daughter at the shore at the first moment, trying to see extra and able to say, “One of the Hebrew babies this is.” That’s the moment I guess I have to study so I can know what’s next.

Who were Shifra, Puah, Batyah. What’s the best version of them, the best place to put the vowels and the best way to interpret their words -- and how can I become like them.

Serious Chanukkah: Cultural Integration, Freedom, War and Power Then and Now

You can read below or download this as a Word document here.

 

 

 

I love Purim and Chanukkah. It’s true that these are not the major Jewish chagim, and not in some sense as important as Passover/Pesach.

But I have come to love them more and more because they are set in worlds I recognize as more contemporary than the major festivals. Their stories have more texture than the descriptions of the Torah. While there are miracles associated with Purim and Chanukkah, these stories are not driven by Divine voices and direct Divine intervention. I love these festivals because they are about Jews very much like us, at least in the themes they faced in their lives as Jews. I am probably a Purim person most of all, because that story is set like my own life in the Jewish Diaspora, but right now it’s almost Chanukkah time, and I am thinking about Chanukkah in a particular way now in December 2023 because of the war between Israel and Hamas. Chanukkah is among other things about a war in the Land of Israel. So some of the things I’ll talk about today I have talked about year after year, and some things are coming to me just this year. We’ll see when anyone listens to this or reads this in the future how much of it still resonates.

So at the end of my talk, you might not think that Chanukkah is as important for Jews as Christmas seems to be in the Christian-majority part of the world of today. But I hope I’ll persuade you not to downplay Chanukkah as merely a minor festival, and that you’ll think of Chanukkah in fact as something very important to mark at this time of year.

This talk is almost everything I probably think about Chanukkah other than the purely individual spiritual dimension. That part is very important and powerful, and not minor in Judaism either – the subject of another and much shorter talk, which I know others could teach far better than I in any case.

What is the purpose of this talk? What do I hope you’ll learn?

On both Chanukkah and Purim we say a blessing that is only said on those festivals, giving thanks for miracles that happened to our ancestors, nissim l’avoteinu, bayamim ha-haym bazman hazeh. That last phrase translates as “in those days at this time.” Which can mean that the miracles happened to our ancestors back then at this time of year -- or it can mean that those same miracles or happening are timeless, they are of that time of the past and also of this time.

Our holy days have stories, and one of the things those stories do is to remind us that the history of the holy day isn’t locked in the past. The story reverberates today, it has echoes still today and actually can affect our today; it can pre-echo today. I mentioned war in Israel as one of those echoes but I’ll offer more. The ritual telling of stories help us see the present as another chance to get a good look at dilemmas that first presented themselves in the past. Not just dilemmas that recur, but hopes that recur, and challenges and triumphs. The stories point out themes of today and affirm: That’s really important, it’s always been important.

The stories can also pick out for us things in our current reality and say: Pay more attention to this. Look at what happened at the time of the original story, and also at the ways we’ve retold the story in other generations, and you can get clues that might help you today. Or at least you can hear more options. One of the themes of Chanukkah is how Jews live in a world with a majority culture, an imperial culture. There were options pursued by different groups back then, or evaluations made about different options back then, and maybe some of those options we aren’t considering enough today, or maybe we should think about what those options looked like to generations from then up through now.

Of course at the same time, a story from a different era can’t tell us in detail what to do, about war or integration for instance. And we shouldn’t be limited to what our tradition tells us; we have to look at these things along with our tradition and see if we have something new to add to the interpretation for own day and the future, as all our generations have added and passed down to us.

So our Chanukkah story, however we tell it, cannot give us specific guidance for our day, and you might therefore wonder as I have why bother to add historical detail when we could tell a simple story. Mostly, I want to tell the story of Chanukkah in a certain way in order to affirm the agenda that comes from the original story. If you’ve been thinking already this fall about war, Jewish power, wealth, freedom, anti-Semitism, Chanukkah can say: Yes, those are important; you’re right to be focused on them right now. And if you haven’t been thinking about all of those, Chanukkah is a reminder to take eight days and do so.

Different generations seem to get the Chanukkah they need, or to make Chanukkah a bit in our image. For Jews in America in the modern age, Chanukkah has been about religious freedom. For Jews of the past century, Chanukkah has been about military heroism, certainly in Israel but also here. There’s a spiritual Chanukkah, about finding more hope than you realized was possible, and such Chanukkah might have been invented or brought to the fore during the early centuries when Jews couldn’t think about either military action or religious equality, and it means something different in our modern spiritual age.

