I'm Jon Spira-Savett, rabbi at Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire. This website and blog is a resource for Jewish learning and Jewish action. It is a way to share my thoughts beyond my classes and weekly Divrei Torah. You'll find blog posts, standing resource pages with links and things to read, and podcasts as well.
Looking at my notes from "Justice" and Psychology today -- it's neat for me to see where the terms consequentialism and utlitarianism first entered my mental landscape. Professor Sandel did a nice job (and I did a good job in my notes) capturing both the simplicity of Bentham's theory and the nuance of Mill's revisions of it, to bring it into conversation with some accepted moral principles ("do unto others"), the emerging liberal framework of rights, and the Aristotelian concept that some goods are more good than others. Interesting that I caught that without knowing much about Aristotle (until later in the course, but probably until much, much later in studies and probably long after my formal studies). In some ways it's a wonder utilitarianism sticks at all, in light of the discussion we had the way my notes reflect it and Professor Sandel's later critique of liberalism generally.
The psych lecture continued the overview of methods and types of theories, and my reading notes were about gender bias in contemporary psychological research. Professor Demick started very early to point out how gender affects conceptions of development, and the particular study we read about to take notes on (Broverman?) was about how when people were asked to rate traits as male or female, and as I guess mature or well-adjusted or not, or something like that, the male-associated traits were more likely to be rated as better-adjusted. This held true largely across ages, or between researchers and students, so it becomes a bias passed down within the field unless pushed back on, as well as a reflection of society generally. I don't remembering this seeming like some kind of radical thing to say back in 1985; Professor Demick presented it critically but rationally as a tool necessary for interpreting observations and studies. I also at some point noticed, maybe when this came up next or maybe right away, that despite my male-ness I myself seemed to track more of the "female" qualities than the average male in the study. I know some friends and I, or maybe just my friend Tova who was also in this class, talked about that in the dorm!
I love this parasha about the scouts, the m’raglim, and the fact that the Torah is so brutally honest about how hard it is to go forward even to a land of milk and honey, even when the alternatives are to stay in a desert or to return to Mitzrayim (Egypt). I love the duality of feeling like giants vs. feeling like grasshoppers -- and as I’ll tell you in a bit, thanks to Pride Shabbat I love the big cluster of grapes, so large it takes two people to carry it.
When I look forward on Pride Shabbat, toward a promised land, I personally have to start by looking back, to a day I think of as “The Lunch of the Three Jonathans.”
It was right after a final exam during college, and I remember this lunch partly because we ate at one of the dining halls I almost never went to. I can’t remember if I ran into two other Jonathans by accident or if I had plans with one and the other showed up too.These two other Jonathans were distinct and important in my life at that time.
Any one of us could have become rabbis, and we briefly talked about it that day because I thought I might and I really thought they should too, both of them. Of the three, Jonathan #1 -- I’ll call him just Jonathan -- he really was the one most suited at the time to become a rabbi. He had the widest vision; he had the widest ranging intellect of the three of us; he had integrity and fearlessness about being an activist; he had been an active youth group person in high school. I brought up the rabbi thing and Jonathan laughed, a certain look on his face that was trademark for him -- a combination of a silly grin and a knowing, “no-way” laugh. If it’s possible to be simultaneously loving and telling someone how stupid they sound for the thirtieth time, it was that kind of laugh.
Jonathan #2 at the table was me, the only one called Jon to the exclusion of Jonathan. Jonathan #3 was a star yeshiva student, sometimes called Jonathan and sometimes Jon, and he’s a whole other story.
I knew Jonathan wasn’t going to rabbinical school but it was fun to poke him about it periodically and I didn’t mind the look and the laugh. I thought I knew at the time why Jonathan wasn’t going to be a rabbi, because we were good friends and had talked about it. But it turns out, I didn’t know at all.
I didn’t know until another lunch three or four years later, in a different cafeteria, this one at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I was in rabbinical school, and Jonathan was on a panel of three people brought in to talk about what it had been like to grow up Jewish and gay.
I knew Jonathan was gay, but that was the first time I heard him speak about what it was like to have been a gay Jewish teen, in a liberal Jewish community in Boston in the 1980s. People in his youth group thought of Jonathan as the ultimate insider, a leader, he said -- and Jonathan told his story of being unseen, of the closet as the price he had to pay to belong. Other people, straight kids, could be draped on someone of the opposite sex in a friendly way as they hung out, but for him this kind of regular youth group behavior was a constant reminder of what he couldn’t share, and the very cameraderie that was so essential for other teens was alienating to him, and told him that there was no room for him within Judaism. We didn’t use words like “heteronormative” so much back then in the early ‘90s, not even the gay and lesbian speakers on the panel that day. But that’s what Jonathan was talking about.
