Chanukah in Israel

In Israel, schools are closed through all of Chanukah, meaning that I will not be returning to school until Monday, December 9th.  During the second half of my break, I will be staying with Eli in Ma'alei Gilboah, in the north.  It's now the fifth night of Chanukah, and I've been having an enjoyable holiday thus far.

On Wednesday night, the first night of Chanukah, I had the privilege of leading an enrichment session among my cohort of volunteers.  The topic was the historical roots of and meaning of Chanukah.  (By the way, if you're interested in an hour-long audio class about Chanukah, here's one from the man who has taught me more Talmud than anyone else in the world, Prof. Aaron Koller).  I provided some sources on several topics, such as "Historical Antecedents to the Maccabean Revolt," "Identity and Purpose of the Maccabees," "Rededication of the Altar," etc.  My friends split into groups of two and three, presenting the information in each theme in the form of a skit.  The skits were quite creative and funny, and included a surrealist allegorical narrative about a cabana boy (Coco, Harry, and Noa), a Jewish father visiting a Greek doctor to have his son circumcised (Noah and Alex), speed-dating with several of the male characters of the Chanukah story (Devin and Natalie), a war correspondent reporting on the combat of the Maccabean revolt (Max, Jordan, and Gabbie), a rap about the reasons why Chanukah is associated with fire and oil (Noach and Ben), and a Capra-esque take on the "true meaning of Chanukah" (TZ, Hannah, and Perrin).  We finished with a discussion about what people had learned, and whether that would affect how they might one day teach their own children and students about the real meaning of Chanukah.  I think that the activity was successful (and by that, I mean that people learned without being bored or turned off).  Max, at the end, reacted with a surprising about of passion about how he felt about finally having what he felt was a well-grounded understanding of the Chanukah story.  We never got at all into the observance of Chanukah, or into the Roman postscript to the revolt, which in some ways is just as well.  I was doing my best to keep this historical and political, rather than spiritual.  Still, we missed out on one of the more interesting sources, a tale about the Roman victory, told in the Babylonian Talmud: "What did Titus do?  He seized a harlot in his hand and entered the holy of holies.  He spread out a Torah scroll and committed a sin upon it.  Then he took a sword and slashed the curtain, and a miracle happened and blood bubbled out of the curtain.  Titus thought that he killed God" (Gittin 56b).

In the process of preparing the activity, I, too, learned a whole lot.  This was my first time, for instance, reading the Second Book of the Maccabees, and I also made use of Yeshiva University's Chanukah To-Go Packet.  As always, the more I read, the more complicated things become.  I wonder if, had I been alive in the days of the Maccabim, whether I would have been a "מתיון" (Hellenizer) or among the rebels.  The extent to which pious Jews went in order to protect their values at some times seems extraordinary.  In addition to the tales of the murders of those who clearly aligned themselves with the Greeks (see, for instance, the First Book of the Maccabees 2:24), and the forced circumcision of Jewish males (ibid. 2:46), there were persecutions of those who assimilated, even to a lesser extent.  The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin, chapter 6, tells the story of an execution of a man who trespassed what was not even a Toraitic mitzvah, but a Rabbinic ordinance.  Rambam retells the story in the Mishneh Torah, Sefer Mishpatim, Sanhedrin 24:4: "An incident occurred concerning a person who rode on a horse on the Sabbath in the era of the Greeks and they brought him to the court and had him stoned to death... All of the required processes of questioning, cross-examination, and warnings were not followed, nor was the testimony unequivocal.  Instead, their execution was a directive for that immediate time according to what [the judge] perceived as necessary."  The death penalty without a fair trial, because it was thought necessary; that, in my opinion, is extreme.

On Thursday night, TZ and I visited Moshe's house, and TZ met Moshe's family for the first time (I had already met them at Rivka's Bat Mitzvah).  I first attended Minchah/Arvit at Lod's בית הכנסת מרכזי.  After Minchah, a Rabbi stood up and gave a brief Devar Torah about Chanukah.  I strained my ears to understand, and would guess that I understood about half.  Not good; I remember being able to fully understand the very first French-language Sorbonne lectures that I attended two years ago in Paris.  And, just as history was in French, Judaism is one of my "specialties" in Hebrew.  Anyway, I had an enjoyable time at Moshe's house.  I spoke English, in order to be polite (except to Rivka, whose English isn't that good).  Na'amah's English is first-rate, surprisingly; she can even read Pride and Prejudice in English, which is quite impressive, given the fact that I know a lot of American anglophones who can't.  The next time I visit Moshe's I hope to be able to speak in Hebrew with his wife and children, at least, and practice Hebrew with Israelis.  I have so, so much to learn.

