Somewhere in every good Reconstructionist education is a healthy dose of Maccabean revisionism. Though we may have been raised to consider them the heroic victors in a struggle against oppression, a colder appraisal of the historical record often leaves liberal-minded Jews with questions about their legacy and our relationship to it. They are good questions, worth asking. Yet, in light of recent events, I wonder if we are being too easy on ourselves in claiming alienation from Judah and his brothers. I have seen the Maccabees a few times over the past year. They are closer than you think.
For my part, I was definitely ushered into an awareness of Hanukkah with the heroism of the Maccabees at its center. I can still remember waving a paper sword around my bedroom in an early flush of adrenaline, while the record-player (that’s right, I said record-player) spun out holiday songs in praise of ancient Jews with God in their hearts and weapons in their hands. The biggest battle in our house was over who got to be Judah.
The first re-evaluation of this heroic narrative predates Reconstructionism by almost 2,000 years. It originates in a glaring contrast between two different classical sources, and their respective tellings of the Hanukkah story. We are used to thinking of the full arc of this story as beginning with the Maccabean revolt and ending in the oil that lasted for eight days. But these are, really, mutually exclusive elements. The books of Maccabees, which are called “apocryphal” because the rabbinic canonizers deliberately left them out of the Hebrew Bible, tell the first part but don’t mention the second. That comes several centuries later in the Talmud, as the only answer to the simple question mai hanukkah? — “What is Hanukkah?” It’s a rhetorical question. In answering it, the rabbis don’t brandish any paper swords, but, instead, celebrate the light that wouldn’t go out.
The authors of Maccabees had no need to justify their omission. As far as we know, they didn’t think they were leaving anything out. They simply chronicled their understanding of the conflict between the Seleucid remnant of Alexander’s empire and an emergent Judean cadre of intertwined political and religious leadership. These were the Maccabees. They came into history as a backwater priestly family from Modi’in, and, as the Hasmoneans, ended up dominating the Second Jewish Commonwealth until the Roman conquest. It was likely at least the partial intent of whoever recorded these chronicles to please them.
In the Talmud, the Hanukkah miracle is one of persistence and Divine intervention with no indication that it was the result of guerrilla warfare.
But the rabbis knew what their account in the Talmud was leaving out. They left it out on purpose. They were consciously substituting myth for history, swapping out the annals of Hasmonean victory for a winter solstice legend of unknown origin, which blended well with the tale of rekindling the menorah of a desecrated Temple. This hanukkat habayit — rededication of the Temple — is the common denominator of both stories, but in the Talmud, it is a miracle of persistence and Divine intervention, with no indication that it was the result of guerrilla warfare.
What could have prompted these rabbis to leave the Maccabees out of their explanation of Hanukkah, as well as the Bible itself? Why this emphasis on religious renewal and the tending of a flickering candle with no mention of military triumph? It may have had something to do with their attitude towards the Hasmoneans, a dynasty that descended into a reign of corruption, infighting and realpolitik worthy of the Borgias, or Game of Thrones, and which, in its final throes, was at cross purposes with the emerging philosophy of rabbinism. Just as plausible was a lingering rabbinic self-awareness that their own flirtation with militarism had ended in spectacular failure. The Rabbi Akiva-backed Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans, several decades after the destruction of the Temple, ultimately brought only martyrdom and obliteration of the last shreds of Jewish sovereignty. In its aftermath, it must have made good sense to downplay any dreams of victory over empire and to focus instead on a modest hope that the lights would stay on longer than expected.
We know from our latter-day, synthetic version of Hanukkah, combining the sword and the oil, that it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. But it wasn’t just the early rabbis that gave one of these details the upper hand. The two narratives are always somewhat at odds with each other and which of them happens to be in ascendancy over the other in a particular time or place — the outward or the inward, ambition or accommodation, aggression or passivity — can tell us something about the Jewish sensibility dominating that moment. The tension between Diasporism and Zionism represents the most striking modern vacillation between these poles. The experience of the first was well-characterized by the image of the persistent candle. The second rediscovered the potency of Maccabean swagger.
The Reconstructionist addition to all of this revisionism, which I first encountered as a rabbinical student, was to supplement the implied Talmudic critique with a clearer focus on who it was the Maccabees were actually fighting. As a kid, I was confused as to whether it was the Syrians or the Greeks, lacking any awareness of the geopolitical circumstances of imperial Hellenism in decline. I only knew, for certain, that wherever Antiochus came from, he was hellbent on forcing us to give up Judaism for pork. But the sources we studied at RRC troubled this simplistic understanding. They painted, instead, a picture more clearly resembling civil strife between various parties of Jews: some open to the influence of Hellenistic, or Greek, culture and others reacting violently against it, and those who adopted it. The Maccabees, at least in their early days, were standard-bearers of the fundamentalist camp. I began studying for the rabbinate soon after Sept. 11, 2001. This new learning made it hard for me not to associate them with the fanaticism of the Taliban. From there, I reached my own conclusions as to how they might have regarded me — and anyone working out the terms of their Judaism between two civilizations.