Listening to Jonathan I was crushed on so many levels. Ashamed of ourselves as a Jewish community. Ashamed of the myself for the things I thought were tough for me when I was in USY. After hearing him talk that day at JTS, I couldn’t believe that Jonathan had ever set foot in Hillel.He had so much Jewish and Israeli in him that just walking away was never an option -- that too would have denied him so much of himself. Jonathan came to the Seminary and said he appreciated that we students were listening to their stories, even though we couldn’t ever fix Judaism for him enough that it wouldn’t be painful. At least maybe we could do better for kids in the future.
I was crushed and ashamed that I had known Jonathan by then for at least five years, intense years, and considered him a good friend -- and I never knew any of this. What kind of a friend had I really been. What must have I communicated, out loud or in unspoken assumptions, that he wouldn’t think of me as someone he could share any of this with when we were in college.
I hold up these two lunches next to each other in my mind, the lunch of the three Jonathans in college and the lunch listening to Jonathan at JTS, because the second lunch was the first turning point for me when it came to think about Judaism and LGBTQ+. It was Jonathan’s gift to me and hopefully his gift through me. That was the first time I got that it wasn’t enough to be unfazed when someone came out, to treat it as no big deal, an interesting and important thing about someone just like other interesting and important things. That was the moment I realized that the Torah about LGBTQ+ lives ought not be confined to two verses in Leviticus. It’s because of Jonathan that I eventually became convinced about marriage equality -- later when his partner Peter was dying and I saw what was already one of the most beautiful love stories I had known become even more beautiful and heartbreaking. It took me quite a while even so to arrive where I got to about gay marriage right around the time I arrived here in New Hampshire.
I cannot stand here as an ally, or tell you that I use he/him/his pronouns, without acknowledging Jonathan, and the impact of his friendship and pain and integrity on me. It would not be truthful to say I always knew what the promised land looked like, that from the start I was like Kalev (Caleb) in our parasha and knew how to be a giant and not a grasshopper.
Jonathan might be horrified that I am talking about him to you only through a series of stories about Mitzrayim and the midbar, Egypt and the wilderness, and not getting on to talking about visions of the promised land. (I should say that Jonathan is someone I’ve also learned from about other things, such as affordable housing and Israel-Palestine.)I really want to embrace the terrific formulation that the Tzedek crew created about this Shabbat, which I stole for my note yesterday. We are celebrating LGBTQ+ Jewish lives and we are celebrating what queer Jews have brought to Judaism, to Torah itself.So let’s talk about that enormous cluster of grapes, so unexpected, so big and juicy it takes two people to carry.
A cluster like maybe you’re not sure what it is, and I can say about myself that I’m only just beginning to get a view of what might be called queer Torah, just in the past two or three years. And I have to say, I’m excited and challenged. Here are a few things I’ve begun to see, on my own scouting of the land we’re heading to.
Liz brought to my attention the Queer Niggun Project -- melodies composed and traditional prayers interpreted by LGBTQ+ Jewish creators. Last night I was so taken by the “Carousel Niggun” for L’cha Dodi, one of the big Shabbat love songs -- this version mashes up very traditional, yeshivish Hebrew pronunciation with both old and new idioms for the metaphor of God and Israel as lovers, married partners.
Or take Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Svara, which she calls a “traditionally radical yeshiva.” Her insight is that queer theory is actually the key to understanding the Talmud, because the Talmud was originally a project of marginal Jews who saw the world shaking before other Jews did, and these different-living, different-thinking sages were far more ready when the Temple was destroyed than any other Jews to pick up the pieces and make something strong and beautiful, which is the foundation of all of our Judaism today.
Rabbi Lappe says that a queer perspective is actually helpful and necessary for everyone, because the Talmudic rabbis were brilliant at tooling for a world exactly like that of the scouts in our parasha, who knew they would have to move into a new world about which so much was uncertain.So at Svara you study in Aramaic, the rabbis’ own language, whether you’ve ever studied before or not, and sometimes their study events attract an aundience that is majority straight, because they find it’s the queer perspective that is illuminating. Once upon a time, this kind of thinking was the very definition of Conservative Judaism. I heard this same kind of perspective encoded musically in Itai Gal’s niggun from last night.
So this is my very new-for-me take on queer Torah. People like me, communities like ours, have tended to talk about LGBTQ+ Jews as people “we” quote-unquote need to “welcome”, to “include”, and to do that we have to let go of something we have had, some earlier definition or some certainty. But really, these queer teachers and creators are saying: What we have is this cluster of fruit, and we can carry it together. Yes, you could say it’s heavy, it’s unusual, I don’t know what to make of it. Or you could say it is nourishing and it’s sweet and it’s been missing. It’s been there rooted in the land the whole time, but until we went looking for it, hopefully together, you didn’t recognize it. You thought milk and honey was in the future, but the truth is the promised land is even richer.
When I think about us, this community in particular, I think about the two scouts holding that large dowel between them, carrying this new and large fruit. I can easily imagine that one of them, but only one, was Kalev, confident about the future and ready to live in it right away. The other was concerned or had questions, felt the weight of it more than the sweetness. But they carried it together. That’s a moment I treasure too in the parasha. That’s why we invited Mimi Lemay here. That moment is a hope for us, so that we don’t get stuck in the desert for 40 years. We don’t know exactly what the promised land is like when it comes to equality or what it means truly to celebrate LGBTQ+ Jewish lives all the time. What we can know, and what I do know, is like this in the Torah’s words: tova ha-aretz m’od m’od. The land of our Pride is a good land; it is very, very good.
