Many Jewish holidays are inspiring and fun when you are a child, or when you are raising young children. But at a certain age, religious innocence gives way to sober reflection. What if your Jewish heroes are decidedly unheroic in many ways, betraying the ethics that you value as a modern person? Case in point – the lead actors in the Chanuka drama. Is Matityahu (Mattathias) the Maccabee a brave warrior, a latter-day Klingon pursuing a Jewish code of honour, or a stone-cold killer, intolerant of other Jews who do not measure up to the ancient ways? What do you do when the Festival of Lights causes a moral blackout? Stick to the “feel good” narrative? Focus on the big bad Greeks?

Have another latka and forget the whole thing? Read on…  

“I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd/But when they said, `Sit down,’ I stood up. Ooh, ooh, growin’ up”

– Bruce Springsteen, “Growin Up,” 1973

“I am growing up. I am losing my illusions perhaps to acquire new ones.”

– Virginia Woolf, Orlando, 1928

“The Maccabees were brave, desperate, fanatical, strong-minded and violent men…They lived by the sword and died by it in a spirit of ruthless piety. Most of them met violent ends…In becoming rulers, kings and conquerors, the Hasmoneans suffered the corruptions of power.”

– Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, 1987.    

The story we all learn about Chanuka when we are young is written by John Wayne with an assist from Clint Eastwood. There are good guys and bad guys in this world, and we are crystal clear about the difference. Jews are good. Greeks are bad. Jews are victims; Greeks are oppressors. Jews are peaceful; Greeks are conquerors. Jews are tolerant; Greeks are coercive.

There is nothing more satisfying than celebrating one’s cultural heritage with the feeling that truth and justice are on our side. But as always, it is question of which narratives we accept and which ones we avoid. According to the Book of Maccabees, the bloom comes off the rose fairly quickly. Here is the description in that book of the opening salvo in the Jewish-Greek war:

“The king’s officials…came to the town of Modin to force the people there to offer pagan sacrifices.  Many of the Israelites came to meet them, including Matityahu and his sons.  The king’s officials said to Matityahu, “Why not be the first one here to do what the king has commanded?…If you do, you and your sons will be honored with the title of Friends of the King, and you will be rewarded with silver and gold and many gifts.  Mattathias answered in a loud voice, “Though every Gentile in this empire has obeyed the king and yielded to the command to abandon the religion of his ancestors, my children, my relatives, and I will continue to keep the covenant that God made with our ancestors. We will never abandon his Law or disobey his commands. We will not obey the king’s decree, and we will not change our worship in any way.”

As he finished speaking, a Jew stepped forward in full view of all to offer sacrifice on the pagan altar at Modin, in obedience to the king’s decree. The sight stirred Matityahu to indignation. In a fury of righteous anger, he ran forward and killed the man right there on the altar. He also killed the royal official sent to enforce sacrifice, and then he tore down the altar. In this way Matityahu showed his fervent zeal for the Law.”  First Book of Maccabees, Ch. 2             

Shots fired.

The passage starts out so hopefully. Matityahu rebukes power and rejects its enticements. “I won’t sell out my traditions and my beliefs for a pot of gold.” But it is one thing to stand up for what you believe in, and quite another to impose that conviction, to the point of murder, on someone else. Does Matityahu pass the modern smell test of ethical behavior and tolerance? Is Chanuka more a record of anti-Semitism, or a parable about the disease that Jews carry with regard to one another, and our inability to peacefully co-exist, of learning how to agree to disagree?  

I do not propose to completely reverse the binary about Chanuka. The story is surely not that the Jews were all bad and the Greeks were all good. But like so many stories that we encounter in our lives, as we get older, ambiguity and nuance lift their weary heads and we are forced to reconfront the versions we have told ourselves and the assumptions we have made about so many things. So, no doubt, the holiday rightfully reminds us of the Greek attempt to market, sometimes by very unpleasant force, its cultural and aesthetic brand. And resistance to that kind of imposition is at the very heart of religious freedom and moral struggle. The problem is when the impulse to oppose coercion ironically duplicates that very same oppressiveness. And so Matityahu carries his zeal to the Jewish battlefield and murders one of his brethren. And however religiously lost or misguided he deems his fellow Jew to be, the question is whether violent means achieve just ends.  

There are of course people who review this incident and see it not as the depressing coda to what started out as Matityahu’s courageous stand, but as the exciting heart of the story. This view is exemplified by none other than the late R. Meir Kahane, who knew a thing or two about demonizing Jews as well as non-Jews. Here are some of his reflections on the matter at hand, in language that is positively… Maccabellian:

“[Israel is]  a country crawling with Hellenism . . . [with] Hebrew-speaking goyyim whose self-hate… drives them to reject Judaism and trample it underfoot . . .Jews versus Hellenists: that is the real battle.” 

As for the Israeli Left, Kahane expresses their fate as though he were back in Modin with his latter day comrades in arms: “These are born-by-accident Jews who are riven with schizophrenia over their identity . . . the truth is that they  – not the PLO – represent the real threat to the Jewish state and people . . . They corrupt the country from within.”

If this rhetoric causes you a secret grunt of satisfaction or, alternatively, makes you shudder down your spine in revulsion, then your body will be telling you at what end of the spectrum you find yourself in this cultural civil war. We Jews are very zealous when it comes to calling to account the non-Jewish outsiders who demean or abuse us; would toward it were that we could turn our gaze inwards and ask why it is that we cannot stomach the alternative Jewish view.

By no means am I asking for a fake Jewish unity; debate and even strong disagreement are the very things that prevent ideas from stagnating and become archaic. But it is actually real debate that we currently lack. Many Jews would rather sling arrows across the bow and insult others from afar, than sit down with them in person, in a room or on a stage and really thrash out the issues in a spirited, intelligent and dignified matter.

Life is often messy and contradictory, so why should Jewish holidays be any different? For me, Matityahu is both inspiring guerrilla leader and a scary exemplar of fundamentalist judgmentalism. As many a psychologist will tell us, the ability to tolerate ambivalence is one sign of a grown up. Growing up may be hard to endure, but the alternative is to keep the narrative at a grade school level. I think both we and our children can benefit from understanding both the heroic and the mistaken Maccabees. Judaism need not be infantilized in order to provide a powerful model for living, for recognizing our flaws and, thus, learning how to grow into the adults we must become.

Further Reading

David Brooks, “The Hanukkah Story”, The New York Times, December 10, 2009.

Aviezer Ravitzky “The Roots of Kahanism,” Jerusalem Quarterly 39 (1986).

Bret Stephens, “The Dying Art of Disagreement. The New York Times, September 24, 2017

Noam Zion, “The Rabbinic Ideal of the Peacemaker: David Hartman Reads Maimonides’ Laws of Hanukkah.” www.hartman.org. January 1, 2012.