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Yom Hashoah Remarks 5784 (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

D'var Torah: Questioning and Certainty

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

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

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

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

R. said: “It’s not fair!”

At which point I left Lela to her own devices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jews and Power

This is my current draft of my D'var Torah for Shabbat, December 2, 2023, Parashat Vayishlach and the Shabbat before Chanukkah 5784.

Yocheved Lifshitz is an 85-year-old Israeli who was one of the first hostages released by Hamas in late October. She and her husband Oded have been coexistence activists from Kibbutz Nir Oz just a couple miles from the Gaza Strip. They used to pick up people from Gaza at the Erez crossing who needed medical treatment to bring them to hospitals in Israel. Yocheved made the news this week with the story that shortly after she was captured Hamas chief Sinwar came, and she says: “I asked him how he wasn’t ashamed of himself, to do such a thing to people who for years supported peace. He didn’t answer. He was quiet.” When Yocheved was finally released, she took the hand of one of her masked Hamas captors and said, “Salaam”, peace.

This kind of chutzpah in the face of terror is astonishing, and in Israel since October 7 there’s been a whole genre of bubbe-chutzpah stories like this, starting with Rachel Edri from Ofakim who held off the terrorists in her home on that day for hours with cookies, while giving signals through the window to the forces outside.

It’s tempting to say that this is the whole Jewish superpower in a nutshell, chutzpah and wit for survival with spirit. It’s tempting just to say as we’ll hear from the prophet Zechariah in a week on Shabbat Chanukkah -- Not by might and not by power but by My spirit, lo v’chayil v’lo v’choach ki im b’ruchi (Zechariah 4:6).

But I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest eventually an edit for the prophet’s words, and that brings us to our parasha this week, which in its own nutshell is completely about power. This week we tell of Yaakov’s reunion with his twin brother Esav -- two strong camps of people meeting each other after twenty years of separation. We tell of Yaakov’s wrestling match with a being, a man or a Divine messsenger. We tell of the rape of Dina and her brothers’ response and Yaakov’s own response or lack of response.

And in the middle of it we get our people’s name Yisrael, which contains in it many possible statements about Jews and power.

Twenty years prior, Yaakov was a single man with nothing, on the run for his life from his brother who wanted to kill him. Now Yaakov is a wealthy herdsman with a big family and a whole community with him, and he is ready to come home. With both a signal from the Divine and because he is himself ready. As he approaches the border Yaakov sends messengers ahead to Esav, and they return and tell him Esav is coming toward him with four hundred men. What their intentions are, the messengers can’t say.

The Torah says vayira Yaakov m’od vayeitzer lo Yaakov was very terrified and he was troubled (Genesis 32:8). There are two verbs that describe the same feeling or a combination of reactions. The first verb vayira has connotations of terror and fear and awe, being overwhelmed. The second verb vayeitzer relates to narrowness, being narrowed or boxed in or clenched.

The midrash in Bereshit Rabbah sorts it out like this: Vayira means Yaakov was afraid that Esav would kill him, and vayeitzer means Yaakov was afraid that he would kill Esav. “If he overpowers me he will kill me, and if I overpower him I will kill him.”

I want to pause over that. Yaakov was afraid of being overpowered and of being overpowering. I’m also once again astonished that our Rabbis living in Israel under the rule of the Byzantine Empire could imagine a Jew worrying about being so powerful that they might have to kill someone in war, worrying about the ethics of power.

The midrash goes on and imagines Yaakov thinking: All this time Esav has been living in the Land of Israel and I haven’t, and perhaps he comes to our battle with the strength, the koach, of the mitzvah of living in the land. All this time Esav has been living with our parents and supporting them, and perhaps he comes to our battle with the koach of fulfilling the commandment of “honor your father and your mother.” And just because the Divine has made me promises of protection if I would live according to our covenant, which I have, maybe those don’t really apply to worldly matters.

Yaakov seems to understand that he has power and Esav has power, and both of them have physical power and both of them have some moral and spiritual power. This realization itself overwhelms him. Yir’ah is awe and trembling in an existential sense. Yaakov’s consciousness is broad enough to see Esav somewhere in this picture, not just Esav’s might but the mitzvot that Esav might have, which are the same mitzvot related to the land and to legacy and to compassion that Yaakov himself has or wants to have.

At the same time, Yaakov is tzar, he is concerned about seeing himself too narrowly and of seeing Esav only in the narrowest possibility as a mortal enemy. My chavruta Rabbi Dan Ross says Yaakov is concerned about his yetzer, about acting only out of his selfishness, of justifying violence by shutting out the humanity of Esav and assuming they are in a zero-sum game.