I think the Chanukkah we need in 2023, in 5784, is about freedom, power, corruption, integration or assimiliation, authenticity, wealth, hope – all of the above. It’s probably the Chanukkah we have needed for a long time and for the foreseeable future as well.

One caveat: I am going to tell more history than you’ve probably heard in connection with Chanukkah, but I am not a historian. Knowing a bunch of history isn’t the same as being a professional historian. Academic historians have responsibilities not to let biases or contemporary agendas drive their findings, and when they have a question they are supposed to find the answer whatever interest it might or might not have for today. I have agendas, which I’ve told you. I’m interested in the history of the period of Chanukkah because of the themes I am interested in and how we live them today. I’m sure I have gaps in my knowledge. I am intrigued most by interpretations by historians that speak to those agenda, and I have no way of my own to assess debates between scholars in scholarly terms, so I could be relying on interpretations that suit my story but aren’t considered the best in the field. So if you’re interested in this history as history, by all means read or look for more.

So, let’s get into the story of Chanukkah.

First is the historical context, which those of us who learned about Chanukkah originally as kids might not have learned or wouldn’t have understood. The events of the Chanukkah festival specifically took place in the first half of the second century B.C.E., in the 160s. This would be a bit more than a century and a half after Alexander the Great, who came to power in Macedonia and Greece and then conquered much of the Middle East. It’s also about two hundred years before the end of the life of Jesus. This is about four hundred years after Jerusalem was conquered and the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians.

The Chanukkah story occurred in the middle of a period that is described variously as the Hellenistic period, because of the empire and culture of the time; or the Second Temple period or the Intertestamental period. Both of these latter terms describe the centuries between the end of the history recorded in the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, and the events of the New Testament or Christian Bible.

The geographical focus of the Chanukkah story is an area called Judea in Greek, which translates the Hebrew word Yehudah, or Judah as we say in English. This is a fairly small area of land including the city of Jerusalem and extending around it and toward the Mediterranean coast, a small part of what is today Israel and the West Bank.

The simplest version of what happened is this, and it is based on a contemporary source from the time that we have in Greek and came to be called the First Book of Macabees:

A new emperor, Antiochus IV, came to power, ruling the mostly Asian section of Alexander the Great’s original empire. We term that part the Seleucid Empire, and in some tellings you hear the rulers called the Syrian-Greeks. Antiochus took over the Temple in Jerusalem, plundering it and replacing the sacrifices there with sacrifices to Zeus or perhaps other pagan gods. He is said to have considered himself a god, and he was known as Antiochus Epiphanes, god-made-manifest. Antiochus issued decrees outlawing the practices of Judaism, including circumcision, and ordered the burning of copies of the Torah. His officials went around the territory of Judea and in public squares demanded that Jews come forward and make pagan sacrifices.

They came to the town of Modi’in, which is in the foothills of Judea, roughly halfway between today’s Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. One source says the date on the Jewish lunar calendar was the 25^th of Kislev. An elder of a priestly family named Matityahu (Mattathias) was asked to come and make this sacrifice but he refused. When another Jewish was brought up to make the sacrifice, Matityahu came up and killed him as well as the imperial official, and proclaimed that anyone who was ready to stand in rebellion against these decrees should come with their family, and they headed into the hills.

The family of priests was known as Chashmonai or Hasmoneans; they were a group of priests different from the Jerusalem priests about whom I’ll talk more in a while. Among Matityahu’s children was Yehudah or Judah, who was known as Maccabeus or Maccabee, apparently meaning “hammer.” He became the military leader. Nowadays Jews often refer to the whole group as the Maccabees, which is like naming your team after your captain.

Many people joined the rebels. For a few years the rebels fought a guerilla war, coming out of the hills to attack imperial forces. Eventually they gathered the numbers and strength to mount a campaign on Jerusalem and recapture the city and the Temple. They purified the Temple and rededicated the altar – Chanukkah is the Hebrew word for “dedication.” This was also the 25^th of Kislev, the anniversary of the start of the uprising in Modi’in. The Chashmonaim called an eight-day celebration, to make up for and imitate the fall pilgrimage of Sukkot, which could not have been celebrated at the Temple that year. Sukkot was also when King Solomon had dedicated the original Temple around 800 years before. The Hasmoneans established this as a festival for all generations.

