As A New Year Dawns

One of the hallmarks of text study as we pursue it in our Friday morning Chumash class at Shelter Rock is the way we focus on the minor fissures in the narrative—the discrepancies, the slight contradictions, the instances of inner-textual illogic, the places in which the text self-contradicts in ways that readers see easily but that the text itself seems not to notice—and take those the apparent “errors” in the text to point to truths hiding just beneath the narrative surface. I can’t claim to have invented this method of text study, although I can also say that I don’t know any setting in which it is more vigorously pursued than on Friday mornings at Shelter Rock. This method is at the core of my own as-yet-unpublished Torah commentary as well and derives directly, at least in terms of my own willingness to engage with it, from the decades I’ve spent listening to congregants, trying to help them unravel their own narratives, counselling them in times of stress and distress, and offering interpretations of their own stories that I hope will be useful to them.

In that latter context as well, you see, it is often the case that the way into the deeper meaning of someone’s personal story is through discrepancy, inconsistency, and narrative discordance. In other words, when the story I’m being told that I’m being told doesn’t quite match the story I actually am being told, then the careful dissection of that discordance is often precisely the context in which the most interesting truths can surface. Theodor Reik, the only one of Freud’s inner-circle disciples not to have also been a practicing physician, wrote a classic book called Listening with the Third Ear in which he described his career as a listener in similar terms, explaining specifically how the real skill for any psychoanalyst to master is the art of hearing what the speaker leaves unsaid (that’s what it means to listen with the “third” ear) and how that specific ability often derives directly from taking incongruity in even a simply told story seriously and thoughtfully.

I mention all this today because I’d like to suggest that what applies to text study and to any counselor’s effort to listen with his or her third ear also applies to religion and that it is often precisely in those instances of disconnect between theory and reality that lie some of the most interesting truths.

Rosh Hashanah is an excellent example. Presented in our prayerbooks over and over as the commencement of the season of judgment, as the day on which the great Book of Life in the heavenly tribunal is opened and all are summoned to stand as defendants before Judge God, any reasonable observer would expect the mood in our communities—both in synagogue and at home—to be, to say the very least, somewhere between dour and somber. And yet that is not at all how I experience Rosh Hashanah or how anyone does: for Jewish families, Rosh Hashanah is a very happy, warm, satisfying time of the year, a time of communal warmth, a time for families (in non-pandemic mode) to gather, to eat together, and to enjoy spending time in each other’s company. The whole experience is far more encouraging than discouraging. And in that discrepancy between the natural ill ease that should attend the notion of being judged for one’s sinful behavior and the way in which the holiday actually is experienced—that is precisely the kind of fissure in the larger narrative that reveals a secret that would otherwise be hidden from view.

I suppose you could interpret that discrepancy in lots of different ways, but for me personally the disconnect has to do with the concept of confidence. We all know the many ways in which we have done poorly in the year drawing to a close and could surely have tried harder to do good in the world. But we endlessly use the phase Avinu Malkeinu to reference Judge God because we feel—not because we have any right to, but because we almost universally do anyway—we sense that God’s judgment of us all will be more similar to the way parents evaluate their children’s behavior indulgently and kindly than to the way that harsh, merciless judges evaluate the behavior of the defendants who are tried in their courtrooms. So Avinu (“our Father”) comes before Malkeinu (“our King”) because that is how we feel things to be as the Book of Life is finally turned to our personal pages and the Judge decides what the coming year should bring each of us personally. And it is that sense of hopeful confidence that we bring to the pews and to our holiday tables, one that makes us aware that, for all we have entered the season of divine judgment, our heavenly Judge can still be reasonably expected to be as forgiving as parents are of their own children’s missteps, errors of judgment, and ethical blunders.

And that brings me to New Year’s Day 2021. We certainly should be on tenterhooks about more or less everything. There are several new vaccines that should bring the COVID era to its welcome close…but the government has yet to explain how exactly it plans to inoculate all 330 million Americans in a way that is effective, fair, and well-organized, let alone how to administer two different shots to each of us. (And on top of that, new strains of the virus continue to evolve, thus making it unclear how effective the current vaccines will actually be in eradicating the virus totally.) The incoming administration has promised to take environmental issues seriously and to promote legislation accordingly…but much of the damage to the environment permitted by the outgoing administration is apparently far too severe to be undone merely by counter-decree. (And on top of that, it is far from clear that Congress will be at all eager to support that kind of initiative anyway. For more, click here.) Racial justice issues have come to the fore in a way that would have seemed, to say the least, unlikely even just a couple of years ago…and yet it’s hard to see any actual progress as unarmed black men continue to be shot and killed by police officers who are supposed to know how to arrest unarmed individuals without shooting them…and as recently as this last week in Columbus, Ohio. (For more on that incident, click here.) And on top of that, the Supreme Court has formally declined to review the rule the prevents citizens from suing police officers accused of misconduct despite the fact that that rule makes change much less likely.) I can go on. The problems facing the nation are grave, their solutions far from obvious. We should all be racked with anxiety. Of the top five issues facing the incoming administration, not a single one comes tied to an obvious, simple solution (click here for such a list, but maybe pour yourself a giant whiskey first). And on top of all that the Congress itself remains riven, and the possibility of self-induced governmental paralysis as real as it’s ever been.

