Chanukah 5784

To me—and, I suspect, to most (or at least to most decent people unburdened by prejudice)—it feels as though we truly have stepped through the looking glass into a topsy-turvy world this Chanukah, an upside-down world in which nothing is quite as it should be.

Just this week, for example, we were treated (and that is definitely not the right word) to the spectacle of a member of the House of Representatives, Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), finding it impossible—even when being broadcast to the nation on CNN—unequivocally to condemn the brutal rape of Jewish women, the sordid and truly horrifying details of which are only now becoming common knowledge. Yes, Representative Jayapal generously allowed, rape is “horrific.” But in the context of the October 7 Pogrom, what we really need to bring to our appraisal of unspeakably grotesque violence directly specifically against women is, and I quote, “balance.” So that was one indication, at least to me, that we have departed from a world of normalcy (i.e., one in which a member of the U.S. government can feel confident that she won’t lose any votes by speaking out unequivocally against rape) and entered an Orwellian fairyland in which rape elicits, not blanket condemnation, but a call for a even-handedness, for balance, for let’s-consider-the-feelings-of-the-rapist-too-ism. If Representative Jayapal’s mother had one of the women repeatedly violated and/or killed (and many were apparently both) on October 7, would she feel the same way? Or if her daughter had been? Readers can feel free to answer that question for themselves.

And then we had the spectacle of U.N. Women (also known as the Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women), the website of which defines its role as an organization devoted to upholding women’s human rights and to working to ensure that “every woman and girl lives up to her full potential,” having nothing at all to say about October 7 for eight long weeks, at the end of which it issued a strange statement announcing that it was “alarmed” by the accounts of rape and violence directed specifically against women on October 7. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me—but verified stories of men—beasts, really—brutally violating and then beheading women feels as though it should elicit something marginally stronger than “alarm”  from an organization whose entire raison d’être has to do with the defense of women. I have to say, though, that the U.N. Women did accomplish something with their silence (and then with their timid, equivocal statement) and, at that, something I would have thought impossible: they have made me think even less of the United Nations than I did even just a few months ago. And, believe me, that is no small accomplishment.

And then, as if all that weren’t enough, we had the spectacle of the presidents of some of America’s most prestigious universities appearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce earlier this week trying to explain how their schools can have descended so far into an abyss of prejudice and immorality that, as their school’s leaders, they felt unable unequivocally to condemn calls for the wholesale murder of Jews. When asked if  calling for the genocide of the Jewish people does or doesn’t constitute bullying or harassment according to the University of Pennsylvania’s code of conduct, for example, the president of the University, Professor M. Elizabeth Magill, herself had to be bullied into admitting that, yes, calling for the slaughter of Jews could be interpreted as “harassment.” Admittedly, the presidents did describe all they were doing to make their Jewish students feel safe and to banish anti-Semitic activity from their campuses. They sounded sincere too, as I’m sure they were. It’s just that they appeared not to feel that calling for the eradication of Israel and the annihilation of its millions of Jewish citizens rose to the level of anti-Semitism. It’s really hard to know what to say. I wonder if they Jews of Warsaw or Vilna would have used the word “harassment” to describe their treatment at the hands of the Nazis. Readers can feel free to answer that question for themselves as well.

And that brings me to Chanukah, our annual festival of resisting tyranny and asserting the simple right of Jewish people to live as they wish and where they wish, to pursue their religious goals without being pestered by outsiders who find their rituals annoying or offensive, and to feel uninhibited about supporting their fellow Jews in the lands of our dispersion and in Israel.

The story of the Maccabees is far more complex than most people realize and far more interesting. In the end, though, what Chanukah is about is the natural right of Jewish people to chart their own course forward through history. Yes, it is true, that the “real” reason King Antiochus sent his army to Israel in the 160s BCE was to support one side in what was about to degenerate into a true civil war. And it is also true that the anti-Jewish edicts that we all have heard about in the context of the Maccabean revolt were instituted specifically to support the Hellenizers who wished to abandon rituals out of step with Greek culture and to embrace the institutions which, even today, are considered the hallmarks of Greek culture at its finest. All that is true.

But it is also true that the Maccabean Revolt was about the right of the Jews of Israel to work out their disputes, to reach reconciliation on their own, and to live in peace. The world was no less a dangerous place in ancient times than it is today. There were always enemies at the gate, always powerful nations eager to tamp down the Jews’ natural yearning for autonomy to serve their own nationalistic ends. Hamas’s wish for Israel to vanish (and its Jewish citizens to vanish along with it) is not something new at all, but merely the latest recrudescence of a recurring theme in Jewish history. We go through different eras, we Jews. Sometimes the world is accepting, but other times brutally hostile. Sometimes, our foes wish us to vanish by adopting other faiths, but other times simply to vanish utterly from the world. And sometimes we are awarded the right to exist only if we agree not to annoy the neighbors by asserting our right to self-defense or to self-determination. It’s always something!

But the point of celebrating Chanukah each year is to remember that, no matter how bleak the horizon, defeat is never our only option. Yes, this whole Jewish thing seems at times (at times!) to rest on a foundation of anxiety and ill ease regarding the future. But that’s just who we are. It’s what the world has made us into. And yet we persevere, moving ahead into the future possessed of the conviction that we can survive, that we will survive.

We have all stepped through the looking glass just lately into a topsy-turvy world in which governmental agencies, university presidents, and at least some members of Congress feel unable unequivocally to condemn rape and murderous brutality directed against innocents as though doing so would somehow be unfair to the rapists and brutal murderers. How to fix that, I have no idea. But I plan to light my candles each night of the holiday and to focus on the second of the blessings we recite before doing so, the one in which we acknowledge that God wrought miracles for our ancestors at this time of the year in ancient times and, in so doing, to affirm my faith in the possibility of miracles even in our own day. The Maccabees should have lost. They were a tiny fighting force of untrained guerillas going up against a mighty army made up of endless platoons of well-trained soldiers. But God was good…and the Maccabees defeated their foes. So may the foes of the Jewish people be eradicated in our day! Amen, ken yehi ratzon!