Let’s admit it: Hanukkah is no match for Christmas. Put the two in a boxing rink and Christmas would knockout Hanukkah in the first minute of the first round. Then again, it wouldn’t be a fair fight. Christmas is one of the two major holidays in the Christian faith and Hanukkah is a minor holiday among any number of other really important Jewish holidays. That’s not to say that Hanukkah is unimportant or irrelevant. To the contrary, it deserves better than its reputation among our young folk as the “holiday when you get gifts.” But the minor designation does stem from a few glaring deficiencies about this holiday—
1. There is no mention of it in Torah;
2. There is no mention of it in Tanakh or the Jewish Bible;
3. It involved few restrictions unlike Shabbat or a major festival
like Pesah;
4. Even the rabbis weren’t sure what to make of it and wondered:
What is Hanukkah?
Fair question. In truth, Hanukkah
was as much a second century BCE Judean civil war as it was a war against the
Syrian Greeks. They were Judea’s overlords and unabashedly espoused Grecian
values. They glorified the human body, found circumcision abhorrent, chose to embrace
the existence of many gods unlike the Jewish insistence on only one, found
Shabbat a waste of time, and bristled at the national aspirations of the Judean
community. And yet there were plenty of Jews who found common ground with the
Syrian Greeks. Frankly, many 21st century Jews would see the exposed
human body as artful, circumcision problematic, the Sabbath as no impediment to
labor, and any condemnation of pagans or polytheists as bigoted. The Maccabees,
in contrast to Jews then and perhaps today, saw danger in the wholesale
acceptance of such foreign values and were willing to wage war to oppose them.
It is very difficult to resist a dominant culture that you
want to be part of. But what happens when the dominant culture is chipping away
at your own? What to do? The Maccabees knew what to do. But in our own day, do
we? The fundamental problem with the liberal Jewish world is that even when
recognizing the debilitating factors working against our spiritual selves, the resistance
needed to oppose those factors contradict everything we have worked for during
the past 100 plus years. We wanted to become Americans and did, but did,
knowingly or unknowingly, at the expense of our Jewishness. And the fruits of
our lopsided efforts are evident in a liberal Jewish world that is largely
illiterate in Hebrew, either uninterested in or alienated from Israel,
disenfranchised from its own spiritual heritage, and searching for meaning
everywhere but in the incredibly rich 3000 years of Jewish meditations on the
meaning of life and the human raison d’etre.
Bleak a picture as this may be, I have to believe that the will to deepen our own Jewish identities remains intact, and all it takes is a bit of prodding to release that subdued passion. I’m no Maccabee, but let me offer a few ways to reclaim our authentic Jewish selves:
1. When people say that God is not a fact, believe them. But remind
them that man does not live by facts alone. God is a reality, and a reality
that has inspired thousands of generations to vigorously pursue liberty and
social justice. We dare not abandon such a powerful faith.
2. That faith and science are forever at odds disparages both faith
and science. Faith is about following truths that help us live full lives.
Science, in contrast, offers no way to live our lives, but does provide us with
tools for ascertaining certain truths. That is why there are many scientists
and medical professionals who are themselves people of faith. There need not be
any contradiction between the two.
3. English is the lingua franca of the world, but Hebrew is the
lingua Judaica—the language of the Jewish people and we should take pains to
enhance our Hebrew vocabulary. It is as difficult to be Jewish with no Hebrew
skills as it would to be an American with no English skills.
4. The fact that the Jewish heritage may have evolved during the Dark
Ages (if not earlier) does not make it a relic of the Dark Ages. It was then,
as it remains today, an invitation to eternity,
connecting us with ancestors stretching back generations, as with
descendants stretching forward for endless centuries. The modern disdain for
the past contrasts with the value Jews grant tradition.
5. Israel is the Jewish homeland and all Jews, citizens of Israel
or not, are connected to it. Israel is not a foreign country like Italy or
Spain. Love of Israel does not suggest disloyalty to the country of one’s
citizenship, no more than close friends undermine the integrity of one’s
marriage.
6. Jewish identity should be based on Jewish values and principles,
which may or may not incorporate aspects of the dominant culture. But the
guiding hand in the formation of Jewish identity should not be the demands of
the dominant culture, but the Jewish values and principles that have guided us
throughout the generations.
Every system requires a shot of
energy now and then in order to maintain itself. The Jewish world is long
overdue for that shot. Which brings us back to Hanukkah. The above six points
is what the Maccabees might tell us were they around today. And so Hanukkah, no
matter how minor a holiday it may be, delivers a message with a major punch.
Anything less than the above prescription for Jewish life is a crude hybrid of
Jewish and western secular culture. The first Maccabees would never stand for that.
Why should we?