So we should all be in a state of high anxiety seasoned with large dollops of angst and ill ease. And yet…as 2021 dawns, I feel myself inexplicably hopeful. Maybe it’s the concept itself of a new year as a kind of tabula rasa in time that exists, at least so far, only in theory…and thus also in a kind of unsullied, pristine perfection. As we look forward, we see a year in which no one has been unfairly hurt or discriminated against, in which no one’s trust has been betrayed, in which no act of kindness has been repaid with uncaring or harshness. As we peer, together and separately, into the future, we see a stretch of as-yet-unwritten history in which disputes–including international ones—can theoretically be resolved fairly and justly, in which citizens of all political orientations can potentially join together to act together for the strengthening of the union and the betterment of all its constituent parts, in which individuals faced with aggressive incivility can seek and gain redress without having to take to the streets to demand it.

I suppose that rabbis are supposed to think of Rosh Hashanah as the “real” New Year’s Day, not January 1. But I somehow manage to live in both those houses at once: part of me easily thinks of today as falling somewhere in the first half of 5781, while another part of me—the part that answers easily when asked that my birthday is in June, not Sivan, and that I got married in December, not Kislev—that part of me really does think of a new year as dawning on January 1. And so I leave you all with a few lines Walt Whitman wrote a cool 172 years ago as he contemplated the dawn of 1848, words that feel to me as fresh and inspiring as they must have back then to Whitman’s readers and admirers: “Days of a coming year promising change, / Yet full of promises, we need but watch / And pray for guardianship to come / Over caprices and all foolish ways! / So shall bright sunshine in advancing days / And starry invitations leads to Heavenly praise.” Amen to that!

Frost and Snow

Of our great American poets, Robert Frost was the one who was held up to me as a young person on the edge of adolescence as the ideal, as the paragon, as the American poet par excellence. Walt Whitman was deemed too much—and in more or less every way—for adolescents, not to mention pre-adolescents, to digest. (In that, our English teachers were probably more right than even they knew.) William Cullen Bryant and his enormous and magnificent oeuvre was unstudied and unnoticed, his very name left unmentioned other than with reference to the high school in Astoria named after him. The other greats I later came to know and respect—and foremost among them James Russell Lowell and Henry Longfellow—were mostly skipped past as well. But Frost—he was the one we all watched at President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1960 (I was in second grade, but remember this clearly) declaiming “The Gift Outright” from memory when the glare of the bright sunlight made it impossible for him to read the poem he had written especially for the occasion. He, we were told, was to poetry what JFK was to politics: the apotheosis of his profession, the one to whom all others in the game were inevitably to be compared and no less inevitably to be found wanting.

I mention Frost today because a poem of his came right back to me the other day when we experienced the first winter storm of any consequence we’ve had in several years. As the snow fell and only the contours of what lay beneath the blanket of white remained visible, I felt a surge of…of what? Not exactly nostalgia. Melancholy, even less so. But a kind of wistfulness that I hadn’t felt in a while, a sense that the universe was speaking through the storm and reminding me—or rather, all of us—that all the many, many things in the world that appear to divide us—the number of cars we own or the size of our homes, but also less tangible things like the number of diplomas hanging on our walls or the size of our stock portfolios—that all of those things are purely cosmetic in nature, all details that together constitute the outer shell that, at least most of the time, prevents us from looking at our neighbors and friends, and at each other, carefully, respectfully, and thoughtfully. As the snow fell, the world became quiet. At a certain point, the light began to fade. The air all around, chilly already, became even colder. And still the snow fell, covering the earth with a white blanket of peacefulness and serenity. Joan and I put on our winter boots and went for a walk around the neighborhood. We walked for half an hour and didn’t see a living soul. We might as well have been on the moon. Except that the moon is covered in space dust and grey rock, and Reed Drive was covered, at least for a while, with the whitest of snow.

And then Frost came to call. I expected him, of course. (Whitman, at least with respect to myself, is a purely summertime visitor. Bryant, if he comes at all, shows up in the fall. The others, I hardly ever see at all these days.) But when Frost appeared in the cold air to speak into my ear so that I alone would hear, he surprised me. I was expecting, of course, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which I actually know by heart. “Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow.” That was the expected whisper, the predictable message. You all know the rest—the horse thinks its queer to stop without a farmhouse near, then “gives his harness bells as shake / To ask if there is some mistake.” And then, the real point—or what I expected to be the real point: “The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.”  And there Joan and I were watching the snow fall on Reed Drive and the world really was silent except, as Frost knew would be the case, for the soft whoosh of the wind and the imperceptible, non-sound of new snow falling on already fallen snow. So that was the expected message. But poets, or at least great ones, more or less never deliver the expected message.

