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?