I spent Shabbat Chanukah in Jerusalem.  It was my first time at the Western Wall on Shabbat, and it was quite an enjoyable experience reciting all of Shir Hashirim on Erev Shabbat among the throngs of Jewish men assembled at the Kotel.  The next morning, I arrived at the Kotel before 8:00 am, and, again, had the opportunity to pray with a minyan.  It's a real experience being on the men's side of the Kotel; I sometimes wonder if the experience is the same on the women's side.  I slept and lighted the Chanukia at the Jerusalem Heritage House, which is a free hostel (with definite right-wing leanings), and ate at Rabbi Eli Deutsche's house.  He's the Rabbi who visited Ramla just before Rosh Hashanah, and invited me back to his house.  He in a very friendly way tried to convince me to study in a Yeshivah in Israel, something which I politely explained I was not interested in doing, if I can find work this coming year.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, before I travel up north to Ma'alei Gilboa, I'll be involved in an archaeological dig, in Lod, with some of the Community Involvement Oranim people.  I'm very much looking forward to this opportunity.  However, I thought that I would share my Chanukah thought of the year.  Although the books of the Maccabees were not canonized into the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible (to be fair, they describe events which took place well over a century after the end of the אַנְשֵׁי כְּנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה, the group of scholars to whom Biblical canonization has been ascribed by the Jewish Oral Tradition), they are of great historical importance.  They were both obviously written by pious Jews, and I would go far as to assert that the Second Book of the Maccabees was written by a Rabbinic Jew (see the end of chapter twelve for an explicit reference to מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים).  There is a very well-known passage in the First Book of the Maccabees 2:31-38, describing an incident in the early days of the revolt against the Greeks: "And it was reported to the king's officers, and to the troops in Jerusalem the city of David, that men who had rejected the king's command had gone down to the hiding places in the wilderness.  Many pursued them, and overtook them; they encamped opposite them and prepared for battle against them on the sabbath day.  And they said to them, 'Enough of this! Come out and do what the king commands, and you will live.'  But they said, 'We will not come out, nor will we do what the king commands and so profane the sabbath day.'  Then the enemy hastened to attack them.  But they did not answer them or hurl a stone at them or block up their hiding places, for they said, 'Let us all die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify for us that you are killing us unjustly.'  So they attacked them on the sabbath, and they died, with their wives and children and cattle, to the number of a thousand persons."  What just happened?  Well, one thousand Jews just died because the Greeks attacked on Shabbat, and the Jews refused to defend themselves on that particular day of the week, because work is forbidden on that day, and bearing arms is considered a form of work.  In fact, according to Jewish Law, one is not just permitted, but obligated, to perform acts of labor on Shabbat, if doing so will save a human life.  As codified by Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Sefer Z'manim, Hilchot Shabbat 2:25 (explaining how the Oral Tradition interprets Deuteronomy 20:20), "We may wage war with [enemies] on any day, even on the Sabbath, until we conquer [the city], even if the war is voluntary in nature...  Indeed, it was on the Sabbath that Joshua conquered Jericho."  Here, we have a case of Jews acting piously to the point of allowing themselves to be killed, something that the Law neither demands nor desires.

In another incident, mentioned (to my knowledge) only in the Second Book of the Maccabees, another incident occurs, involving death and Shabbat: "In the language of their fathers [Yehudah Maccabee] raised the battle cry, with hymns; then he charged against Gorgias' men when they were not expecting it, and put them to flight.  Then Yehudah assembled his army and went to the city of Adullam.  As the seventh day was coming on, they purified themselves according to the custom, and they kept Shabbat there.  On the next day, as by that time it had become necessary, Yehudah and his men went to take up the bodies of the fallen and to bring them back to lie with their kinsmen in the sepulchres of their fathers.  Then under the tunic of every one of the dead they found sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear.  And it became clear to all that this was why these men had fallen" (12:37-40).  According to the narrator, these Jewish men who were killed in the battle against Gorgias died because they were wearing idols around their necks, something which was only discovered after Shabbat had passed, when the Maccabees went to collect their dead.