Do school children still learn those words by heart in sixth grade? Probably not. But why am I even writing about that poem when Frost was in an entirely different mood and whispered into my ear a poem I once also knew by heart, although I only learned it later on in tenth or eleventh grade. “Desert Places” is a great poem, one of Frost’s best. Written in 1933 and published in 1934, then eventually included in his 1936 collection A Further Range,” there was a time when “Desert Places” was known to all Americans, or at least those who had lately been in tenth or eleventh grade. I learned it then, have occasionally returned to it over the years, but was completely unready to hear the great man himself declaiming it—to me alone, apparently—from his spectral perch just overhead in the white sky.

I should have known better: we were in much the same place when he stopped by to watch the snow fall on Long Island as he must have been when he wrote the poem in the first place. “Snow falling and night falling fast, oh fast / In a field I looked into going past, / And the ground almost covered smooth in snow/ But a few weeds and stubble showing last.” That was just where we both were as the white blanket fell on the world silently, obscuring all we have wrought in this place other than the occasional bush or blinking electric Santa. And that man-in-the-moon (or rather, man-alone-on-the-moon) sense of the world falling away that I felt was surely the poet’s as well.

“The woods around it have it—it is theirs. / All animals are smothered in their lairs. / I am too absent-spirited to count; / The loneliness includes me unawares.”

I’ve written so often to you all about that concept of loneliness and the subtle way it differs from aloneness, solitude, and seclusion. And I’ve mentioned repeatedly in these letters my great admiration for Admiral Byrd’s 1938 book, Alone, in which he wrote openly—and, I think, inspiringly and beautifully—about his experiences living entirely on his own for five months in a one-room shack in Antarctica. There is something threatening but also comforting, he wrote, about being that alone And so did the combination of frozen whiteness, solitude, and almost complete quiet remind me, yet again, that loneliness is something to be cherished when it occasionally comes to call and neither feared nor reviled. I have no specific desire to live on my own for months on end in a hut in Antarctica. But I also know that loneliness—as specifically distinct from mere aloneness—is the only reliable context for true spiritual and intellectual growth I think I have ever really known.

And that snow-inspired message was the poet’s to his readers in general…and the other night to me personally as well. “And lonely as it is, that loneliness, / Will be more lonely ere it will be less— / A blanker whiteness of benighted snow / With no expression, nothing to express. // They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars—where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.”

That was where I briefly was the other evening: in my own desert space, in my own wilderness, alone (but also with Joan by my side in a street lined with houses filled with people and with Robert Frost’s beneficent ghost hovering somewhere overhead), not scared by the experience but elevated by it, almost approaching some momentary version of sanctification, of ennoblement, of sublime privacy. And all this on a snowy evening before the neighbors began shoveling their driveways or the sidewalks in front of their homes, before we lit our Chanukah candles, before we fried our latkes or gave our granddaughters their last presents. That was all still before us as we walked in the snow, and a pleasure it all was to contemplate. But before we returned home there was this long moment of almost otherworldly aloneness in a street “almost covered smooth in snow” when a familiar ghost came to call, to share a moment, and to remind me that, for all loneliness may well be the context for all real emotional or spiritual growth, I’m also beyond fortunate not to be alone at all in the world except when I wish to be.

When A Torah Falls to the Ground

I don’t believe I had ever heard of Rabbi Israel of Brno until earlier this week. Or maybe I had heard of him, but without knowing who he was or having read any of his surviving works. Born around the year 1400 and gone from the world in 1480, his life span covered almost the entire fifteenth century. And he had, to say the least, a tumultuous life, on one occasion being imprisoned by the authorities after someone lodged a blood libel against him by claiming he had kidnapped a Christian youth to make some sort of ritual use of the lad’s blood. (That story actually has a good ending—or at least it did for Rabbi Israel: his accuser eventually recanted and was subsequently executed. But they still only let the rabbi out of jail once he formally renounced any future effort to secure compensation for the injustice done him.) I mention him, though, not because of any of those details, but because he is apparently the earliest authority to suggest that the correct way to respond to seeing a Torah scroll, or even a pair of tefillin, fall to the floor is to take the incident as a sign from Heaven for the community to consider its deeds, to spend time in repentance for known and unknown sins, and to fast as a way of atoning for the misdeeds of individuals in the community and of the community itself.

