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I am noting that in the Lit and Arts course, what seems to be easiest for me to understand (and was back then too?) is architecture. I'm not spatial, generally, and geometry was my weakest part of math. But the layout of churches seems to be intelligible to me. Charlemagne's church architecture has a logic to it, defining what a Christian ruler is and his relationship to his people, the clergy, and Christ. I noticed in the notes that Professor Nercessian compared Aachen to the Jerusalem Temple, as a representation of divinely created order within the chaos of life at that time. I find myself wondering what things like "order" and "standardization" were like related to before Charlemagne and in comparison to the hyper-organization of life today (not that we don't have our types of chaos).

In Government, Professor Hall noted about Britain in the 1800s two things -- the switch in the bourgeoisie's alliance from the commercial aristrocracy to some part of the working class; and how that alliance was mediated through or really because of the durable legacy of parliamentary stability, such that social conflict was in politics and not raw class conflict.

In France, the 1800s saw a succession of regimes, as monarchism and for a time a strong presidency kept coming back and then being undermined, and the question is why. Among the underlying factors Professor Hall pointed out were the fact that while Britain had a certain democratic ideology and corresponding institutional framework for more than a century, France's democratic ideology was only ten to twenty years old when industrialization began. The slow industrialization meant that the bourgeoisie was not large enough to be an independent force, and the peasantry remained large. Both groups, the peasantry more so, responded to monarchist offers -- strong top-down leaders coopted the language of democracy and the supposedly democratic plebiscite to woo the peasants. The working class leadership never coalesced because much of it was killed during rebellions, and the political system did not even in the late 1800s offer an avenue of influence for socialist parties. Consequently labor was not a parliamentary force and turned toward either more radical revolution or demands for working conditions outside politics. Thus the Third Republic, which endured for about 70 years finally, did so by performing relatively limited functions -- catalyzing a certain amount of industrialization but not anything like in Britain or even Germany, and nothing more major than that, and preserving for the most part the social class arrangement in France as it had been.

Two things that struck me in the notes -- One was the description of political parties in France as being based on locales and notables, such that they did not provide the durable mediating, aggregating, and compromise mechanisms that define British or American politics. (I think this is still a legacy somewhat in France today?). The other was Professor Hall's discussion of the Dreyfus Affair, and how little attention he paid to the function of antisemitism, which I still don't know enough about, other than to note that nationalism was a fissure point in French politics in a way that weakened the Third Republic.

In the Zionism course, Professor Bartal talked about how the all the religious reform movements within Eastern European, non-westernized Jewish society, all weakened the traditional authority structure of the community without disturbing the daily practice of religious tradition. He didn't really draw a line from this to Zionism, other than to suggest that at some margin this made the move into Chibbat Tziyon easier for traditional Jews. Some of the moves of the Eastern European Haskalah, such as the publication of newspapers and journals, were copied from the more Western maskilim and made it possible for traditional Jews to learn about new trends.

The liberalization movements in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Poland and Ukraine, multiethnic polities, often found Jews on the side of the state rather than the nationalists, because the state was the champion of reform based on multiethnic rule while the nationalists had no room for the Jews as a people regarded as not part of the "nation." In Russia up until the early 1880s, Jews had hopes that the czar and his reforms would be beneficial for Jews, but the violence following the assassination of the czar squeezed Jews from both directions. The people rejected or suspected the Jews, and the czarists also made up stories that the Jews were responsible. With the failure of emancipation already in Western Europe, there was no room for hope of acceptance in the Russian realm.

A large part of the Chibat Tziyon movement in this phase was small-scale and for self-help and education; there was no plan yet for migration to Eretz Yisrael. A schism arose between those focused on the practicalities of changing the Jewish situation, and Ahad Ha-am, who argued that a cultural and intellectual-spiritual transformation was the primary thing that needed to happen before the Jews could make any social change or migration succeed.

Back to College Update

It has always been hard for me to find a way to interact with art that isn’t verbal. I want to think and talk about the concepts that are artistically represented, to interpret them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems incomplete. As I go over Lit and Arts, I’m thinking about this but also realizing the course is about contextualizing art in a period period in history, to see what we can learn about history, politics, and religion through art. I’m not sure yet if I would have learned the same things without the artistic pieces, as a straight history course.

