The Head Heeb

Ocho Kandelikas

Tonight is the fourth night of Chanukah, or whatever variant spelling you prefer to use. In the United States, Chanukah has become one of the two or three most prominent holidays in the Jewish calendar, largely because it falls in close proximity to Christmas. In fact, though, it's not a major holiday. It isn't a yom tov, a holiday on which work is forbidden; when I taught at a Hasidic elementary school for a brief period a decade ago, the students didn't get Chanukah as a vacation. If not for its role as a commercialized Christmas substitute, Chanukah would rank with Purim on the Jewish calendar, or maybe with Tu b'Shevat.

One of the paradoxes of Chanukah is that it is celebrated most avidly by assimilated Jews, who are most likely to live in non-Jewish neighborhoods and to feel the need for a substitute Christmas. The irony, of course, is that Chanukah is a celebration of the victory of fundamentalism over assimilation. The heroes of the Chanukah story, the Maccabees, were religious zealots; their enemies were as much the outward-looking Hellenistic Jews as the Seleucid monarchy. As a modern Jew who treasures the fusion of Jewish tradition and ethics with the limitless horizons of Western civilization, Chanukah seems to me a distinctly ambivalent holiday. I've always had a nagging suspicion that, had I been alive at the time of the Maccabees, I would not have been on their side.

On the other hand, I have the luxury of choices that the Maccabees did not. At the time of the Hasmonean rebellion, the Jews of Judea suffered from religious persecution so severe as to amount to attempted cultural genocide. The Seleucids were not interested in fusing Jewish and Hellenistic tradition; they wanted, instead, to replace the Jewish culture with the Hellenistic. As unpleasant as the Maccabees might seem to those who prefer Judaism with a more worldly focus, they were necessary to the survival of the Jewish community of their time.

Perhaps this is why the Maccabees have been celebrated, quite unselfconsciously, by Jews who they would have hated. The Maccabees were revered in Ptolemaic and Roman Alexandria, for instance, among Jews who had eagerly adopted Hellenistic philosophy and who dramatized Jewish legends in Greek-style plays. Maybe the Alexandrian Jews, who had troubles of their own with the city's Greek community, simply relished a story that ended with the Jews kicking Greek ass. On the other hand, their version of the story, like ours, emphasized the miraculous survival of the Jews in Judea, and when one of them retold the legend of their own deliverance from Ptolemaic persecution, he called it the Third Book of Maccabees. Time and again, it was to the Maccabees that Jews turned for comfort in troubled times.

Today, we are once again living in a time when Jews have a choice other than between orthodoxy and total assimilation; it is once more possible for a modern Jewish theology to take root and for the discipline of tradition to be moderated. If not for those traditions, though, we would not have reached this time. The Maccabees are just as much the ancestors of modern Judaism as of the present-day fundamentalists.

I'll celebrate Chanukah this year. It's my holiday too.

Posted by jonathan at December 3, 2002 01:06 AM