This was an almost natural development of an earlier idea mentioned in the Talmud, where a well-known text enumerates the specific instances in which, after having rent one’s clothing in grief, the tear may never be sewn up: when mourning the loss of a parent and the loss of one’s primary teacher of Torah, when gazing on the site of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem, or when expressing one’s sense of deep loss after having witnessed the burning of a Torah scroll. (There are others too.) The commentators focus on each instance separately, in the case of the Torah scroll wondering if the law is different if the scroll is burnt accidentally or intentionally, if one actually sees the incident or is merely present in synagogue when it happens, and if it is completely or only partially destroyed. But Rabbi Israel of Brno (pronounced Bruna by the Jews of the time) was the first to decree that the proper response even just to seeing a Torah scroll fall to the ground, let alone to seeing it burnt to ash, is to fast as an expression of sorrowful repentance and to take the incident neither as happenstance nor accident, but as a word from Heaven to the community that the time has come for it to consider its ways and devote time to asking the most monitory of all self-directed questions for any Jewish community: whether the community itself is worthy of having a Torah scroll in its midst. Not whether they can raise the money to repair or replace the damaged scroll. Not what procedures they should put in place to guarantee that this kind of accident never happen again. Not, and least of all, whom they should blame for the incident having happened in the first place. Instead, Rabbi Israel suggests that a far more disorienting question be asked: whether this incident can successfully inspire the community to look deep within to consider how privileged its members are to own a Torah scroll in the first place, let alone a dozen of them, and to ask what exactly they have done to make themselves worthy of that privilege.

These are not stress-free questions to contemplate. The urge to wave the whole incident away as a mere accident, thus as something to be regretted but not taken all that seriously, is intense. And hiding behind the whole question of how to respond when a Torah falls to the ground is the even deeper, far more anxiety-producing one regarding the way in general that God speaks to the world, to us all, to each of us. Are the circumstances of our lives—the things that happen to us, the successes we celebrate and the setbacks we endure, the accomplishments we achieve and the failures we regret—to what extent is any of these things, let alone all of them, meant to bear meaning beyond the obvious details of the event itself? Shelter Rockers know that I often speak from the bimah about the concept of personal destiny. And that concept too is part of the larger discussion here. Are the big things that happen to us part of God’s plan for our lives? What about the less big things, about the twists and turns along the road of life we all experience? What about individual incidents—arriving at the site of an armed robbery when the robber was already fleeing the scene instead of ten minutes earlier (this happened to me in college), being in a minor airplane accident that led directly to meeting your future spouse in a specific setting and at a specific hour (ditto), having the bus you’re on break down in the middle of nowhere on Erev Yom Kippur thus guaranteeing that you spend Kol Nidre evening in a chilly field of purple flowers instead of in shul (also)—what about incidents like that? Is that how God speaks these days to whomever will listen? (And if so, then why not far more clearly, as in ancient times when prophets wandered the world proclaiming the word of God forcefully and clearly?)

As many readers already know, we had the terrible experience last Shabbat of seeing a Torah scroll fall from the Torah-reading table to the ground, whereupon it rolled down the stairs to the floor of the sanctuary and ripped almost in two. It was, to say the very least, a heart-stopping moment…for me, certainly, but also for everybody present both physically and virtually. I’ve known that Talmudic passage mentioned above about rending our garments in the style of mourners when we see a Torah scroll for decades. (Just for the record, the text is clearly meant to reference an intentional act of desecration.) But I don’t think I ever really understood it until this last Saturday—or rather I understood it intellectually but not emotionally or viscerally.

Of course, the physical thing—the parchment and the ink, the gut used to sew the panels together and the wooden handles—is just the vessel, the pot: the “real” Torah is constituted of the words themselves, how they sound and what they mean. So here too it feels like it should be easy to look past the physical thing and feel secure that the words themselves were safe. But that’s not at all how it felt. I remembered, somehow, that we don’t rend our garments on Shabbat, so I didn’t make that error. (And also that law applies solely to acts of intentional desecration, not accidents.) But it was still a chilling moment, one that no one present is going to forget easily or even possibly at all.

We have been responding, I think, in a positive manner. Each morning we have been adding the 130^th psalm to the worship service, the same psalm we add in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a way of inspiring repentance born jointly of serious introspection and trust in God’s saving power. As soon as Chanukah is over, we will be adding in Avinu Malkeinu as well, the extended supplication recited on fast days and also on the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A week from today, on Friday, December 25, we will be observing the Fast of the Tenth of Tevet—a relatively obscure fast day generally ignored by most but this year to be imbued with the hope of a whole community that through the traditional media of repentance—prayer, fasting, and giving charity to the needy—we achieve a state of atonement for whatever flaws in our personal behavior, or in our communal comportment, that led to this signal being vouchsafed to us all.

The sages of old understood the universe to be an organic whole composed of disparate but intricately interconnected pieces, something of the way the human body consists of many different bits and pieces that are distinct yet intricately interrelated by virtue of being part of the same organism. That being the case, the thought that happenstance be alive with meaning is not that far-fetched. Whether the Creator always speaks through creation seems unlikely. (I broke a glass bowl Sunday when I was emptying the dishwasher and found the incident to be suggestive solely of my own clumsiness.) But that creation—and not solely the physical universe but the universe of deeds, events, and, yes, accidents—that creation can serve as the medium for the Creator’s tweets, that seems entirely reasonable to me.