The last few classes have been about Charlemagne, and some of the manuscripts, churches, and monasteries from his reign. Artistically, there is something about I think Germanic stylized nature forms, vines and animals that aren’t meant to evoke a scene or a landscape and aren’t traditionally classic or Roman or Christian. Professor Nercessian talked about some ways that Gospel manuscripts were organized, and how the lettering was meant to set a standard for the educated classes that Charlemagne was trying to develop as an elite ruling class.

There is the prominence of the X-R (“chi-rho”) page in manuscripts, about Christ as King. It’s not entirely clear to me if the blending of earthly rule and spiritual supremacy is pretty new or a continuation of Byzantine motifs. But I think the imagery of Christ as a ruler jumped to a new level in this time, and even when there wasn’t a parallel image of the emperor, just the vibe of Christ as imperial was a contribution to imperial power.

It is interesting, thinking about my preconceptions of the early Middle Ages, that Charlemagne was trying to consolidate his rule over much of Europe through culture. I hadn’t realized just how real was the touch of a common culture at this time, as far as the islands of Scotland and Ireland – maybe not as a dominant culture but at least a palpable presence. Charlemagne and the pope seemed to use each other, since the church was the only other entity with pockets of authority and ownership of vast lands. Charlemagne coopted that, and the pope coopted Charlemagne. I don’t know if the emperor felt that Christianity was a worthwhile culture for his realm, or just a useful one. There was a special Professor Nercessian talked about the gospel codices as standards for copymaking.

There was a transition from a roaming court, which was one way to exemplify rule over a large area, to a center in Aachen with a magnificent church and other palaces and buildings. If I read the notes right, Charlemagne emulated and advanced prior Roman/Byzantine emperors in incorporating adoration for the emperor into the traditional basilica or enhanced basilica (my term, not a scholarly one).

The Book of Kells is a thing I remember.

In Gov 1170, there was a brief comparison of industrialization in Germany and Italy with Britain, and why the path of the first two set the stage for fascism. In Britain, industrialization was funded largely by economic activity itself, so that a strong state was not originally necessary and both industrialists and commercial landowners developed power. In Germany and northern Italy, the late-starting industrialization required concentration of capital in investment banks, and railroad and infrastructure building by the state, so the state drove the empowerment of groups and not vice-versa, and there was not the same multiplicity of power centers.

Which is not to say that Britain developed without massive dislocation. Eventually the requirements of capitalism drove people from the rural land toward cities, into conditions of both squalor and lack of traditional social structures. When the poor did try to organize or rise up, it tended to be in a mode of restoring old social structures, rather than pressing for revolutionary new ones, and the aristocracy could coopt that part of the agenda.

Political conflict in Britain in the 1800s was primarily between the new bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. At key points, Parliament served as an effective mediating institution – there was bargaining over tariffs and poor relief, there were strategic concessions to the new monied class and also times when the more commercial aristocracy saw an alliance with industrialists as in their interests. Professor Hall suggested that the legacy of parliamentary compromise which ended the Glorious Revolution continued to have an impact, and the most effective sources of change were by those who could organize into interest groups for concrete changes. Some of those changes were constitutional – the expansion of the franchise, reorganizing city governments, reduction of rotten boroughs. These came about through somewhat traditional parliamentary processes. The lower classes were shut out from driving these processes, unless it was in the interest of another class and in concert with them.

Professor Bartal taught that the messianism was a matrix for an early Zionism in the mid-1800s, from a couple directions. The stall of integration of Jews was accompanied by a small but significant trend in Christian millenarian circles in Britain and the U.S., which saw the development and improvement of the Holy Land as a redemptive step. Jews’ separate existence, in this light, was viewed as a positive, a way of positioning Jews for a role either as returning Jews or as new Christian converts in the Holy Land.

Some prominent wealthy British and French Jews allied with this Christian movement, to fund settlements in Palestine as initially part of the reform and education of more backward Jews, most of which was taking place in the home countries. British and American Christian authorities and philanthropists in turn green-lit these enterprises by people like Montefiore and Cremieux.