The story of a cruse of oil for the Temple lamps with enough for one day, but which lasted eight days, didn’t come for a few hundred years and I’ll talk later about why.

The version of Chanukkah in First Maccabees is basically the traditional Jewish story. It is about religious freedom and national liberation from a tyrannical empire, and the idea that a small dedicated force with right on their side can defeat any empire. Which is a tremendously important message, for Jews in particular but for the ages, and this dimension of the story has been adopted beyond Jews as well. This is the part of Chanukkah we talk about all the time and I hardly need to expand on why at least for now.

The book of First Maccabees also widens the frame, and gives a window into a key division within the Jews of Judea in that time. Before Antiochus, there were Jews who advocated giving up the specific, unique Jewish ways of living and wanted Jews to adopt the Hellenistic culture entirely. First Maccabees certainly exaggerates this as a stark dichotomy between Hellenizers and faithful Jews. What the book says is that the Jews who supported Hellenization reached out to Antiochus, who responded or took advantage of the situation to take more direct control. Hellenizers among the Jews are in this version largely responsible for bringing on the persecutions.

To get into this part of the story, we have to back up from the revolt of the Maccabees, back to Alexander the Great and even before.

Before the Hellenistic period, Judea and the nearby areas were part of the Persian Empire. The Persians had generally let each nation within the empire live according to its own culture and govern itself, so long as they supported the empire. When Alexander the Great conquered Jerusalem, in the later 300s B.C.E., he continued that policy in Judea. Later Jewish legends say that Alexander came to Jerusalem and honored the High Priest at the time, and offered the Jews autonomy in return for fighting in his wars and paying taxes to the empire. Whether Alexander actually came to Jerusalem who knows, but that was the policy he followed.

When Alexander died, his generals divided up his empire, and Judea was on the border between two parts – the empire of Ptolemy, centered in Egypt, with a new capital in Alexandria; and the empire of Seleucus, centered in Syria, with its new capital of Antioch. Judea was for about a century and a half part of the Ptolemaic empire, but really both empires continued the policy of cultural autonomy in return for taxes.

Sometime during the following century, so now we’re talking about the 3^rd century B.C.E., the Torah was translated into Greek, a translation known as the Septuagint. The Greek-speaking Jews particularly in Egypt needed a version of the Torah for themselves that they could understand. What is at least as remarkable as a Greek-language Torah is what is revealed in a fictional story that was written about the creation of the Septuagint, a story written sometime in the aftermath of the Hasmonean revolt.

The story is known as the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates. It is part of a set of writings that came to be called pseudepigrapha. It was probably written sometime within a few decades after the revolt of the Maccabees, as strife between the Jewish kings of Judea and the Hellenistic emperors after Antiochus was still ongoing. Which is why it is such a remarkable book, because it’s about how Torah and Hellenistic culture flowed together.

In this fictional book, Aristeas the narrator presents himself as a pagan emissary of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the emperor who was at the time finishing the project of the great library in Alexandria. The king had a librarian named Demetrius, and gave him a budget for buying books encompassing the wisdom of the entire world. Aristeas is in the room when Demetrius was giving the king a report – that he had collected 200,000 books of the 500,000 he intended to procure in total. But there was one book that he couldn’t get, the Torah of the Jews, because it was in a different language and used a different script. The king drafts a letter to the high priest in Jerusalem about creating a translation of the Torah into Greek.

Aristeas tells King Ptolemy that it is hyprocritical to make this request while holding tens of thousands of Jews as captives in war, and he advocates for their emancipation. One of Aristeas’ arguments to the king is that the Jews are governed by the same God as the king; that YHWH is just another name for Zeus, who upholds your kingdom. The king agrees, and he drafts a communication to the high priest Elazar, explaining the emancipation order and asking for a team of six scholars from each tribe to come down to Egypt to translate the Torah. He sends Aristeas and one other aide to Jerusalem with gifts and a payment; the gifts include a solid gold table that the king hopes will be useful to the priests in the Temple.

Aristeas describes the scholars who were sent back from Jerusalem as steeped in both the Torah and Greek learning, men of virtue and noble parentage who spoke without pride and listened well and answered any question thoughtfully and carefully. They were basically the ideal student of Plato, and Aristeas says that the high priest Elazar was afraid that they would be so impressive that the king would insist on keeping them in Alexandria, because it was his reputation that if he met a man of excellence, prudence, and wisdom he would consider him indispensable as an advisor to the kingdom.