In the wake of the incident, I received many, many emails offering to help both with repairing the scroll and with interpreting the event. All were heartfelt and helpful, but I would like to quote in closing just from the one written by Stuart Stein. “The Torah scroll,” Stuart wrote, “is ultimately words on parchment wrapped on wooden spindles. The Torah’s message and meaning stay firmly and permanently secure in each of our hearts, thus forming part of who each of us is. And from that perch it simply cannot fall.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Chanukah 5781

Among President Lincoln’s most famous addresses is surely the one he gave in 1858 as part of his campaign to be elected to the Senate by the people of Illinois and in which he referred to the nation as a “house divided against itself” with respect to the slavery issue that at the time was, indeed, tearing the fabric of American nationhood asunder. Lincoln lost that election (Stephen A. Douglas was elected instead to a second term), but that image of the American republic as a house falling in on itself that cannot endure unless all of its walls and its foundation are somehow brought into alignment has become an enduring image, one cited over the years in countless contexts to describe situations as no less untenable than a house attempting somehow sturdily to exist while its walls go to war with each other.

Lincoln didn’t invent the image. It appears twice in the New Testament, once (in the Gospel of Mark) just as Lincoln used it and once (in the Gospel of Matthew) as a “kingdom divided against itself.” Augustine, bishop of Hippo, whose Confessions was once one of my favorite books, wrote about his conversion experience in similar terms, describing the state of his inner self in the years leading up to his embrace of Christianity as the psychic equivalent of a “house divided against itself.”  Whether Lincoln read the Confessions, I don’t know. (For more on Lincoln’s reading habits, click here.) But I can’t imagine he didn’t know Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, truly one of the most important documents in all American history, in which the author uses that exact phrase witheringly to describe the English Constitution the Colonials were about to reject as the law of their land.

Whether or not there were Jewish roots to the expression used by the authors of the Gospels mentioned above, I don’t know. (I haven’t found any exact parallels.) But the concept itself—that there is a line beyond which dissent (including the kind that engenders fiery, passionate debate) becomes not a healthy sign of intellectual vibrancy but a harbinger of impending disaster—that surely was widely understood in Jewish antiquity. Indeed, the Chanukah story—or at least its backstory—is specifically about that notion. Yes, the famous tale about the miracle jug of oil has surely won in the court of public opinion. I’ve written about that story in several places (click here for one example), but the more sober historical sources written in ancient times by contemporaries or near-contemporaries tell a different story. And, indeed, it is precisely the story of a house divided against itself.

For most moderns, the period in question—the centuries between the death of Alexander in 323 BCE and the rise of the Roman Empire towards the end of the first century BCE—is one of relative obscurity. (For a dismal account of the degree to which American high school students are shielded from learning anything of substance about ancient history, click here.) And that reality pertains for most Jewish moderns as well, even despite the fact that those centuries were precisely the ones that witnessed the transformation of old Israelite religion into the earliest versions of what we today would call Judaism.

There’s a natural tendency to imagine that kind of transformation as a kind of slow, ongoing metamorphosis that leads from Point A to Point B. But the reality was far more complicated. And the single part of that reality that was the most fraught with spiritual tension, internecine strife, and the real potential for internal schism was the great task laid at the feet of the Jewish people by Hellenism, the version of Greek culture that became—in the very centuries under consideration—a kind of world culture that no sophisticated individual would turn away from merely because he or she wasn’t personally of Greek origin. This was the culture that brought the masterpieces of Greek theater, the classics of Greek philosophy, the masterworks of Homer and Hesiod, and the whole concept of athletics to the world. Opting out was not an option—not for anyone who wished to be thought of as a citizen of the modern world.  (The ancients thought of themselves as modern people, of course—just as do we. And that thought will sound just as amusing to people living 2500 years in the future as it does to us with respect to people living 2500 years ago!)

And thus was the stage set for the internal schism that was the “real” background to the Chanukah story.

The Hellenists—eager to be modern, to embrace world culture, to eschew provincialism, and to take their place among the educated classes of their day—wished to embrace all of it. If the Greeks were repulsed by the idea of circumcision, then they were against it too. If the Greeks believed that Homer, Plato, and Euripides existed at the absolute apex of culture, then they wanted to spend their days immersed in the sagas, dialogues, and dramas associated with those individuals, and with dozens of other classic authors as well. If the absolute monotheism of traditional Jewish belief was deemed incompatible with the more sophisticated theological stance espoused by the greatest Greek philosophers, including Socrates himself, then they wished to see the masters of the Temple in Jerusalem reform the worship service there to reflect that stance. In other words, they wanted so desperately to be modern that they lost confidence in the value of their own traditions.

Their opponents, the traditionalists, were no less committed to the all-or-nothing approach: just as the reformers wanted all of it, they themselves wanted none of it. They were repulsed by the theater and by the gymnasium. They refused even to consider the possibility that Sophocles and Aeschylus might well have had something valuable and profound to say about the human condition. The dismissed the Homeric epics as mere storytelling hardly worth the time to consider at all, let alone to study seriously and thoughtfully.  And they were certainly not interested in altering the procedures in place for centuries in the Temple to suit a new set of standards imported from Greece. Or anywhere.