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 18th 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.
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.
Some meandering and very rough notes about the opening of this week’s Torah reading, Leviticus 16, somehow sort of in light of week’s events at Columbia University and other places.
The chapter appears to be just the description by the Divine to Moshe and Aharon (Moses and Aaron) of an elaborate ritual for Yom Kippur, the annual Jewish high holy day of “atonement” – cleansing, resetting. This year, I’m thinking that it’s hinting at a conversation between the Divine and Moshe about his brother Aharon, who is not there at the moment. The conversation is about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing.
Some scholars view this conversation as the center of the Torah itself. It references the Holy of Holies, which is in the very center of the traveling community of Israel in the wilderness.
“The Divine said to Moshe – after the death of two of Aharon’s sons, in their coming near in the presence of the Divine, and they died. The Divine said to Moshe: Speak to Aharon your brother, that he not come just anytime the Holy Place inside the curtain, facing the Cleansing-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover that is on the ark, and die – for in a cloud I am seen over the Cleanings-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover. This is how Aharon should come to the Holy Place…. And atone/cleanse/reset for himself and for his household…”
And then more, about atonement/cleansing/resetting/ransoming for the entire people, through offerings and a scapegoat and an encounter in a cloud in the Holy of Holies.
1. Nadav and Avihu
In the first verse, the Torah is already wrestling with itself. The two sons had names, so why are they hidden here? Nadav and Avihu were their names. They died in a fire that came out from the Divine presence, when the two of them brought some kind of unauthorized fire offering. So that’s a reason to hide them. But then the verse shifts, softens -- unauthorized, “strange” fire is reported here as “coming close to the Divine.” And the Torah just mentions that they died, as a thing that happened without pronouncing judgment. It happened and it seems to be how Aharon is marking time right now, or how Moshe is, or how the Divine is.
If you want to say Nadav and Avihu were punished, you could say they wouldn’t tolerate holiness by any kind of methodical system. They had waited through seven days of an elaborate ritual of dressing up and waiting inside, to become priests. As soon as that was over, they just came the way they decided was right. You could say they wanted a short cut to absolutes, to truth. They didn’t trust authority, not their father’s or the Divine’s. They were protesters against the system. They were individualists masquerading as brave rebels. They broke from their tribe and family, from a long collective process of inquiry into truth and value and holiness, and fell into groundthink, an echo chamber of two.
Or you could Nadav and Avihu were right, but the Torah has no room for them, or the system can’t figure out how to assimiliate them. They were on a different plane, one which just couldn’t coexist with the world of method and system. The Torah doesn’t say in the chapter where they died that they sinned. The “strange fire” of many translations is probably too harsh and wrong for the Hebrew “zarah”; “unauthorized” is more precise. So maybe their story isn’t about punishment at all? Nadav and Avihu were just completely absorbed, in every sense, figuratively and literally. And still we can’t build a bridge from the Torah to them, on this way of seeing it. And to those they left behind, the matter was never resolved, and no one understood who they were or what they had done.
2. Aharon and his two sons
I never noticed this before this week: the Divine is worried that Aharon will go back to the place where his sons died, and if so he would also die. He might go at the wrong time, or he might go not prepared in the authorized way.
None of them had been priests for long. But Aharon was the quintessential system guy. He had to be, after he had improvised in the Golden Calf situation and look at the chaos and carnage and death that ensued. Aharon was at the top of the careful pursuit of holiness, the absolute, and truth – with his carefully designed garments, and the step-by-step processes of shepherding people through their offerings whenever they felt whole, or guilty, or joyful. Aharon would be the one to make judgments, first by oracle and eventually by the book of Torah.
But even so Aharon couldn’t suppress the improvisational, says the midrash. Doing his compulsory figure-eights, Aharon had the cultivated calm and metronomic pace to listen to people. And when they hurt he wanted to help them find peace within, or reconciliation between.
From time to time, could it be that Aharon was jealous of his two sons? Wished he could dispense with the time-consuming processes and inquiries, and go straight to the absolute? Is that the ground he wanted to go back to, at the Holy Place – to experience himself as they did for a once and only time? Did he need go there to reassure himself that this was him, and that was them, so he could reground himself? Or did he ever doubt his own way? If he did, who else could the Divine possibly find, to model the best of the priestly way and not just the prophetic?
Or maybe Aharon would go to the Holy Place simply to weep at the site of his loss, which was or wasn't connected to anything Nadav and Avihu did or represented in relation to him or anything. And the Divine was worried the people might never get him back from there, or never get him back intact.
3. The Divine and Aharon
How to talk to Aharon about this? How to protect him from searing pain, from being retraumatized by the Holy Place itself? How to shield him from a complexity he might never emerge from?