The messianic trends within Kabbalistic Sephardi and Chasidic Judaism also became a frame for a small number of Jewish religious proto-Zionists to view settlement in the Land of Israel. Some mystics looked to the year 1840 as a date for the Messiah, as some Christians did for the second coming. To these Jews, the small steps of Jewish self-improvement in the context of incomplete integration were also signs of the beginning of a messianic era. (There was a fascinating piece I hadn’t remembered about some Jews seeing Cremieux, Montefiore, and Rothschild as encoded in some messianic verses of Torah and prayer.) The stall of integration could be seen as a positive – the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness was good, and the improvement of Jews, which was driven by negative stereotypes, was also in service of making us more fit for redemption or a redemptive era.

In the secular stirrings before the 1880s, language and culture were understood as more central than religion (of course) and even land sometimes. Professor Bartal mentioned some interesting perspectives on Hebrew. One was that unlike Eastern European nationalisms, which took languages of lower status and elevated them, Ben Yehudah-style Haskalah looked at Hebrew as an originally elevated language that had been displaced by lower vernaculars like Yiddish and needed to be restored. Interestingly, Ben Yehudah looked to Arabic to generate new modern words and my notes say that 25% of modern Hebrew comes from Arabic.

Zionsim, such as it was in the middle of the 1800s, was a small movement alongside three main well-defined Jewish responses to modernity – reform of Judaism, whether religious or in a Haskalah vein; Orthodox rejection of the Reform impulse; or a passive integrationism.

College: Historical Transitions

Professor Hall started his course with a terrific introduction, setting out the goal of the course: to figure out why in particular Great Britain, France, and Germany entered the modern age from similar medieval conditions but took such different political routes. Britain had a relatively nonviolent transition toward democracy. French made the transition with violence and setbacks. Germany was the one which had fascism. He said we would review the history and assess different factors and theories, using a comparative perspective to try to isolate factors which made the key difference in these trajectories. He named some of the major theorists and theories of modernization that I would come to really only begin to get the following year in Social Studies 10, such as Marx and Weber and Durkheim.

In the first phase of the transition from feudalism, there were two major sets of trends. One was economic. Each society had a distinctive "crop", which shaped how commercialization could occur. In Britain it was wool, which would require the consolidation of land for pasture. In France it was grapes, which was labor-intensive and gave the patterns of the peasantry a tremendous inertia. In Germany it was grain. The other trend was political, and shaped how the institution of the state and the monarchy would change in the age of absolutism. In Britain, the new economy of grazing and "putting out" generated a new class of gentry, distinct from traditional artistocracy. In France, the monarchy created a bureaucracy to enforce the collection of taxes, a new set of nobility distinct from the traditional landed nobles. In Germany, which was not yet a unitary state, what political authority existed relied on the traditional aristrocracy, the Junkers.

I hadn't known how consequential the commercialization of agriculture was as a phase before the market and industrial revolutions of the late 1700s and 1800s. Professor Hall did a nice job presenting us a ton of detail, organizing it, stopping to talk about big theories of these changes like Marxism and critiquing them and refining them, and also introducing what he called the question of structure vs. voluntarism, meaning the role that factors in the moment, decisions by political actors, and ideas played in addition to structural constraints.

I certainly hadn't really thought of or maybe even known that Britain had experienced a revolution in the 1600s, or two -- though it occurs to me now to question whether the same term is appropriate for Britain as for the U.S. and France. I will say now what I think about a lot too, which is that I know really nothing about the backdrop of non-European societies and whether any of this analysis of the transition to modernity applies. I don't think Professor Hall claimed that it does; I just know that like a lot of people, I carry the implicit notion that Western modernization is the norm, or that the British/American experience is in some sense an ideal to which others should be compared. It's a gap in my learning I still have not addressed.

One thing I note about the French Revolution is that it doesn't stand pat for a single explanation. Professor Hall labeled its different phases -- driven at different times by different groups in society, sometimes peasants, sometimes bourgeois, sometimes aristocrats, sometimes urban sans-culottes. He made note of the terror as both a new kind of state action, and an ideology identifying the state itself as a source of virtue and authority, distinct from society or the king who ruled. He also talked about how in France, the Revolution tore apart so many institutions, set the state against the church, did not succeed in reconciling the interests of peasants in earning enough from their crops and city-dwellers in having affordable food. So the French state would continue to convulse, and the Revolution and the Napoleonic period created a strong state with an army but not a modern land economy or a modern social class powerful enough to move the nation into a strong and stable next phase.