The ancient history books, the First and Second Books of the Maccabees primarily but others as well, tell this story in detail. The internal debate among Jewish people had reached the boiling point. And by the time King Antiochus IV finally decided to intervene, the schism had become not merely passionate but violent. The nation was wholly divided against itself. And, as Lincoln would have commented, the nation, now fully divided against itself, was not going to stand for long. Or at all!

After Alexander the Great died, his generals divided up his kingdom. One general, Seleucus, became master of most of the Middle East. Ptolemy became master of Egypt. Israel passed back and forth many times between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires, ending up finally as part of the former. And that is why King Antiochus, the Seleucid emperor, was involved in the first place. How, when, and why he intervened is a story unto itself. But that he sought to restore order to a province in his empire that had reached the boiling point is the underlying fact worth considering. Nor is it that difficult to imagine why he would have favored the reformers over the traditionalists: he too was a committed Hellenist who saw one side as aligned with his own beliefs and one side espousing views inimical to them. That he was unexpectedly defeated by a ragtag group of guerilla warriors under the leadership of the Maccabee brothers was, depending on who was telling the story, a miracle or a calamity. That we remember it as the former is an excellent example of how the victors win the right to tell the tale: the losers would have told it entirely differently…but those who survived were eventually swallowed up into a people eager to remember the story positively and in as satisfying a way possible. That’s what losers lose most of all, I suppose: the right to frame the narrative.

I love Chanukah. Even as a child, I liked it—primarily the gelt and the latkes, but also the whole nightly ceremony of lighting the menorah that belonged to my father’s parents before it belonged to my parents and which is at this very moment sitting on our dining room table on Reed Drive. As I’ve grown more sophisticated in my understanding of ancient Jewish history, however, the message underlying all that fun has become more serious in my mind, more monitory, more cautionary. The Jewish people was ultimately weakened, not strengthened by the Maccabees’ victory—which led first, and within a few decades, to the Maccabees’ descendants illegitimately proclaiming themselves kings of Israel, and eventually to the Roman invasion that ended Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel for millennia. Had the Jews of the time been able to compromise, they would perhaps have created a stronger, more inclusive kind of Judaism open to new ideas…and who knows where that would or could have led? We remember the Maccabees’ victory enthusiastically by framing the story as an “us against them” story featuring a harsh king and his innocent victims. But that’s only one way to tell the story. I understand perfectly well why we’ve always favored the story line that features brave Jewish warriors resisting the domination of a foreign tyrant. But I also see an alternate plot line hiding just behind the preferred narrative, one that features a house collapsing in on itself that needed outside intervention precisely because warring groups within the Jewish people couldn’t engage in meaningful dialogue and learn from each other. That doesn’t ruin Chanukah for me. Just the opposite, actually: it turns the holiday into a thought-provoking opportunity to consider the nature of Judaism in the context of history—and that is something I don’t ever pass up. Who would?

Fakhrizadeh

There is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the chief Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated just days after the seventy-fifty anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials, the courtroom setting in which the most important members of the surviving Nazi leadership were finally brought to some version of justice.

The Trials have long since faded into history for most people, but at the time they not only garnered the attention of the entire world because it felt so important that at least some of the Nazi leadership—even absent the arch-fiend himself—be brought to justice, but also because the trials themselves were legally innovative: it was at Nuremberg that the concept of “crimes against humanity” was first used as an actual actionable offense for which individuals could be tried in a court of law. (The term itself was devised earlier on and was used during the First World War by the Allied Power to describe what it referenced as “new crimes of the Ottoman Empire against humanity and civilization.” But it was at Nuremberg that actual defendants were actual put on trial specifically for having committed offenses against humankind.)

I was eight years old when the movie Judgment at Nuremberg came out in 1961. I didn’t see it then (none of my friends’ parents would let them see it either) and it was actually about the so-called Judges’ Trial of 1947 rather than the “big” Nuremberg Trial of 1945 and 1946 in which twenty-four members of the Nazi leadership were put on trial in the city that just a decade earlier had proudly lent its name to some of the most barbaric, discriminatory, base legislation the world up until that point had ever seen. But the movie—a blockbuster in its day featuring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Maximilian Schell, and other Hollywood stars—was a landmark in its own right because it brought the war crimes of the Nazis front and center in the consciousness of the American people just when they might otherwise have begun to fade. And yet, even though it really was a huge hit and the concept of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was more than resonant with audiences across the world, there was nonetheless something slightly pathetic about the whole scene as depicted on the screen. Just watch the movie and you’ll see what I mean.

In the defendants’ box were two dozen old men, one greyer and less terrifying-looking than the next. Together with those among the Nazi elite who had either escaped capture or committed suicide, they were collectively responsible for the deaths of scores of millions of people. (The war against the Jews was particularly savage. But the Nazi war machine cost scores of millions of others their lives as well, including an unbelievable twenty-five million Soviet civilians.) And yet these men on trial looked not only harmless but pathetic in their grey ordinariness. Years later, Hannah Arendt used the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Adolf Eichmann when he went on trial years later in Israel. But she could just as easily have applied it to the defendants at Nuremberg.

