Oh, the joy
of Hanukkah. Such a popular holiday, yet with no clear message or meaning. There
seem to be more interpretations to the holiday of lights and Maccabees than
the calorie count of a latke. Indeed, every few years a media fistfight
breaks out about the meaning of the holiday. In 2009 David Brooks wrote an op-ed in
the NYTimes about Hanukkah, pointing out the zealous actions of
the Maccabees. Many liberal dreidel-spinners were horrified to be reminded
that their beloved holiday of religious freedom was based on the acts of
violent religious zealots.
I found Brooks’
piece disheartening not because of the questionable actions of the Maccabees,
but rather because he ended up denying the right to creatively interpret the
holiday. Brooks’ expectation that holidays must be confined by a historicist
representation of their original context revealed a deep misunderstanding of
how Judaism works. Judaism is a
“community of interpretation,” and it is those interpretations that make
Judaism an interesting, vibrant and moral tradition, that walks the line
between adhering to its authentic calling and being continually relevant.
No Jewish
ritual exemplifies this “community of interpretation” more than the way
Hanukkah was interpreted by Jews in the modern era. Travel among Jewish homes
as they light their menorahs, asking what the meaning of Hanukkah is, and you’ll
discover extremely divergent stories:
In many an
American home, Hanukkah is a battle of a minority against those who deny it religious
freedom. In Orthodox homes Hanukkah is about a civil war against hyper-free
assimilated Jews who gave in to their neighbors’ Hellenized ways.
In secular Israeli
Zionist homes God and the oil lamp were summarily evicted and the battle of
the Maccabees was re-christened a battle for national political freedom. In
the home of a Habad family near you the Maccabees wear black hats and battle
to ignite a Jewish spark within their fellow Jews. (If you’ll excuse the product placement - you can read more about these
interpretations in my father, Noam Zion’s Hannukah
anthology).
Each
community uses the rituals and metaphors of Hanukkah in order to shape and celebrate
their ideological world view – and this is exactly as it should be!
In 1907 a
wild Hanukkah party rocked the world of the early Zionist settlement in
Jerusalem. Betzalel, the heady Zionist art school of Jerusalem had just
opened its doors, and its founder, Boris Shatz, had place his baroque-like
sculpture of Matthias, the first Maccabean zealot, at the center. The polemic
that followed on the OpEd pages of the Israeli Zionist newspapers of the time
rivals was immortalized in Israeli Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s novel “Tmol
Shilshom”:
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When Professor Boris Shatz founded his Betzalel, he was struck
by Hanukkah, the holy day that people started calling the Holiday of the
Maccabees. They went and turned it into a lusty party.
They placed a large statue of Matityahu the High Priest, with a sword
in hand ready to stab the villain who dared sacrifice a pig on the altar
placed in honor of evil Antiochus. They danced the night away in revelry and excess.
The next day [Eliezer] Ben Yehuda wrote in his newspaper good words
about the party, but he was disturbed on account of that statue that they had
placed in the ballroom: For Matityahu was a zealous for his religion – his religion and not his country. As long as
the Greeks controlled our country, and stole, robbed, murdered, killed and
destroyed cities and villages, Matityahu and his sons stayed in their city
Modi'in and didn't do a thing, but the second the Greeks began harming the
religion… he jumped up like a lion, he and his heroic sons…
And now, says Ben Yehuda in his essay, now I have no doubt that when
we gathered yesterday in his honor, if the statue would have come to life, or
if Matityahu was alive today - that he would have stabbed us all in one go
with the sword in his hand! Wouldn't he have sacrificed us on top of that
altar?!
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כשעשה הפרופסור
בוריס שץ את הבצלאל שלו, פגע בו חנוכה, חג קדוש זה שהתחילו קוראים לו חג המכבים.
הלכו ועשאוהו נשף חשק.