In Britain, Professor Hall noted that industrialization took off first even though Britain lagged France and Germany in innovation or education. What Britain had was an alignment between the state and new economic actors, who adopted the technology of the factory and accepted patterns of the city and both internal and international trade and who could propel them forward. There was social transformation and suffering, a complete overturning of the logic of land, labor, and capital within a hundred years or less -- and while there were upheavals they did not overwhelm the political system the way that France experienced.

Germany was still fragmented into separate governments in a looser economic alliance well into the 1800s, and while Britain made the leap from textiles to steel, Germany was still much more rooted in grain for far longer, so industrialization was impeded until later the new state would push it ahead in a convulsive way.

In the Zionism class, Professor Bartal to my surprise on reread referenced contemporary Palestinian nationalism in the first class. This was a year and a half before the first intifada. I think from him I learned the idea of the Jews as a medieval "corporation" -- a recognized legal-social entity with its own parameters from the rulers. I didn't remember two things from the early lectures. One is that before the Enlightenment period, during the age of European absolutism, the Jewish of particularly Central and Eastern Europe were experimenting with a kind of parallel process of consolidation, such as the "Council of the Four Lands." Already in other words the purely local, self-contained corporate community was experiencing some stresses in the 1600s. Also he said that again before the period of political change, there was a certain shift toward the Atlantic, to some degree even in Jewish migration, as opportunities in the commercial and mercantilist centers began to draw Jews away from the Ashkenazi centers.

Professor Bartal portrayed some of the Wissenschaft scholars as documenting historical processes within Jewish reality that might be leading to the end of separate Jewish existence as it had been known. I don't remember that then or hearing that since. I am struck my how small the window was in the 1800s between the offer of citizenship to the Jews in liberalizing countries and the turn toward modern anti-Semitic attitudes. I don't know how Bartal saw it, but there is both an incredible creativity in Jewish movements like Haskalah and self-critique/reinvention/reform of Judaism and also a tremendous pressure from the outside, from romantic-era attitudes toward Jews and about nationhood while the Jews were still assimilating earlier Enlightenment, liberal ideas. That mismatch would crash all over Europe in the late 1800s, from France to Russia.

In one lecture, Professor Bartal tried to answer why anti-Semitism became such an important feature of 19th century social thought and reform discourse, including among leaders and thinkers for whom traditional anti-Jewish attitudes were not important. I hadn't remembered that he pointed out how anti-Jewish attitudes morph to absorb whatever the core issues or critiques of the time area, and in that sense continuous in energy with medieval anti-Judaism even though the content in completely different. He said that some of the ways Jews were described are true, but don't carry the weight that anti-semitism assigns them. Even thinkers who viewed Jews positively overemphasized the features they admired (e.g. that Jews embodied the spirit of capitalism). All of these are commonplaces I think today; maybe they were back then and I just didn't get it. Ultimately, what made anti-semitism so potent, he argued, was a combination: the failure of political equality and liberal ideas to achieve enough equality of social status for Jews in the eyes of others; plus the romantic essentialism of nationalism in the later 1800s, which defined nationality rigidly and could not fit Jews in. Then when Jews turned to nationalism in response to this exclusion, that itself fed into the anti-semitic nationalism of others.

Professor Bartal also took a lecture to trace how messianism had been spreading within the Jewish world in a particular way even right before modernity. In its kabbalistic form, Jewish messianic suggested a cosmic process unfolding toward redemption, helped along by the spiritual acts of individual Jews. The movements that embraced this kind of messianism created a spiritual energy separate from the authority of traditional halacha and the rabbis whose authority came with that. I think what he was saying was that by the 1800s, with the wide spread of Hasidut, the Jewish world was ripe in this religious way for another change movement which was not built on traditional authority and which saw redemption as a possibility in the foreseeable future. But I haven't read ahead yet....