One of the most remarkable parts of the Letter of Aristeas is the banquet that the king prepared to welcome the seventy-two guests. First, the hosts were interested to know the special rules of eating that the Jews would require. Aristeas explains what he learned from the Jews about the details of kashurt: for instance that the split hoof and chewing the cud represent memory and thoughtful reflection; that wild animals are forbidden to eat in order to teach Jews how not to be vicious and destructive.

This way of interpreting kashrut, as a symbolic way of cultivating our minds, is a hallmark of the integration of Judaism and Greek thought. Aristeas presents a defense of kashrut that is contemporary for his time. In the Torah, kashrut is at least partly about obedience to the Divine for its own sake and the separation of Jews from others. In the Letter of Aristeas, the author has a pagan narrator Aristeas give an unabashed, positive presentation of kashrut as a perfect philosophical way of eating which the Jews can teach others.  And kashrut will actually help the pagans and Jews eat together; the king’s stewards study the laws of kashrut and prepare a kosher banquet that lasts for seven days.

Each day the king asks ten of the scholars from Jerusalem a question about how to rule wisely. For instance, the king asks: “What is the essence of kingship?” And the scholar replied, “To rule oneself well and not to be led astray by wealth or fame to immoderate or unseemly desires, this is the true way of ruling if you reason the matter well out. For all that you really need is yours, and God is free from need and utterly benign. Let your thoughts be such as become a man, and desire not many things but only such as are necessary for ruling.” The king asks similarly about truth, beauty, honor, preserving power, friendship, kinship.

The king turns to his own philosophers and says that these Jewish scholars are superior, because they gave spontaneously all their wise answers, on all kinds of questions of philosophy and politics.

After the week-long banquet, the scholars are brought to a special house on a nearby island, and treated to the same food and comforts as the king. Each morning they would come to the court and then go back to the island to write. At the end of seventy-two days they produce their translation. It is read before the king, who states how impressed he is and expresses his astonishment that no historian he knew had ever mentioned anything about what was in the Torah. He presents each of the scholars with lavish gifts and sends them home along with an open invitation to return to him again anytime they wish.

The Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates purports to tell about things that happened about a century before the Hasmoneans not in Judea but in nearby Egypt nearby, and if that were the case it might be only partly relevant to the world of the Chanukkah story. Again, the Septuagint was not commissioned by the emperor but created within the Jewish community. But it’s quite likely that this story was written down after the Maccabean revolt, in the same general time period as the books of Maccabees. All these books were created for both a Jewish audience and an audience of educated, Hellenistic gentiles, and they present different pictures of the relationship of Judaism and Hellenism.

To Jews living in the aftermath of Antiochus, the Letter of Aristeas says: Even with the political persecutions we have experienced, and the ongoing conflict, we have a place among the high cultures of the world, and we should regard our own Jewish culture as impressive and a guide to modern living. And there are men of culture and power who will respect and admire us if we are willing to present our Torah in their language.

To gentiles, the books says:  The laws of the Torah can be understood as a very concrete and practical path to the same learning that you value and to the virtues in life that you hold as the highest. We are not divided from you by our unique customs, or by the traditions we have which come from a long ago past. In fact we can even sit and eat together, and our customs could unite us if you actually study them with us.

And we know that at times in the 250 years between the persecutions of Antiochus and the destruction of the Temple, there were Jews and Hellenists and later on Romans who came together in this way. Who were fascinated the conversation between Judaism, Jewish practice, and philosophy. Josephus, the great Jewish intellectual of the first century C.E., was one of those people, and when he wrote his history of the Jews, he went straight from Alexander the Great to the story of Aristeas to the Maccabees. It was all part of the same picture for him. He didn’t want to give Antiochus the only word, nor the Jews who wanted to give up everything Jewish, nor the Jews who wanted nothing to do with anything Greek.

The First Book of Maccabees does not go into any of this, and conveys in its opening a suspicion of Jews who wanted to Hellenize. In the polemic there, these Jews were ready to give it all up and appealed to Antiochus as an ally. Not far from the Temple, these Jews helped get a gymnasium built, and this not only represented Greek values of physical excellence, and the beauty and perfection of the human body, but also forced the conflict between traditional Jews and Hellenists out in the open. A nude Jewish man would be seen to be circumcised, which to a Hellenistic mindset would be not just different but a desecration of the human body as a perfection. In that time period a procedure was developed for young Jewish men to have the visible evidence of circumcision altered, an incredibly painful procedure. Brit milah, circumcision, would be one very major dividing line between Jews keeping and rejecting tradition in their contemporary world.

