Are We Maccabees? Hanukkah in a Time of Conflict
December 9, 2024
The Maccabees, at least in their early days, were standard-bearers of the fundamentalist camp.
Rabbi Benjamin Weiner, a 2008 graduate of RRC, has been the spiritual leader of the Jewish Community of Amherst, Mass., for over a decade. He studied English literature at Columbia College and received a Master of Philosophy degree in Anglo-Irish literature from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, focusing his thesis on the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. He worked for a time as a translator of Yiddish and Hebrew, and his own writing has appeared in publications including the Jewish Review of Books, The Forward, Religion Dispatches and Pakn Treger, the magazine of the Yiddish Book Center. While in rabbinical school, he served as a chaplain for adults with mental illness, Jewish elders and terminally ill hospital patients. In addition, he interned at the RRC archives and, under a Luce Foundation grant, at the Institute for Christian-Jewish Study in Baltimore. He lives with his wife, Cantor Elise Barber, and their son, Efraim, and daughter, Batya, on a three-acre family homestead in Deerfield, Massachusetts, along with several dairy goats and chickens.
The Maccabees, at least in their early days, were standard-bearers of the fundamentalist camp.
Everything we do and dream isn’t built upon or etched in stone, but rather relies on whether or not it is going to rain.
How do we giddily celebrate the world gone mad in Shushan when our weather foretells our world gone mad?
*This article was first published in the ZEEK issue “Reconstructionism: Denominationalism That Works?” (Fall 2010)* Among recent attempts to define “Jewish authenticity,” I find one characterization of
Rabbi Benjamin Weiner explores the ways that traditional Hebrew prayers can provide meaningful spiritual experiences for those who neither understand Hebrew nor believe in a God who hears and responds to our prayers.
The Bible’s description of the shuddering of the people at Mount Sinai reflects a deep truth about how moments of revelatory insight can be frightening.
Serving as central organization of the Reconstructionist movement
Training the next generation of groundbreaking rabbis
Modeling respectful conversations on pressing Jewish issues
Curating original, Jewish rituals, and convening Jewish creatives