But also, how could even the Divine know when Aharon was healed enough, clear enough, to play his essential role? Which was to help the nation take responsibility, be accountable in a global way, for all it had done over a year’s time. It was Aharon the priest, not Moshe the teacher, whom the Divine designated to shepherd them through. It was Aharon the Divine wanted to train for this, even after Aharon had made the Golden Calf.
I have sometimes thought that Aharon’s priestly life was the Divine’s way of guarding him from ever making another public pronouncement in front of an idol that *This* is your god, O Israel. Literally from now on his every word and move would be scripted. But for some reason, that’s not the Aharon I’m seeing this year in this text. The Divine wants the father of Nadav and Avihu to be the one who comes to their meeting together in the Holy of Holies, to be the one person who will speak out loud the Divine name.
4. The Divine and Moshe
So the Divine went to Moshe with this dilemma.
Usually when the Divine has a charge that involves Aharon, the Divine speaks to them together. Not always, but mostly. Here, it stays for the time being between the Divine and Moshe.
Let me tell you what I have in mind, which the people need soon, and we need Aharon to guide them through. Maybe if I tell you, Moshe, you can tell him? Or you’ll know when he will be able to take this on?
Could we possibly say that the Divine “felt better” unburdening from this load, even if it would be a charge, a command whose execution we don’t hear much about?
Usually the Torah records that Moshe passed along what was spoken to him by the Divine, and then the Torah reports who followed through on the matter. In this chapter, it’s only sort of. We hear at the very end that someone did what the Divine had charged Moshe, but you almost miss it. We don’t know if “he did what the Divine had charged” means that Moshe talked to Aharon, or that Aharon performed the ritual.
Usually we don’t think of the Divine and Moshe as having conversations of consoling, of reflection. Moshe is the insistent one, the resistant one, the impatient one, the one who has an answer back or pushes the Divine to do something or do the opposite of what was just announced. Who just demands that the imperatives of absolute truths and methodical systems be reconciled – and you, Divine, make that so now! Usually the Divine relies on Aharon to slow things down and soften the edges, or make the dilemmas less painful.
On very rare occasions, it has to be Moshe. In this chapter, Moshe just listens to the Divine, listens absolutely, like no other time. And I have to think Moshe sobs in worry for his brother, for the Divine, for the people who need both the Divine and Aharon. Sobs for himself, for being Moshe and not Aharon. For not being able to meet these needs of the people himself.
And the Divine will not forget this, and will one day teach Moshe how to be like Aharon. But not yet.
5. Aharon and the people
It’s not like there haven’t been “sin offerings” until this point. Somehow it hasn’t been enough.
They need from time to time a broader accountability, for their year as a nation. Not just when they realize or find out they’ve done wrong – that’s what the “sin offerings” were for. They need to be made, forced, to ask themselves on an annual basis what have we done wrong, and give real answers and not just formulaic ones.
Even if they are in pain and in mourning, they need this periodic accountability. Nadav and Avihu were their loss too. Their trauma. It happened in their Holy Place.
Aharon will have to be the one to lead them through this new Yom Kippur, this day of cleansing/resetting/ransoming themselves back. Partly because Moshe is too harsh. The teacher is always grading. Partly because Aharon is the master of both systematic method and peaceful reconciliation.
And because when Aharon shows the people how to do this, from within his own pains and questions and anger and uncertainties, they will say: If he can, if he must, then we must, and we can.
Aharon will show them that you start with yourself, and your family. Before he can engage the people in confession, he must reflect on himself, on Nadav and Avihu, on everyone who is left. He will confess what he can, and what he doesn’t know is a sin or not he will at least offer up out loud as a report, to say that he knows.
Then he will speak on behalf of the people. Atonement is a word muddying the matter. There is a dimension of confession and acknowledgement, and then there is the Kippur, the cleaning/resetting and possibly ransoming back of one’s own soul and the national soul.
Interlude – Two Goats
The Mishnah says the two goats have to be identical in every way. The one that will carry off all the people’s wrongs to a far-away, sealed-off place no one can get to – and the one whose blood Aharon will take with him into the Most Holy Place.
Our worst acts and our ideals, sometimes they flow from place that are twinned within us. A quantum entanglement. (Or maybe just a cliché.)
6. Aharon and the Divine, or: Two Cherubs, or: Us Now
In the Most Holy Place it is crowded and it is lonely.
I have often thought of this part of Yom Kippur, where Aharon disappears into a cloud and meets the Shechinah, right by the ark with the deposit of the Divine words, as a calm retreat. A place he can see the most things, and hear spoken the special sounds of the Divine name, a word reserved and protected from the ways the world barnacles onto even our best most powerful words. How peaceful, how whole in this place.
This year I wonder about the lonely part. How will the Divine and Aharon be together? Will the two cherubs, which in the midrash embrace when the people as a whole are reconciled – will they be a comforting metaphor, especially to Aharon, or a cruel reminder of the separations he feels? Or of Nadav and Avihu who came toward this place and are no more – tragically, or because of their choices?