The Hasmoneans present themselves in First Maccabees as devoted to God and the covenant, and continuing a long line of faithful Jews in the face of both foreign danger and local idolatry.

But even the Hasmoneans at the time of the revolt were not pure traditionalists, and they did not entirely reject Hellenism. We know this at least from the fact that many of them had Greek names or nicknames along with their Hebrew names, including of course Judah Maccabeus himself, and many of the descendants of Judah and his brothers came to be known by their Greek names primarily.

And while we don’t know for sure, some form of Jewish rationalism beyond the Letter of Aristeas seems to come from this general time period. Some scholars, admittedly a minority, suggest that even biblical books like Jonah and Job were finished during this period – books that are philosophical and have a universalist outlook about the Torah and the Divine. Certainly we know that a kind of Judaism based on interpretation and debate about texts eventually became the major form of Judaism, and to some degree the prototyping of this kind of Judaism was occurring in small groups during this period of time. Josephus says that a group with this philosophy called the Pharisees began in the decades following the Chanukkah story; they believed in broad interpretation of the Torah and norms beyond the literal words of the Torah.

In the debate between the authors of First Maccabees and the Letter of Aristeas, I’m obviously putting my finger on the scale. But more important is to show you that even very soon after the events of Chanukkah itself, Jews were actively debating how the ideas of Torah and Hellenism could be synthesized, or whether that synthesis could work at all. And it clearly was not a yes or no question, as it is not today.

The other theme I want to talk about is power. Chanukkah is obviously a story about a revolution through war, even in the version we tell kids. But there is much more about power than just the uprising against an unjust authority, and for that we begin with another source from the era, which is known to us as the Second Book of Maccabees.

Second Maccabees has a more elaborate preface to the persecutions of Antiochus. It begins a bit earlier during the high priesthood of Onias, which is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Choniyo or Choniyahu or possibly Yohanan, which is the origin of the name John. A lower official named Simon, which is the Greek for Shimon, had a conflict with Onias, and when Simon did not prevail he sent word to an imperial official that the Temple in Jerusalem had a great treasury stored up. So the imperial government sent someone to confiscate the money, but Onias refused and according to Second Maccabees this imperial official was stricken with a plague. Onias prayed for his healing and all was well, for a time.

But Simon, again this is a Jew within the Temple administration, continued to conspire against Onias, and when the new king Antiochus IV took over, he replaced Onias as high priest with his brother Jason. Jason was known primarily by his Greek name, at least in the text, which also identifies him as the builder of the gymnasium in Jerusalem. Second Maccabees says that at this time the priests were not even offering their sacrifices, preferring instead to go and wrestle at the gymnasium.

Jason was in turn betrayed by Menelaus, brother of Simon if you can keep track, whom Jason had sent as an emissary to the king. Again, he was a Jewish priest known by his Greek name. Menelaus bribed the king and procured the high priesthood for himself. He had Onias killed, and Jason launched his own bloody rebellion within the Jews of Judea. Eventually Antiochus himself came to the Temple and the takeover began as well as the other decrees about which I have spoken. According to Second Maccabees, Judah Maccabee was in Jerusalem at this time, and escaped the bloody power struggle to get to the outlying areas and organize the revolt.

This is a sordid tale of wealth and political power. In Second Maccabees the catastrophes of Antiochus did not original in a cultural conflict within the Jews so much as a power struggle within the nation, which fed on and fed into the cultural conflict.

Judah Maccabee’s war led to one particular new insight about Torah and fighting. Initially, Antiochus’ forces knew to attack on Shabbat, because of laws that would prevent the Jews from taking up arms. But soon the Hasmoneans and their comrades decided that the Torah could be set aside when life was at stake, and they introduced into Jewish law what we now call the principle of pikkuach nefesh docheh et HaShabbat: preserving life sets aside Shabbat and Shabbat laws. Antiochus was initially surprised by the Jews’ willingness to fight on Shabbat, so this made a difference in battle. For the long term, this change in the law came to represent the ability of Jews to reason with Torah more generally, to interpret and to assert ourselves as the ones who give life to the Torah beyond just the literal text.