העמידו פסל של
מתתיהו כהן גדול, כשהוא אוחז חרב בידו לדקור את הפריץ שהקריב חזיר על גבי המזבח
שעשו לשם אנטיוכוס הרשע. עשו כל הלילה בהוללות ובזוללות.
למחר כתב בן
יהודה בעיתונו דברים של חיבה על הנשף, אלא שדעתו לא היתה נוחה בשל אותו פסל
שהעמידו באולם, שהרי מתתיהו זה קנאי לדתו היה, לדתו ולא לארצו, שהרי כל הזמן
שפשטו היוונים על ארצנו וגזלו וחמסו ורצחו והרגו והחריבו ערים וכפרים ישבו לו
מתתיהו ובניו במודיעין עירם ולא נקפו אצבע, אלא משהתחילו היוונים לפגוע בדת...
קפץ כארי הוא ובניו הגיבורים... ועתה, אומר בן יהודה במאמרו, ועתה אין אני מסופק
שבשעה שנתאספנו אמש לכבודו, אילו היו נופחים רוח חיים בפסל, או אילו היה הוא
עצמו חי, כלום לא היה דוקר אותנו כולנו כאחד בחרב שבידו?! כלום לא היה מעלה
אותנו על גבי המזבח?!
ש"י
עגנון, "תמול שלשום", עמ' 386
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I love how
the polemics of a century ago continue to be relevant today.
The irony of
inviting Matityahu to a secular artists rave, surrounded by idols and
sculptures, is awesome, and it reminds us to always be a little tongue in
cheek about our reinterpretations. I hear Ben Yehuda’s criticism, but I would
side with Boris Shatz here. We have the right, in fact, we have the need, to
be reinterpreting our holidays for ourselves and our communities in ways that
are relevant, that charge our lives and our Judaism with a content that is
fresh and motivating. When we weave Jewish narratives back into our lives, we
galvanize our focus towards greater meaning and action. These
reinterpretations need to resonate within Jewish values and narratives
authentically, but they must also be renegotiated so as to be a response to
the needs and vision of our communities.
What is the
meaning of Hanukkah in 2011? What do the Maccabees tell us this year? Is it the
continuous call to let the affluence of the American Jewish community spill
into the public realm, as symbolized by Jewish lights in the window lighting
the public streets, or is it about our need to light candles inwardly,
reminding ourselves of the light of our heritage in a time of existential darkness?
Are today’s Hellenists those who are mimicking European neo-fascist sentiments
in the land of Israel, and it is time for Maccabean democracy fighters to “banish
the darkness,” or are the Hellenists those who blindly accept a post-ethnic
mentality and are ashamed to call the Jewish people their family? I hope
you’ll see that I am not claiming that Hannukah is any one of these stories,
rather that within the spectrum of stories that can be told within Jewish
narratives and values, we must take ownership of this story, redeem it from
its “original historical” significance (a Greek idea if ever there was one!)
and reinterpret the holiday, placing a big Matityahu in the center of our Hanukkah
parties and actively choosing how we are telling the story of his battle. This
is what the Zionists and American Jews of previous generations did so effectively.
We must not feel alienated from these rituals because of their historical underpinnings,
but rather retell them creatively, turning them into tools as we encounter the
greater challenges of our own existence.
Perhaps that
is the ironic fate of Matityahu the Zealot: to hear widely divergent
explanations of his heroism and have people wolf down fatty foods espousing narratives
he would scarcely recognize. That too must be symbolized somehow through the
narrative of Hanukkah.
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“When the Holy Blessed One gave the Torah to Israel, He gave it to them like grain from which to make finely sifted flour; and as flax from which to make fine linen” (Seder Eliyahu Zuta, p171). Blogging one grain of Torah and unraveling the many garments made of it, "in those days and in our times". With a cultural eye and the assumption that "The Torah is a commentary on our lives, and our lives are a commentary on the Torah."
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Hanukkah and the Battle for Re-Interpretation
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