Yaakov is suspended there for the rest of a day. He prays, and he begins to strategize and develop a negotiating strategy toward Esav. None of this gives him confidence.

Then that night comes the fight with the being. They wrestle, and if you read the description in the Hebrew or a good translation, you won’t quite know at first who blesses whom, who wounds whom. In the center of the episode Yaakov receives a new name, Yisrael, “for you have sar-ed with the Divine and with people and you were able, or you were victorious” (Genesis 32:29).

The letters sin-resh make up the root sar or sarar. One of the essential meanings of sar is a person of power or authority. In modern Hebrew a sar is a government minister.

I said that this name Yisrael contains a number of possible statements about Jews and power. It’s been suggested by scholars that Yisrael means “God is the powerful”, meaning God and not us, that Yisrael are the people who have no human king, only God. That’s what we show and stand for in the world in contrast to all the other nations.

A second interpretation is that Yisrael the people are ourselves sar-el,  the human manifestation of power in a godly way, the executive official of the Divine. A third and related take holds the image of the story of the name, that we are destined to wrestle with power, our own power and the power of others.

The first interpretation says that human power is always evil or tragic, and that no human can wield power as the Divine does. All human power in the hands of a group turns destructive or exploitative or oppressive. A version of this says that there is no way Israel can exert power as Israel in relation to Palestinians, except oppressively.

The other interpretations acknowledge that power is necessary for us and possible. Power can be godly or not. Power is necessary to survive, to live with Esav, to acknowlege his mitzvot or to defeat him if necessary. But it’s always a struggle to use power well, and the grappling never stops.

I have been saying lately a lot that Jews are experiencing power in the world in a way we never have since maybe King Solomon. And it’s not since 1948 even; it’s probably since the late 1960s or the 1970s, my lifetime, fifty or not even sixty years.

We have sought power out of necessity, to protect ourselves as a minority in this country and of course to protect ourselves in the Middle East. Being powerless as an immigrant community, being powerless after the Shoah, these were not an option. Leaving our fate to the hands of God or the powers of the world were not and are not an option.

We have developed power in the obvious senses -- military, political, economic. But we have also developed power through our values and our friendships and our alliances. In the U.S., our situation was transformed through World War II for instance because Jews fought side-by-side with every other American group, and then came home to the G.I. Bill and went to school and gained education and built wealth, often alongside other groups.

We used our power to establish for ourselves hospitals and nursing homes and universities when others wouldn’t have us, and then we opened those to others, and look what power for good a name like Beth Israel holds in our world.

In the U.S. Jews became enmeshed with others working to gain the power we all needed and deserved, in unions and in the women’s movement and the civil rights movement and beyond. In Israel, when it wasn’t possible to reach out to neighboring countries, Jews brought life-changing technologies of agriculture and health to the developing world, sources of power in the long run for the people of those countries.

We have struggled with power and how to continue to hold it as sar-el, as power infused with divinity -- as the power and status of Jews in this country began to diverge from our African-American allies and friends in the 1970s, for instance; of course with the Palestinians as well, even in times of relative quiet.

And this is what we have to do, to struggle with power, to wrestle with it ourselves as Jews today. The answer is not that Jewish power is evil inherently. The answer is also not the opposite represented by Otzmah Yehudit, the Israeli political party whose name means “Jewish power.” That is a movement that glorifies power itself and whose ideology makes no bones about putting Jewish lives above Arab lives in every way, and is behind the terrorizing of Palestinians in the West Bank right now. The name is opposite of Yisrael, and it is our responsibility to  repudiate it and wrestle power away from it.

Our power is necessary, not just for survival but for being Yisrael is the widest senses. Like Yaakov we have to understand our power to save lives and our power to take them, and how power can limit our vision or enlarge it. We will use our power as Jews ethically and not, in the current war and at other times, and all we can do is to keep trying honestly to use it well and say when we have not.

So this is my revision to the prophet Zechariah: Not only by might, not only by power, but also by My spirit. Lo rak b’chayil v’lo rak b’choach ki gam b’ruchi. So we might say in a time when we contemplate the power of Yocheved Lifshitz and the power of Tzah”al (the IDF). So we might say during this time, as we arrive at Chanukkah this week and retell that ancient story of corrupt power, redeeming power, and the struggle to establish power well.

Shabbat Shalom and may I be the first to wish you a Happy Chanukkah.