From Tali Adler this year, I think for the first time that Aharon and the Divine speak to each other. It’s not just Aharon, speaking the Name. About the Golden Calf, and what happened; about Nadav and Avihu, and who they were and what they did and what happened to them, and how everyone was affected. Aharon and the Divine have the best and most difficult conversation, about the year past and the losses and the wrongs and the world. Just like our midrash says that revelation at Mt. Sinai took as long as each person needed – a spiritual case of special relativity – so too Aharon and the Divine speak. From their perspective it takes as long as they need, maybe infinitely long, even if to the outside it seems to be over in a few minutes.
They have the conversations we all need – about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing. I wish the Torah would have told us more how to do that.
I believe Aharon emerges more cleansed, and restored, and healed. Through his acknowledgements, of his own faults and those of the people. And then all of the people through him are cleansed and restored and healed. They feel better and they are better, in every sense of the word. I believe this because I believe Moshe doesn’t tell Aharon to do all of this until Aharon is ready. (I wish the Torah had told us more about when Aharon was ready.) I believe this because I believe it’s possible to be ready.
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.
In August we went down to New York for the simchat bat celebration for our newest grandniece, and when we were hanging out with the family afterward at the synagogue, my daughter Lela was playing with R. and P., and she offered to give them piggyback rides. I think it was R. who got the first ride, so P. began to scream that it was unfair, so Lela said how about I give you two rides. And then of course R. began to scream -- that’s unfair! -- and this went back and forth for a minute when I though I might help.
I tried a trick I learned from Laurie which she learned from her mom, Iris z”l, which is to distract a kid with some other words. And I thought the way I would do this was to bring my moral-educator skills to bear. So I said to one of them, R. I think, “What’s fair?”
And there was a pause for about a second, and can you guess what she said to my question?
R. said: “It’s not fair!”
At which point I left Lela to her own devices.
So R. was right about one particular thing, which I’ll tell her when she’s old enough to get it but I’ll tell you now. In Judaism, we say that we value questioning. We value it a lot, and sometimes we even say that questioning is the essence of Judaism. Questioning what everyone takes for granted, questioning authority, even questioning God. It’s why Jews are often b’gadol, in the big scheme, revolutionaries and social critics, and scientific innovators, and litigators.
What R. was responding to is something else which we also say is the essence of Torah, which is knowing right and wrong. We look to Torah for absolute moral principles, which b’gadol is also why Jews have been among the leading activists for civil rights and human rights, in any country we are in and around the globe.
Questioning and having absolute moral conviction are not the same thing.
R. was saying now is the time for moral conviction, not for questioning.
Sometimes questioning is the opposite of what the Torah wants. When Par’oh says “Who is the Divine, mi Adonai, that I should listen and release the people”, that is not: Ah, Moshe, you’ve brought me an interesting theological perspective I’ve never encountered. I have some questions, perhaps we could discuss divinity and its implications for social ethics.
No, this is Par’oh questioning something we don’t think should be questioned. People shouldn’t enslave other people, period-full-stop.
And even if Par’oh had said: Let’s talk about this God of yours and the implications for our current labor situation -- this was not a situation for questions like that. This was a situation for moral certainty.
It’s not just that certain things should be beyond question. It’s that if what you mostly know how to do is question, it’s hard to build up the commitment you need to follow through, or to stand up for someone. Sometimes questioning can prevent us from believing that we know right from wrong. We think: if you can formulate a question about this conviction, then maybe it’s not a conviction. But you need to be certain about something in order to fight for it, especially when the people who are convinced of the immoral opposite are certain and fight from that certainty.
Let me give you one example from the week, and I want to say something about it from this lens and then come back to from another angle. Israel is right now before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, responding to an accusation that the war in Gaza constitutes genocide.
To me this particular charge is in the category of when questioning is not spiritual strengthening but leads you astray. When you are in a just war, against an enemy that is real and continues to be dangerous on a day-to-day basis, when you make efforts even though they are imperfect to distinguish combatants from noncombatants by helping them escape the fighting so they won’t be killed and giving warning and even a map and schedule of the fighting -- raising the question of genocide is profoundly confused. And Israeli actions to take account of the human rights and humanitarian needs of Gazans aren't a ruse to cover up genocide or genocidal intent. Gaza isn’t some kind of Theresinstadt, that if no one was looking the whole area and all its people would be bombed to the ground.
On this issue there is moral certainty that self-defense is right and a enemy itself genocidal deserves to be fought.
Considering genocide on the part of Israel as though this were a real question, worthy of the international court, doesn’t further any moral certainty at all -- no matter what the court rules, and may they have the wisdom to rule justly. No result of this case, or of parallel actions on university campuses, will strengthen a moral principle in the world or in anyone’s mind.
The parasha and the Exodus story more broadly do teach us about the questions you should ask even in a situation where much is morally clear and absolute. I have this question of my own -- why does God insist so often that the purpose of the plagues is so that Par’oh and the Egyptians will know the Divine? Why doesn’t God say: It’s so they will know that slavery is immoral. Surely that’s a moral certainty that ought to come before anything else.