After the story of Chanukkah itself and the rededication of the Temple, the war with the forces of Antiochus did not end. The Seleucid forces were not driven out of Judea, and in fact returned in the immediate aftermath to Jerusalem. But within five or ten years, the Hasmoneans were high priests and kings of Judea, and their dynasty lasted almost a century. A good of that century was continued war, and sad to say there was a good deal of infighting within the Hasmonean dynasty at many points. Much of what we might know about the Hasmonean dynasty comes from the writings in the first century C.E. of Josephus, so more than a century after the dynasty’s end. Josephus was a Jewish rebel leader who defected to the Romans, so he is not a detached source or always trustworthy. But at least in his telling, the kingdom of the Hasmoneans is not a model of self-rule or of wise rule, and some of the particular flaws of their kingship are worth noting today.

As priests, kohanim, the Hasmoneans maybe could have been expected to be the opposite of the corrupt priests such as Jason and Menelaus. On the whole, they did avoid the kind of blatant financial corruption of the earlier period. However, the fact that they became kings at all represents a problem within Judaism. It’s not the modern problem of church and state, so to speak, which wouldn’t have been a concept at that time. Though in a way it is actually that problem. The biblical and later Talmudic traditions are very cautious about the limits of priests’ authority beyond ritual, teaching, and stepping in at times to bridge gaps in public administration. In the Bible the key example of priest as public official is Ezra, who when the Jews returned from Babylonian exile was a priest and a scribe and a national leader for a time. According to the Bible, the only true Jewish kings must descend from David. So the choice of the Hasmoneans to call themselves kings at times is somewhat suspect. It’s not clear what being a provincial king meant at that time and not clear that all the Hasmonean rulers called themselves kings. But some of them certainly did.

There is archaeological evidence that at times the Hasmonean leaders strengthened Jerusalem’s defenses and advanced the economic development of Judea and the area. Josephus’ history suggests that the kings did not spend all their time in Jerusalem, as many of them engaged in military campaigns all over what we would today call Israel and even into Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Some of that was defense – the Seleucid empire did not stop its military operations in any of those areas, including Judea. Some of the Hasmonean’s military activity was expansionist. While there was Jewish history already by then in all the areas that had been part of biblical Israel, much of the population outside of Judea at the time was non-Jewish. In particular, a few decades after Judah Maccabee, King John Hyrcanus conquered Idumea, Greek for Edom, the land of Esau, and he forced the people there to convert to Judaism. He also destroyed in Samaria the longtime sanctuary of the Samaritans, a non-Jewish people north of Judea with a complicated relationship to Judeans and Judaism. These conquests and conversions did not lead to peaceful relationships, and in the next century it was an Idumean named Herod who would be installed by the Romans as the king over Judea.

Josephus says that the Hasmoneans allied themselves at different times with a mostly priestly group called the Saducees, who were associated with the operation of the Temple and a narrow, literal reading of the Torah, and sometimes with the Pharisees with their more interpretive and adaptive approach. It’s really not possible to know whether this is what happened, since we have few other sources from the Hasmonean era about Pharisees and Saducees. According to both Josephus and the much later Talmud, the conflict between king and Torah came to a head during the reign of Alexander Yannai. Josephus says he turned on the Pharisees because they refused to stand up for him sufficiently against a citizen who had slandered him and called on him publicly to king only and not high priest. The Talmud says quite the contrary, it was because the Pharisees were too afraid to hold Yannai accountable to the law that they lost their influence. Both of these are secondary sources from later, but they both suggest that the rule of at least one Hasmonean ruler was hardly one of principle guided by Torah. They didn’t plunder the Temple treasury, but they used the other religious leaders of the time for their own benefit and their own interests.

The Hasmonean rulers were always entangled with foreign powers and often dependent on them, even though their rule was based on a rebellion against imperial authoirty. The initial establishment of their kingdom depended on an alliance with the Roman republic, which was in the process of rising in the 2^nd century B.C.E. At different times Hasmonean rulers made other alliances and often needed to pay tributes or taxes -- even allying sometimes with the Seleucids, whose rulers after Antiochus Epiphanes were not as crazy or evil as he had been. Finally, the end of Hasmonean self-rule came in 63 B.C.E. About one hundred years after Yehuda Hamacabi had led the Jews back to reclaim Jerusalem, the Roman general Pompey came to the Temple Mount. He had been enlisted to help settle a war between two Hasmonean brothers fighting each other for the throne, Hyrcanus and Aristobulos, but instead Pompey seized an opportunity for himself. The Hasmoneans continued as Roman puppets governing locally under them for a time. But the Romans were happy to pit Jewish and Idumean notables against each other, which led soon to Herod and eventually to the revolts and destruction of the next century and the end of the Second Temple.