Meanwhile, in art, we are at the other end of the Middle Ages. What's interesting is how Charlemagne adopted forms and traditions and ideas from the Roman Empire, which is so unrelated to where he came from. He continued a pattern of new rulers incorporating pieces of prior monuments into his own, of making sure to be represented as both militarily strong and fundamentally just in his rule, as an embodiment of piety and the heavenly. Like other turning-point figures in later Roman history, Charlemagne turned back to Augustus as a model of representation to imitate. It's fascinating that rather than simply obliterate the Roman legacy he took it on, and that the papacy saw it as in its interest to ally with and crown Charlemagne as a continuation. One particular thing that strikes me in the notes, again not realizing I had seen it then, is the Christian shift from pagan temples, where priests are within but most people are outside, to the church as basilica, a public architecture where the people are within even as they may be wowed by grandeur.

I'm a Second Semester Freshman

Okay, it’s second semester of my first year of college in this plan I'm doing, and already I’m a week and a half behind. I will catch up this week and then do the project the way I intended, which is a day at a time.

“This semester”, I am taking first of all Introduction to Psychology with Jerome Kagan. I was trying to take some courses that would meet requirements in majors I was considering, otherwise I might have skipped to some other less intro course. I did know somehow that Professor Kagan was a major scholar, and he was a great teacher for the intro class. I can’t yet find my notes, so I may have to settle for some general memories later on, plus the one paper I do have.

I also remembering shopping a class called Psychobiology, which perhaps today we would call neuroscience. The lecture was about the corpus callosum, and what was learned from people for whom the connection between the two halves of the brain had been compromised. For some reason I decided the hard science of the course would be too demanding for me, maybe too much memorizing things I didn't think I was good at? Or maybe that I would go back and take the class if I chose psychology as a major, but only if that happened. This is the second example of a class I remembering shopping and not taking but where I remember the first lecture vividly. I’d looked at a class called Conceptions of Human Nature first term, and the first lecture talked about Freud and Marx, I remember, as dramatic contrasts in views of the basic premises of what a human is like.

I took a Government course, Political Development of Western Europe, with Professor Peter Hall. This was recommended as both a good background for and a taste of the Social Studies concentration. Professor Hall got great ratings in the student course evaluation guide. I wasn’t going to take the course because of the 300ish pages of weekly reading, but when I mentioned this to my parents my mom said, “Are you afraid of taking a class with a lot of reading?” I said, “No,” and then took the class. Thanks Mom! Also I guess I was considering majoring in Government, and maybe this would also be a way to get a requirement done, though I can't remember how much that was in my calculation.

I don’t think I was considering history as a major too seriously, but I did want to take another Jewish Studies course, and a visiting Israeli professor named Israel Bartal was offering a course on the history of Zionism. I think I knew a lot of the timeline from my Muss program in 11^th grade, and then reading Sachar’s History of Israel and a bunch of other things related to Israeli history in high school, some of them over and over. Obviously this would be a deeper, more critical dive.

I needed a Core course, and something less demanding. I ended up with a Literature and Arts C course, Empire and Art in the Medieval West I think it was called, with Professor Nora Nercessian. My neighbor Terry took it too. I guess I liked that it might touch on religion a bit, maybe, and also that it wouldn’t stray too far from history I knew something about from high school. I was always intrigued in high school by the notion of the Holy Roman Empire, for some reason. Not positive about that or what else I considered there in choosing this course, or which other options I discarded.

The first couple classes in the art class were about how the Germanic rules starting with Charlemagne claimed succession to the Roman imperial crown in some sense. Professor Nercessian reviewed some of the Roman imperial self-representations, in sculpture and a bit in architecture, focusing on Augustus, Trajan, Diocletian, and Constantine. There were nuances revealing their perceptions or backdrops of order vs. chaos in the world, dominance as an emperor, human power verging sometimes into a kind of chosenness by God. Charlemagne and successors would consciously imitate some of this, though they did not have access to the quality of materials or craftsmanship that the Roman and Byzantine emperors had.

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.

 

Exaggerating the Exodus: The Siddur Is the Opposite of the "Slave Bible"

This is a slightly revised version of a D'var Torah I gave on the Shabbat that was the last day of Pesach in 5782 (2022).