The pathetic part wasn’t how contemptible the defendants looked, however, but the simple fact that they were on trial ex post facto for crimes committed over the long years that featured the rise and the fall of the Third Reich. Even years before they came to power, the Nazis made no secrets of their plans or their program. The Führer’s loathing for Jews, his hatred of gay people, his disgust with mentally handicapped individuals, his plans to turn Europe’s Slavic peoples into the slaves of their Teutonic masters—none of this was sprung on the world in 1939 in the wake of the invasion of Poland. It was all there for all to read in Mein Kampf. Hitler expressed himself vocally and unequivocally on all the above topics in a thousand public speeches. The Nuremberg laws of 1935 were merely the migration of these ideas from the realm of theory into the domain of deeds. And yet the world looked on, as though paralyzed by the thought of taking action, of interfering in the right every nation claims to chart its own destiny forward.

If our country, or the U.K. or the Soviet Union, had used the full force of its military might to quash Nazism in the mid-1930s instead of appeasing Hitler and hoping he would go away with an entirely earned bellyache if only they gave him enough of the ice cream he was demanding be served to himself and his people, the history of the world would have unfolded dramatically differently. But the world preferred to stop up its ears and look the other way, justifying its inaction with reference to a dozen different fantasies. Eventually, that contemptible little man will be voted out of office. Eventually, the Nazis themselves will go away. Eventually, the Nazis will become a normal political party and abandon its own excesses. And as for their vocal, endlessly repeated threats to the Jews, to the Slavs, and to all the other sub-human races they perceived to be living in their midst—all that was dismissed as mere rhetoric, as the stuff of bombastic speechifying, as nothing more than turgid fustian. People preferred to laugh at the little man with his tiny moustache rather than to listen carefully to what he was saying and to imagine, and fully to take seriously, what would or could happen if he were to be successful in transforming his proposals into a new European reality. When the Jews of Germany had been made into pariahs in their own country and the invasion of Poland was fully underway, of course, no one was laughing. But then, of course, it was years too late to cancel Nazism and force the Germans to embrace their own better angels and elect a government formed of sane, patriotic citizens and not madmen.

And what did Nuremberg accomplish exactly? Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death and eleven were executed. (Martin Bormann was tried and sentenced in absentia.) Seven went to jail. Five were either acquitted formally or at least not found guilty. So that doesn’t sound like much…but what it really did do was to make it clear how important it is to listen carefully when people threaten to murder millions, when the governments of nations openly announce their plans for genocide. Nuremberg was the best we could do once the war was behind us. But the war itself could have been averted easily had the nations of Europe and our own nation been listening carefully and acted forcefully based on what we heard.

And that brings me to Iran. When the Iranian leaderships calls for a “final solution” to the Jewish presence in the Middle East, I listen carefully. When the mullahs use Nazi-style language to describe the Jewish people—referring to Israel as a kind of cancer on the face of the world or as the country-version of a rabid, predatory dog capable only of infecting those it comes into contact with, or when they use the vocabulary of virology to describe Israel as a source of infection, disease, and misery that the world should be eager to eradicate—I listen carefully to that too.  When I see footage of Iranian military parades featuring missiles that the government boasts will shortly be deployed against Israel’s cities, I take that seriously too. And when I read that the late Fakhrizadeh was working—no doubt among other thing—on a way to create nuclear bombs small enough to be attached to missiles capable of reaching Israel, you can be sure I was listening carefully to that too.

To label Fakhrizadeh as a man of science and thus to mourn his passing is almost fully to miss the point. For one thing, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and thus as much a military man as a scientist. There doesn’t seem to be any question about the fact that he was leading the Iranian effort to develop a nuclear arsenal. The avowed reason for acquiring that kind of weaponry, repeated countless times by the Iranian leadership, is to strike Israel and annihilate its citizenry. It’s a bit hard to imagine what the world today would be like if a roadside bomb had taken out the Nazi leadership in 1933 or 1934. Who would have become Germany’s new chancellor, what that person’s policies would have been, whether the ethnocentric expansionism that brought only misery and death to an entire continent would have retained its appeal with the German populace—none of those questions has a certain answer. But that the world would be a better, safe, saner place if the Second World War hadn’t happened? Does that question really need answering?

Thanksgiving 2020

The word “myth” has a kind of a bad rep these days. And, indeed, in normal American English the word “myth” is used regularly to refer to things that, for all they might be widely believed to be true, are not actually true at all. It’s a myth that Elvis spent years holed up on the Mir Space Station after his alleged “death.” (Mir crashed into the Pacific in 2001, so it doesn’t matter that much now anyway.) It’s a myth that you can dissolve an iron nail in a glass of Coca-Cola if you wait long enough. (That isn’t true, is it? Click here to find out.) It’s a myth that there are huge colonies of alligators living in the New York City sewer system. (Or are they down there somewhere? Click here and see what you think.) You see what I mean: when someone asserts something to be true and the response is “that’s just a myth,” it means that it isn’t true at all. And that is a usage that all fluent English-speakers understand easily.