It's fairly easy to point out the failures and flaws of the Hasmoneans as rulers, and no one could point to them or their century of Judean independence or partial independence as a model for today. They were not regarded as heroes after they were gone; at least we have no evidence that they were. From Josephus and from the New Testament we know that Chanukkah was celebrated, so their history was not not forgotten.

We do know that sometime after the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., the new Jewish leaders, the Rabbis, downplayed Chanukkah and the story of the Hasmoneans as much as they could. While Purim has a small tractate in the Mishnah and the Talmud, Chanukkah has no book in the Mishnah and basically one page in the vast Talmud. The rabbis living under Roman and Byzantine rule did not want to encourage anyone to rebel as the Hasmoneans did, even though the Temple Mount had been turned into a pagan shrine once again. Military power was not something they wanted to promote. The rabbis may have viewed the Hasmoneans as catastrophic leaders, and certainly portrayed them as anti-Torah. It was in the Talmud, hundreds of years after the events of Chanukkah, that the rabbis first tell the story of the miracle of the oil that was only supposed to last one day but lasted for eight. They substituted spiritual for military power – in the words of the biblical prophet Zechariah, “Not by might and not by power, but only by My spirit, said the Lord of Hosts.”

That view of Hasmoneans power, as fundamentally a disaster for the Jews in real-world terms and as spiritually corrupt, made sense for the many centuries before the modern era. For us, we have to find a different way to understand how self-determination, war, international relations and alliances, relations with the other peoples of the land, and power and wealth more generally affect Jewish freedom, wellbeing and Torah. The Hasmonean century doesn’t teach us how to; more how not to. That century does remind us very powerfully that there is no talking about Jewish freedom, safety, and Torah without taking into account all of those same things – self-determination, war, international relations and alliances, relations with the other peoples of the land, power and wealth. All of which affect each other in ways that are hard to predict and are intertwined, as hard to see clearly and sort out and solve as a Rubik’s cube. In that we are every bit the heirs of the Hasmoneans, the heirs of their dilemmas, and we pray we will learn from their failures and deal with the complexities with more wisdom in our own time. We know how many lives are riding on this, right this month of Chanukkah 5784 and in the years and decades to come, in Israel, Palestine, the United States and every place where Jews live.

And that is what I have to say this year about Chanukkah in a serious vein. I haven’t said anything much about the story of the miracle of the oil, beyond how late that part came into the tradition of Chanukkah. I have arrived at a view that I think our Talmudic rabbis had, which is that the storing and finding of the oil to begin with is as significant as the eight nights of light. Someone in the time of Antiochus had to imagine that within a few years, or decades, someone else would know to look and dig up this precious resource near the Temple, more valuable than any of the money that so many had fought over inside. Someone had to hope we would continue to dig up the many-layered story around Chanukkah and find an energy in it.

No historical analogy is perfect. Even if it were, the past is not doomed to repeat, nor are the good things from the past guaranteed to repeat. So we need to find an energy from digging up these stories. From the fact that our ancestors also faced similar dilemmas of freedom, power, adaptation and integration as we do, and that they did it with their backs to the wall far more than ours, and that they bothered to write a lot of it down for us. Then we need to find energy from the hints and resonances in the stories of the past that might fire our own insight, or our own commitment to expand the circle of those who are thinking about these themes, who are working on them, from one to two people, to seven to eight, and beyond. On Pesach we tell of liberation and redemption past, and then we ask what now. The values and dilemmas are framed for us, and then it’s in our hands to turn that into a charge and ask what’s next to do.

So too that’s my hope ultimately in conveying a longer, grown-ups’ story of Chanukkah. That is can be a gift of energy from our past that powers us through the Antiochus part, through the corruption of the early priests, past them toward the courage and rededication of the Maccabees, and finally toward each other -- confident that we can find a bit of insight and then more, hopeful that more of us and then even more of us will shine light toward a better ending to all the layers of the story that was begun long ago and continues now, in those days at this time, bayamim ha-hayim bazman hazeh.