 

Right before Pesach in 2022, a bunch of people mentioned to me an article they had seen from the New York Times by Rabbi Sharon Brous. Her piece referenced a book known as the Slave Bible, or as its inside title page says “Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West India Islands.” This version of the Bible was published in 1807, and it was used in the Caribbean islands under British rule at that time to teach slaves to read and to teach them Christianity. As Rabbi Brous writes, this Bible is unique in that it has deleted the entire story of the Exodus. It jumps from Joseph’s uniting with his brothers all the way to the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, and then from there to the sternest and most warning parts of Deuteronomy, and that’s it for the Torah.

There are in the Deuteronomy section brief references to having been brought out of Egypt but no mention at all of being slaves there. So this was truly a Bible without an Exodus, and a Bible suffused in fact with justifications of slavery from various points in Genesis, as well as other parts of the Old Testament and New.

Rabbi Brous asks us to imagine how it’s possible to have a text without Exodus, without slavery and oppression and liberation, and call it a Bible. What kind of biblical religion could really be true to the Bible without that story -- it’s absurd. Yet that was the Bible and the biblical religion, quote-unquote, being fed to slaves in at least part of the English-speaking world into the 1800s.

After the third person mentioned this Bible to me, I found myself putting into focus an idea that’s been eating slowly at me for a while. I found myself thinking that there is a mirror-image Bible, not exactly a Bible but a book based on the Bible, and in this particular Bible the Israelites are continually being redeemed, over and over.

In this Bible, every mention of slavery and Pharaoh disappears quickly into a celebration of rescue and protection from not just oppression but hunger and pain and disilusionment.

In this version, God operates the world in every moment with compassion for every last creature, and has in every moment since the beginning of time, and God never naps from this concern and care for a moment, and never lets any creature fail to find at least a word to say or sing to describe this world.

In this version, the Sea is not a dangerous thing to try and cross, but a gushing out of gratitude.

In this version of the Bible, even our bones -- the least articulate part of our body, the part of us that can’t see out into the word at all -- even our bones proclaim Mi Chamocha, the words of the Song we sang at the Sea -- "Adonai Mi Chamocha, Who is like you, who rescues the powerless from the one who is stronger."

This Bible, where the liberation from slavery in Egypt is amplified and exaggerated -- it is the Siddur. It is our prayerbook. I’ve just been paraphraising for you most of pages 104-105 in our version of the Siddur, the prayer we call Nishmat Kol Chai after its first words, “the breath of all that lives.”

In recent years with all that has been happening in the world, I have been especially fascinated by what I will call the Nishmat Bible, which is the opposite of the Slave Bible. Part of my fascination is the flat-out contradiction between some of the words of the Nishmat prayers and what’s in our Torah. I mean the Torah is very clear that while Shifrah and Puah and Miryam and Yocheved were saving the lives of babies one by one, and while Moshe was taking matters into his own hands quite literally, God had to be reminded of the Israelites after some long period of time, finally snapping into action and setting a bush to burning. I mean: Is that the God who, in the words of the Nishmat prayer, “does not sleep and does not slumber”?

But that’s not even what fascinates me; it’s not a point of theology. What I’m amazed at is our ancestors of the year 1550, or pick another year like that, who sang these words in a medieval world where they had been oppressed for hundreds of years, who had a tradition of singing these words for least six or seven centuries and possibly more than a thousand years, when most Pharaohs in that time were not defeated and the many Jewish exits were not to promised lands.

The Jews of 1550 sang these words every Shabbat against all evidence to the contrary. What was that like? What did it feel like? What kinds of thoughts were they thinking about these words? Even as late as 1550, Jews had no idea that within a hundred years there might be the beginning of some kind of liberation in this world, in Amsterdam or Brazil or the North American colonies. And for most Jews in most places even in 1650 or 1750 or 1850 this was still the case. And yet they sang this Bible where “from the beginning of time to the end” without exception every moment God is taking care of them and “besides You we have no God who redeems and saves.”

I’m just gobsmacked. I can see in 1947 naming a ship Exodus, with Jews in peril still in Europe and in Palestine but it seems like a time that you could feel is those first chapters of the book of Exodus, where something may be coming and you’re in that fight.