In fact, while the Torah is teaching us about moral certainty in Egypt, the Torah is also teaching about questioning at the same time.
The parasha begins with this interesting revelation by the Divine to Moshe. God says: I appeared to your ancestors in Genesis as El Shaddai, but by my name, Y-H-V-H, I was not known to them. (Exodus 6:3)
The commentators interpret this to mean that there was something about the One that Avraham and Yitzchak and Yaakov knew with certainty, and that there was something they didn’t know. Rav Ovadia Seforno says that they never stretched what they knew for certain beyond their own experience, and therefore couldn’t really pass on to their children what their moral convictions would mean for their lifetimes.
And Sara Wolkenfeld teaches a midrash from Shmot Rabbah which says the same thing this way: that before Moshe no one who really knew God ever asked questions at all, particularly when what they knew for certain from the Divine was contradicted by what was happening before their eyes.
They never asked why if the land was being promised to them they were continually fighting the people there, or finding it hard to dig a well, or I suppose why sacrificing my son was a coherent thing to do. They never even asked how their enslavement was supposed to be part of the big picture.
But Moshe asked the Divine at the burning bush: Who are You? What’s your name? I know that slavery in Egypt is wrong, and I tried to do something way back but I couldn’t, so what’s going on that you think I can help change this?
This is a questioning which is grounded in moral certainty. Which asks -- if I know this is right and I know this is wrong, how should I apply it? What do I need to do? What don’t I understand yet? What detail about the big principle might I be getting wrong -- or might you be getting wrong? (Even the angels by the way in one grueseome midrash ask God: If this oppression is so wrong, why do You allow babies to be baked into the bricks that Your people are still being forced to make?)
So Moshe reaches a level where he can ground himself in certainty and challenge Par’oh and also continue to ask questions of the Divine, about what flows further from his moral certainty and what he is charged with teaching the people.
And the Divine continues to say in our parasha and next week’s too and beyond that that it’s not enough to say slavery here and today is wrong, but knowing Me means knowing that the Exodus means something forever, in other places and times, and you will have to keep asking each other about that.
So we can and must ask questions about Israel and Palestine, and the war and its conduct and what comes after. We ask them out of our certainties about a Zionism of moral excellence and out of the certainly that all human beings are created B’tzelem Elohim (in the Divine image). Indeed these questions will strengthen and deeper our deepest moral convictions about right and wrong.
We can and must ask about how the Exodus certainties stretch out to civil rights and equality in the United States. What now, and what toward the future, and what have we been missing in this story, all of these we should ask as we mark this important weekend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.
Some of these wise questions might be very challenging ones, ones that feel every bit as uncomfortable as the genocide quote-unquote “question.” But the point isn’t the doubt; the point is to question in service of conviction. This is the questioning of the chacham in the Pesach Seder, the wise child. Who is convinced that there are important testimonies and laws, and wants to dive further. As opposed to the one she-eino yode’a lish’ol, who doesn’t know to ask questions in the right spirit. I know that my grandnieces R. and P. will understand that one day, because of their parents and the great teachers they want for them.
The Torah calls of this throughout the Exodus narrative “knowing the Divine”, Yediat Hashem. To remind us that it’s impossible to know everything we need to about our certainties but that they are highest thing to strive for. Yediat Hashem is where certainty and questioning meet and then stretch higher. That’s the questioning that is indeed at the heart of Judaism, and as one of our most famous questions asks: If not now, when?
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 25th 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 25th 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 3rd 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 2nd 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.
This is the note I sent out to the congregation and posted on Facebook.
Dear Friends:
This past Tuesday along with about a dozen people from our synagogue, I was in for the March for Israel at the National Mall in Washington. About 20 people from the Southern New Hampshire Jewish community were there in total, along with a student group from Dartmouth and perhaps some others I’m not aware of. Together we helped make up a crowd of 290,000 people, according to the highest count reported. If that number is anywhere near accurate, something like one out of every thirty American Jews was together for an afternoon! I took a group before and after the rally to meet with Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Representative Annie Kuster and their aides, and others met with staff in the office of Representative Chris Pappas.
I had about ten days’ notice about the rally, and I didn’t know at first that I would go. I am one of two working parents with a child at home, and even though I work for the Jewish community it’s not easy to take an impromptu midweek trip out of town. I don’t usually like mass events and the simplistic speeches. But it didn’t take me long to realize that I was going, or for Laurie and me to work out the details to make it possible.
I went first of all for you in our community who are Israeli, for my Israeli family and for yours, all our Israeli family and close friends. For people who have suffered losses, who know hostages held in Gaza, whose lives are in danger right now in the fighting. Your needs and their needs are important, and it was important to show you and the public that our community notices you and the people you are connected with. That I notice. One of the goals of the march was simply to show human solidarity in a hard time. Especially when Israeli grief and danger are being drowned out or denied entirely by so many.