That’s when, as a modern-day Hellenized Jew, you start asking yourself the good questions about your place in the Hanukkah story. Mai hanukkah? What is it exactly that you are celebrating in the darkness of early winter? My sense of self tends to put me outside the embrace of militant religious fundamentalism and more in the company of people who cherish the blending of cultural opportunities. The glimmer of the menorah’s persistent light still beckons, maybe as it did the Talmudic rabbis, inured by their circumstances to zealous dreams of sovereignty. It wards off the darkness, and, if anything, provides us with ballast against the empire of Christmas. But am I really a Maccabee? Maybe I’ve been standing at the wrong end of Judah’s paper sword this whole time!
But the Talmudic rabbis were political quietists, dependent on the fickle goodwill of the gentile hegemonies that determined their fate. We, on the other hand, live in a moment of embattled Jewish power. We may be uncomfortable with militarism, but, at least by proxy, we are up to our necks in it. The past year of brutal conflict — to say nothing of the 75 years of Jewish statehood that preceded it — have given us no choice but to consider our Judaism in the aspect of force. I know that we, in the Reconstructionist movement, array ourselves in a variety of positions around this truth. But there is plenty of Maccabeanism to go around.
It’s tempting for those who still consider themselves liberal Zionists — committed to the Jewish polity of Israel while concerned for Palestinian well-being — to think of this Maccabean quality as simply an aspect of the right-wing, and the settler movement. Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir are the zealous ones, the religious fundamentalists, holding as much disdain for us as they do for the Arabs they seek to displace.
But, as I suggested above, Maccabean self-assertion, whether military or otherwise, has always been an intrinsic part of the Zionist strategy for Jewish liberation. Though we may wish it were otherwise, actively fighting for the realization of our national goals has characterized the project almost since its inception. Having suffered horribly for being denied a place at the table of landed nations, we saw justice in forcing ourselves back to it, even though this necessitated the displacement of other people.
Over time, much of what was miraculous about this victory has given way to a Hasmonean reality. The oil in the Temple finally ran out, and we were left with the compromises of statecraft, infighting and realpolitik — the perversions of power and the overwhelming horrors of bloodshed and repression. Some of us, endeavoring to be progressive Maccabees, are still engaged in the often disheartening task of trying to purify our achievements of their extremism and moral corruption, while maintaining belief in our right to a homeland and to self-defense. In others, though, these have engendered a desire to be like the old rabbis and to write the whole thing out of the Bible entirely.
But, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7, we have also witnessed the intensification of a new kind of Maccabeanism among the supporters of Palestine. At its most egregious, this has taken the form of celebrating the violent actions of Iranian-backed Islamist militias — Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — as legitimate blows in the battle against the scourge of settler-colonialism. This celebration has often been explicit, though frequently it comes in the form of omitting any reference to the discrete ambitions and tactics of these organizations from analysis of the conflict, as if their extremist religious fundamentalism is playing no role in exacerbating the violence. Like Judah and his brothers, they are simply considered heroic freedom-fighters battling the empire.
Though we may wish it were otherwise, actively fighting for the realization of our national goals has characterized the project almost since its inception.
I don’t mean to suggest that this is the attitude of all protesters against the current war. Many just want the slaughter to end or have been long-standing opponents of the Occupation and see this as just the latest chapter in the ongoing destruction of Palestinian society. Still, the ramping up of anti-Israel rhetoric and action over the past year has been notable in its cold-blooded lack of concern for Israeli lives and in the single-mindedness with which it has endeavored to purge “Zionists” — defined so loosely as to encompass the majority of Jews, who remain committed to some version of our own Maccabean achievement of national rebirth — from the public sphere. It seems, sometimes, to border on the fanaticism that must have resonated in Mattahias’s voice when, after slaughtering a Jewish idolator, he cried out, in the second chapter of the first book of Maccabees, “Whoever is zealous for the law and who stands by the covenant, let him follow me!”
The question, then, remains: mai hanukkah? But the answer is more complicated than we might imagine, especially for those conditioned to respond with the menorah, and not the sword. The glimmer of the fading light still beckons. It continues to provide illumination to those in the ambivalent middle, peering through the fog of war for the face of the other. I see its flicker in the increasing popularity of organizations like Standing Together, at least among members of my community. Such endeavors hold out hope for coexistence, based on the proposition that neither Jews nor Arabs are going anywhere, so we will have to learn to get along, or die not trying. This persistent glow also lights my way in efforts to keep the members of my community talking to each other, despite the excruciating pain that arises from how differently we each perceive the same events, though I often feel like I’m running out of oil.
But our Hanukkah is not an either/or proposition. We tell the version of the story that combines both elements: the outward and the inward, ambition and accommodation, aggression and passivity. Though we are used to thinking of compromise as a virtue, this synthesis is our challenge. While it might be easier for people like us to think only about how we are trying to tend the holy light, it is also true that, in the sensibility of this Jewish moment, there are Maccabees all around us.
Who knows? By one path or another, they might even have made their way back into our own hearts.