I can see in churches in the 1950s and 1960s telling and singing about the Exodus, with protests and actions gaining energy if not always gaining momentum. I can see how in the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s we made “let my people” go a real watchword in solidarity with our people in the Soviet Union, when there was already liberation for Jews in this country and the State of Israel.

It’s easy to see how you make the Exodus a present story when the moves are happening and it’s more than a midwife here and an upstander there but history itself seems in the making.

It’s easier to see how you tell this story after we relocated to America, not only a land of freedom but a land that sees itself as another version of the Exodus story.

But for centuries and centuries our ancestors sang these songs, and made the already Exodus-filled Torah into a turbocharged Exodus Bible through the Siddur. Especially on Shabbat when they sang Nishmat, but also every regular day morning and night. Twice a day Mi Chamocha, the Song of the first moment of freedom. In the morning every weekday it’s “protector and savior for their children in every generation”; in the evening every night it’s the power “Who redeems us from the hand of every earthly power.”

What was it like to sing the Nishmat Bible? How did they do it? When there was no end in sight to oppressions, to crimes against humanity; when there was no debate and no media to show anyone else what was happening to us -- our ancestors kept being the stewards of the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus. Against all the evidence of the actual world. There was no way anyone could have pulled a Slave Bible over them. The Siddur is even more Exodus than the Torah itself.

(And of course, the Slave Bible was no match for the people over whom it was lorded in the 1800s.)

It is those centuries and centuries of stewarding this story, protecting it and retelling it and sometimes adding to it and exaggerating it in profound ways and just crazy ways, that have made other Exodus stories and realities possible in the past centuries. We talk about the power of stories, but it’s more than the story and its content. A story stored up and charged with spiritual energy for that long becomes more powerful at some point than any powerful tyrant or tyranny. That’s what I mean each time I hand the Torah scroll to a BMitzvah and say: You can feel all the noise and energy of our ancestors talking about it; their energy is in here and when you add that up it’s just so much power. Enough to power our liberations in Israel and here, the first modern revolutions, and lest we forget the dramatic fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse three decades ago of the longest and widest single brutal system of oppression in human history. So many have understood these as Exodus stories.

As real as the Slave Bible was in its time, it is really no match. At an interfaith gathering during Pesach one year, our congregation’s friend Olga Tines, the music minister at the New Fellowship Baptist Church, talked about the power of the Exodus in her own legacy as an African-American. She reminded us that Christianity was not the religion that her people brought with them from Africa to North America, but once the white slaveholders began to use Christianity they couldn’t keep those Exodus parts quiet. And like us, the slaves created a hyper-Exodus-Bible of song and prayer, in spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and in sermons. And things happened in the real world because of that, and when other things happened they had faith already because the liberation of slaves was a real thing.

I know it seems like we have discharged some of the energy in the Exodus story. There is so much Pharoah, isn’t there; he keeps coming back. I don’t have to recite the topical litany. A couple of years ago I was working with one of our BMitzvah kids, Benjamin, and we were studying another part of the Torah, the story of Noach, and Benjamin’s view was that we have not advanced at all since the time of the biblical Flood.

And I tried to come back to him with the scholar Steven Pinker and his objective, statistical study The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I don’t know if Ukraine or Burma or Afghanistan changes the calculus but Pinker said the world is less violent and more peaceful than ever before. Benjamin was having none of it.

I’m not blaming him. To make the world more free takes empirical things but it doesn’t happen without stories and without being captured back into those stories. That’s why we need more Exodus even when we might not entirely be feeling it.

If our ancestors for hundreds and hundreds of years, in their situation that was more like Israelite slaves than like anyone else in the story -- if they could keep singing the Nishmat Bible and studying the Exodus story, we certainly can from our position on the other side of the Sea as modern Jews. We can --  with our memories of the past century or two in our own lives and the lives of our families. This is not a time to go mellow on Exodus, but to crank it higher. And not just talk about Pharoah and not just about midwives and sprouts, but the splitting Sea and the full-on redemption out ahead.