I went for the hostages in Gaza and for their families, who have been screaming at all of us and at those in power to do something for the immediate release of about 240 people still being held, for 41 days as I write this. #BringThemHomeNow. The most powerful part of the day were the speeches of three family members, and you should take the eleven minutes to watch that (click here).
I went for our kids who are college and graduate students, including my own, who are suddenly living in environments of ongoing physical threat and danger across the country.
If you haven’t read a good news report on the rally and want to, look it up at the Times of Israel or the Jerusalem Post or Ynet or the Forward. Here I wanted to share my overall impressions and reflections, and then tell you about our meetings on Capitol Hill.
1. As I said above, the most intense moment of the rally program came when three family members of hostages spoke. Orna Neutra is the mother of Omer. She called out his name, and called on us to match Omer’s own compassionate being with our own compassion back to him and all the hostages. Alana Zeitchik has six family members being held, including small children – she began with love and ended with peace. Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, asked us present and asked the world in the name of each hostage, child and adult: Why are you letting them stay in the dark, buried in the earth’s crust.
The speakers challenged us to keep the more than 240 hostages in the consciousness of the public and our leaders every single day. They spoke about how inhuman it is subordinate the hostages’ lives to any political, military and diplomatic strategy. I don’t think any of us outside their circle know how to hold that perspective, other than to take action each day that keep the hostages’ lives front and center. (Small thing I did just now – a note to the White House, since the switchboard is closed today.)
2. Natan Sharansky spoke. He talked about what it meant to know he wasn’t alone when he was in prison in the Soviet Union, and how much the gathering in DC means to him and to Israelis now. I was a child and a teen when Sharansky was a refusenik, a household name among us, and I was in college when he was released. Almost thirty-six years ago was the massive march in DC for Soviet Jews, and now here he was in front of us. Just seeing him was a living hope, and he told his story to us with no anger, only reassurance.
3. The student speakers were amazing. Confident, proud, empowered. I hope they took some of the strength from us back home and back to campus with them.
4. This was not in any way an anti-Palestinian gathering. The enemy was defined over and over very specifically as Hamas. From the microphone I heard no gloating over deaths of Gazans in war. Some speakers mentioned peace and innocent Palestinians suffering. I don’t mean to say this was a peace rally, by any means, and there was no talk at all about what specifically will happen after the fighting ends.
Near me, one person was holding a sign calling all Gazans members or supporters of Hamas. Some people asked her to put down her sign, and in the end someone put up an Israeli flag to block the view of her sign, and when those arms were tired another bigger sign obscured hers, “LA Stands With Israel” I think.
The rally was sponsored only by two national umbrella Jewish organizations, so that no other organization would have to decide to endorse some specific other Jewish organization’s participation. As a result, the charedi Agudah movement was there with very secular Jewish groups; AIPAC and J Street were both there; the Zionist Organization of America, pretty right-wing on the Israel-Palestinian question, came and so did Americans for Peace Now.
5. It was remarkable that the one word I heard only a single time all day was: “Netanyahu.” The State of Israel was represented by President Isaac Herzog. (The president is not the head of government, but the head of state. He is elected every few years by the Knesset, the parliament, and functions like the British monarch minus the land and wealth.) Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. also spoke, Michael Herzog, and yes, the president is the ambassador’s young brother. This was all about solidarity with Israelis as a people. And because of Israeli Arabs and Druze, and because of so many visitors and foreign workers in the area outside Gaza on October 7, this was also about more than Jews and even more than Israelis. Near me was a sign for one of the Thai hostages, part of a set of posters you’ve probably seen for every single of the hostages.
6. The music was very special, songs I knew and songs in Hebrew I didn’t know but apparently every young person there did. (Generations present: When Debra Messing spoke, the college kids were trying to figure out who she was; one of them mentioned “Will and Grace” almost as though it was as old as “I Dream of Jeannie.”) At the end, Matisyahu sang his anthem “One Day”, and the Maccabeats joined him: All my life, I've been waitin' for/I've been prayin' for/for the people to say/That we don't wanna fight no more/There'll be no more wars, and our children will play”, and in the crowd that might have been the loudest song of all. We had sung “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah” two hours before.
7. That actually wasn’t the end. There were some non-Jewish clergy who gave long sermons right after, but it was overtime and people left, including our group for a meeting on the Hill. Pastor John Hagee spoke, and this was the most controversial thing about the event. He is a prominent “Christian Zionist” with a history of hateful words and ideas, including anti-Semitic. It was absolutely correct to have the bipartisan leadership of the two Houses of Congress represented, even though everyone at the rally had someone among them whom they despise. Pastor Hagee wasn’t needed and his presence on the program was over the line. At least by then most people were leaving.
8. I stood on my feet stuffed in one place for at least four hours, having had only a small breakfast and some granola bars to nosh on. I didn’t have any water with me. I don’t get inspired by speech after speech saying much of the same thing, as was a lot of the program I haven’t mentioned. And yet, the time felt like nothing at all. I had a random talk with a man who was commuting to work on the train in from the airport at the start of the day, a man about my age with political opinions and life perspective, and we blessed each other. I was with hundreds of people I know who I didn’t get to see at all because who could find each other. And yet, something about the moment helped me feel connected, and when better days come we’ll tell more of our stories about Tuesday.