These two stories, it seems to me, have something in common.  At first glance, they have opposite morals: the Jews who allow themselves to be murdered because it is Shabbat die because of too much piety; the Jewish soldiers who die because they are carrying idols die because of too little.  However, both cases seem to be to be the result of a lack of education and understanding.  If the Jews who died on Shabbat had known the Law better, they would know that the Torah is a law which one is meant to live by; dieing merely because it is Shabbat is not, according to Rabbinic thought, acceptable.  Again, according to Rambam, Sefer Mada, Yesodei Hatorah 5:1 "Should a gentile arise and force a Jew to violate one of the Torah's commandments at the pain of death, he should violate the commandment rather than be killed, because [Leviticus 18:5] states concerning the mitzvot: 'which a man will perform and live by them.' [They were given so that] one may live by them and not die because of them. If a person dies rather than transgress, he is held accountable for his life."  The Jews carrying tokens of Jamnia were also most likely lacking in education.  Let's not forget that they were putting their lives on the line for the sake of fighting an against-the-odds war on behalf of Jews and Judaism; they can by no means hardly be written off as pretenders.  Rather, what they seemed to have lacked was knowledge of the Jewish belief that monotheism is incompatible with such forms of superstition as the belief in the apotropaic or protective properties of wooden statues.  Although I am clearly skeptical about the pious narrator's assertion that it was their idols that caused these Jews' deaths, in the same way as it is obvious that the Jews killed on Shabbat were killed because of their overly pious nature, I would certainly say that the fact that these carried such images reveals their lack of strongly-founded knowledge of what they were really fighting for, and why.

Knowledge is at least as crucial today is was twenty-two centuries ago.  Israel is one of the only two countries in the world which has an education arm to its military (the other is Japan), in order to teach its soldiers just why their service is so important.  Sometimes, even in what seem like the centers of Jewish learning, such as the yeshivot, there is a lack of strong knowledge among the students as to what it really means to be Jewish, observantly or otherwise.  One of the yeshivah students whom I met this weekend admittedly was only studying in order to prolong his time before attending university and eventually joining the workforce.  As I am coming to realize, much to my shock and discomfort in the school in which I work, many of the students harbor prejudices against non-Jews.  On my first day, one of the female students told me that Arabs caused all of the problems in Lod, and that Lod was not such a bad city before the Arabs showed up and began stealing things (she seemed unaware of the fact that, before 1948, Lod was an Arab town).  Likewise, one of my favorite students harbors a very strong scorn of Christians and Christianity, insisting, for instance, that I erase any pairs of intersecting lines that I may have drawn on my whiteboard while trying to teach him English grammar.  What is so shocking about such incidents is that I work at a school which in theory instills its students with Jewish values.  Almost every morning, Rabbi Yosef lectures the males on the importance and sanctity of their tefillin, and why it is absolutely crucial that they wear them six days a week, in the correct manner, after having prepared their bodies properly, etc.  Never is there any mention of ethics, tolerance, or love.  All of the halachot I hear pertain to prayer, the holidays, etc.  As Eli has pointed out to me before, there is a very good reason that Rambam places Hilchot De'ot, the laws of character development, before Hilchot Talmud Torah, the laws of the study of Torah, within Sefer Mada.  Compassion, fairness, empathy, and respect are all Jewish values.  If we lose these values, we lose our Torah.  As Ben Azzai says in Avot 4:3 "אל תהי בז לכל אדם, ואל תהי מפליג לכל דבר, שאין לך אדם שאין לו שעה ואין לך דבר שאין לו מקום." (He would also say: Do not scorn any person, and do not discount any thing. For there is no person who has not his [or her] hour, and no thing that has not its place).  The word used, "אדם" means simply "person," notably neither "אִישׁ" (man) nor "בֶּן בְּרִית" (Jew).

But, really, who am I to speak in such ways about Jewish education?  I am very, very far from even knowing Hebrew, let alone knowing Aramaic, let alone knowing the law.  I have a very, very long and rocky road ahead of me.

Before I close, I ought to mention that, as one of my friends who suffers from UC informed me, this week of December 1st-7th is Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis Awareness Week.  Just to copy and paste a little bit: "Ulcerative colitis is a chronic [probably autoimmune] disease of the large intestine... in which the lining of the colon becomes inflamed and develops tiny open sores, or ulcers, that produce pus and mucus. The combination of inflammation and ulceration can cause abdominal discomfort and frequent emptying of the colon... Ulcerative colitis may affect as many as 700,000 Americans.  Men and Women are equally likely to be affected, and most people are diagnosed in their mid-30s.  The disease can occur at any age and older men are more likely to be diagnosed than older women.  While ulcerative colitis tends to run in families, researchers have been unable to establish a clear pattern of inheritance.  Studies show that up to 20 percent of people with ulcerative colitis will also have a close relative with the disease.  The disease is more common among white people of European origin and among people of Jewish heritage."

Happy Chanukah!

~JD