That’s why we’re here as Jews. You can’t cut those things out of the Bible, and if anything as a Jew you have to multiply them. Somehow, we were the first people who had this story of the Exodus, of Yetziat Mitzrayim. We’ve had it the longest, it changed us and it’s changed the world already. It’s our job in the world to be stewards of this story, pour our energy into it no matter what is happening, and keep bringing it out over and over. And, as we say at the Seder, everyone who uses the Exodus to tell more and more stories is to be praised.

 

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.

****

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.

Partition Day: November 29, 1947

On this day in 1947, November 29, the United Nations approved a plan for the partition of British-governed Palestine into three areas: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a UN-governed enclave encompassing Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The entire area would be joined in an economic union.

The Jewish Agency, which was the official Jewish leadership of the territory, immediately accepted the proposal. The Arab Higher Committee in Palestine as well as the Arab League of other nations all rejected the proposal, because of the Jewish state.

The Arab State of Palestine would have come into existence in 1948, had the Arabs decided to accept the UN plan and proclaimed the state.

Partition was no one’s ideal – not the Jews, not the Arabs within Palestine, not the surrounding Arab countries, not the British. It was the least bad solution the UN could come up with.

No Jew or Muslim believed they should give up Jerusalem, as all would have been required to do. No one by 1947 was interested in a completely joint, binational governing mechanism, which had been discussed at various times within the British administration but not implemented, and among Jewish-Arab groups like Brit Shalom that had dissipated years earlier. The Arab leaderships in and around Palestine rejected the Jewish return to the land entirely. The Jews did not love the partition in principle. They were concerned about whether the small amount of land dedicated to the Jewish state would be defensible and could sustain the population. There were Jewish groups opposed to partition who had militias. The main difference the Jewish Agency Executive fought back against those militias for the most part in their attempts to sabotage the UN plan.

So partition was the UN’s proposal. The Jews’ representatives accepted the UN partition plan, and the Arabs rejected it. The Jews would have abided by the terms and map of the plan and were prepared to up until the moment of the British withdrawal, even after months of fighting, had the Arab armies not invaded.

When the new phase of fighting broke out beginning November 30, 1947, while the British were still present and then beginning their withdrawal, the Jews’ objective was to secure the areas assigned to the Jewish state, plus an open road linking Jewish areas assigned to the prospective state with Jewish areas in Jerusalem. Jewish Jerusalem was very quickly under a complete siege, with little food and water as well as bombardment and terror attacks. The road from Jewish areas on the coast went through a narrow pass in the hills that was controlled by the Arabs and frequently blocked.

The Arabs’ objective was to take over all of the territory, including that assigned by the UN to the Jewish state.

Today could have been a national celebration for Israelis and Palestinians, the 76^th anniversary of a world-changing event. So many lives and communities could have been saved. If only. Instead there was a war, and the map changed because of who won or lost which battles in which areas.

There is much more to say also about what drove the parties’ considerations in 1947-1948, who prevented a Palestinian-governed state even in 1948, and the displacement of both Palestinians and Jews in the territory and throughout the Middle East in the immediate aftermath. But today 76 years ago, it all could have been prevented.

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A few connected and somewhat-connected links:

Here’s a glance at partition proposals from 1937 to 2008. The video is from 2019, so the “proposal” at the end is not something I’m endorsing here; it seems like a very bare minimum. I really recommend the Unpacked series of educational videos and podcasts. They are from a Jewish-Israeli point of view, self-critical about and within that point of view, embrace complexity and value coexistence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYWII25cxM

This is an account of the Abbas-Olmert negotiations of 2008, and an indication of how serious and close to agreement they were and where the major problems ended up remaining: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/magazine/13Israel-t.html

Here is the very long August 1947 report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). It’s illuminating for its detail about the nature of the land and the conflict to that date:
https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/NL3/729/28/PDF/NL372928.pdf?OpenElement

O Jerusalem! is a classic book about 1947-1948, from the partition vote through the war. The focus is on Jerusalem and the voices are local Jewish and Arab, with also some detours to the "halls of power". I imagine there is better history and historiography since its publishing, but it's solid and fair and descriptive. https://bookshop.org/p/books/o-jerusalem-larry-collins/7488416?ean=9780671662417