Before the rally six of us met with Representative Annie Kuster, and afterward with Senator Jeanne Shaheen. For me, this was an essential part of the day. Having something concrete to do, something more in my element. It grounded me.
Rep. Kuster and a senior member of her staff met us in the Capitol, in the members’ dining room. She told us how that morning, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had screened the video of Hamas atrocities for all House members who were willing to see it, and how many members were shocked beyond anything they had seen before. She talked about the efforts to move the supplementary appropriations for Israel’s military needs, which she supports. We thanked her for her personal support and outreach to our Jewish community, and her staff’s calls to me on a regular basis.
Much of our conversation was about increased anti-Semitism. Each of us in the group spoke about our own child’s experience on campus, and the physical and emotional danger to Jewish students that is accompanying certain slogans and accusations of genocide against Israel. The degree of all this was obviously surprising to Rep. Kuster.
We turned then to the matter of Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her use of phrases like “from the river to the sea”, “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Rep. Kuster said she did not vote for the censure of Rep. Tlaib for a variety of reasons. She told us that she talks with Rep. Tlaib directly and within the Democratic caucus generally about why this language is unacceptable, and that she has made some public statements to that effect.
I am absolutely convinced that Rep. Kuster thinks and has done the things she told us. We pressed her to take more responsibility as a public official to be more specific about why specific characterizations of Israel are both false and physically dangerous to Jewish students in particular, to make her statements more frequent and audible, and to call on other public officials to stop making such characterizations. Already this week there is some evidence that she and her staff heard us. They asked for my help in drafting a statement about our meeting, and incorporated some of what I suggested. You can read her statement here.
I gave Rep. Kuster and her office a copy of a book I often recommend, Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which also includes letters back from Palestinians. She wrote me subsequently that she plans to read it and then pass it along.
After the rally we met with Senator Shaheen. We were actually expecting only to meet with a couple staff members, since Sen. Shaheen had talked with some of us just a couple weeks ago at the Jewish Federation.
Sen. Shaheen is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the subcommittee for the Near East. She talked to us about a briefing she had been at concerning negotiations for the hostages’ release, which we of course emphasized. Sen. Shaheen too has been a longtime supporter of U.S. defense assistance to Israel.
We asked her about a letter she and other Senators had sent to President Biden asking him to raise certain concerns with Israel about humanitarian issues in the war in Gaza. Her public statement about that letter is here.
Both Sen. Shaheen and her staff were also very affected by what we told them about college campuses. Despite a lot of recent stories about how aides to Democratic members of Congress are at odds with their bosses about Israel, everyone we spoke with in both offices told us how engaged they are with the issues facing Israel and American Jews, even after our meetings formally broke up. It has been my experience that all the members of New Hampshire’s delegation in Washington have some of the best and most knowledgeable staff on all of Capitol Hill.
Some of you have asked what you could do in terms of advocacy around these issues. I would say in brief that over the next week or two, you could send notes to Sen. Shaheen and Rep. Kuster thanking them for meeting with us. Then you could thank them for their continued support of our community’s needs and Israel, urge them to press for the immediate release of all hostages, and ask them to take a strong and specific public stance whenever any public official. I can help you craft that if you'd like.
A couple final personal spiritual thoughts after this week.
I have a pretty wide Jewish definition of joy. Sometimes I stretch it so far that means something like “feeling purposeful.” But to be honest with you, I can’t say that on Tuesday I felt particularly joyful. Sometimes rallies like this are like camp reunions. This didn’t feel that way for me at all. There were small moments of joy for me: Finding our group in front of the Capitol, a building that takes my breath away. Running into someone I have known for a long time. Dinner after all of it with my nephew. I hooted at times and waved my sign, and sang along when I could, but it wasn’t out of joy overall. Still, I know I feel different after Tuesday than before.
I feel better; that I can say. Part of it comes from the analogy of mourning that a lot of people have been using over the past month. I am not right now an immediate mourner for October 7, but I have been part of an extended Jewish family in mourning. As I tell every family, no one mourns the same way or on the same schedule. Just for me, Tuesday in DC was a kind of shloshim occasion, like the traditional thirty-day mark. Not an end, by any stretch. I just feel a bit more ready to talk with more people in more dimensions about what is going on, and a bit more ready to be in the wider community discussing and educating, returning to my familiar modes. It was good to be talking to our representatives. That seemed more like me, even though the conversations were unlike any I have ever had with them. I am not fine yet.
I am grateful: for the Jewish people, for the United States of America, for my family’s safety and wisdom, for community, for all the teachers and inspirations who brought me to this week, for everyone who is standing up for us and for what is right.
Please feel free to ask me more. I will go now and light an extra Shabbat candle and put some extra tzedakah in the box, for the people who need us now.