But among scholars of religion, the word “myth” means something else entirely: not a false story that has somehow come widely to be believed, but a tale, long or short, that a nation tells and retells because it is deemed somehow to encapsulate something of that people’s inner essence, something of its self-conception, of its ideational core. The question of whether the story is historically true or not thus fades into irrelevance—it might be true or it might not be, but the reason the myth is worthy of consideration has to do with something else entirely. To give a relatively tame example, when Americans tell the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, they are suggesting that integrity, honesty, and responsibility are among the nation’s most basic values, not that they have the magic ability somehow to know what a little boy once said to his mother (or was it to his father?) sometime in the first third of the eighteenth century.

The same is true of the myths of other nations. In our country, Greek and Roman myths are taught widely in our high schools (or at least they were when I was a high school student), but tales derived from other national mythologies—old Germanic mythology, for example, or the rich mythological heritage of the Native Peoples that the European colonialists found in place here in North America when they presumed to “discover” the New World—far less so. More controversial is speaking about Bible stories as myths—and this is so even when the point is not to use that designation subtly to suggest that they may not be historically true in every detail, but rather to promote them as core stories meant to suggest something of the national ethos of the Jewish people. There really shouldn’t be anything too off-putting in reading the Bible in this way: surely we can agree that Moses would have had no specific way to know precisely what words Eve spoke to Adam in Eden long before recorded history began and still find the story moving, chastening, and engaging. And yet people regularly become exercised by the intimation that even the least verifiable detail in the scriptural narrative may not be precisely accurate in terms of its historicity. Such people would do well to read my book, Spiritual Integrity, to see how inconsonant with meaningful spiritual growth it is to insist on the truth of details you have no actual way to verify.

But I write today not to promote my book (well, maybe a little), but to apply these thoughts to my favorite American holiday, Thanksgiving.

It’s become a regular pre-Thanksgiving ritual for there to appear newspaper article after blog post after op-ed piece in which the author professes wide-eyed amazement recently to have discovered the flaws in the Thanksgiving story. The Pilgrims (a name later assigned to them by tradition, not one they themselves would have recognized) did not come here seeking religious freedom, which they already had in Holland anyway, but rather to establish a kind of religious theocracy in which they could specifically deny religious freedom to others. And weirdly omitted as well is the detail they left out when, as a first-grader in P.S. 3, I first heard the story of noble Squanto teaching the Pilgrims how to farm: that he was the sole surviving member of his tribe, the Patuxet, because the entire tribe other than himself had been wiped out by smallpox, a disease brought here by Europeans seeking to settle on land they chose to fantasize was uninhabited and thus legally unowned when they arrived here. I am also quite sure Mrs. Riskin didn’t mention the Pequot War when telling us the story of the first Thanksgiving. But to tell the story of that first feast without reference to the war that broke out within a decade between the Massachusetts natives and the English colonists, a war that ended with the massacre of almost an entire tribe and the few hundred survivors being sold into slavery, seems—to say the least—slightly misleading.

I could go on.  There’s practically a cottage industry out there that exists to ruin the holiday by forcing history into the narrative we all learned as children. (To see what I mean, click here, here, here, here, or here.) But maybe the solution isn’t to trash the holiday or to suffer over the historicity of the narrative, but to move the whole concept—the holiday itself and its backstory—from the realm of history to the realm of myth.

If we adopt this line of thinking, Thanksgiving stops being about the terrifically brutal way the natives were treated by Europeans who somehow didn’t feel ridiculous “claiming” other people’s property for their own king or queen, but rather about the image the story as told projects onto the national ethos of the American people. Reading the story that way allow us to embrace the core values that have generated its many details over the years since President Lincoln first proclaimed it as a national holiday in 1863—and foremost among them the valorization of religious freedom, of interethnic cooperation, of mutual respect between different racial groups, and of a common sense of rootedness in this soil that has nothing to do with where anyone’s parents or grandparents were born and everything to do with the will of the nation to exist as the embodiment of its own national values without reference to the ethnic origin of any of its citizens.  At its core, that is what Thanksgiving has evolved into being about. And that is what we should focus on as we sit down, even pandemic-style, to enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner.

Yes, we need to see to it that the children in our schools are given a clearer sense of what the European settlement of North American entailed for its native peoples. And we certainly need to bring to the fore forgotten episodes like the Pequod War or King Philip’s War (also, as far as I can see, forgotten by all) and make sure that our children learn about them and understand their significance. But I believe we can do that without ruining Thanksgiving…and that the key to success will lie precisely in moving the holiday from the domain of history into the realm of myth.

When you read this, Thanksgiving will be behind us. I hope you all had happy days with whatever kind of family-pod feasting the circumstances of the hour permitted you. Joan and I are planning something along those lines ourselves. But most of all I hope that the values that the holiday promote become fixed in our hearts and in the hearts of our children, and that we find it possible to embrace those values without over-emphasizing the upsetting history behind the narrative, without feeling honor-bound not to enjoy Thanksgiving because of details always omitted when we first heard the backstory as schoolchildren.