The Chanukah story
Dec. 14th, 2005 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bnewmanI may be getting over my profound ambivalence about Chanukah.
The problem with identifying the darkness of winter with Hellenic civilization is that Hellenic civilization is pretty neat. The problem with identifying the darkness of winter with the tyranny of Antiochus "Epiphanes" is that winter is part of a natural cycle which is necessary for many living things, while the tyranny of religious oppression rooted in hubris is wholly evil and should indeed be banished from the world forever, if it's ever convenient to do so.
Worse, the conflict we commemorate on Chanukah wasn't primarily between my ancestors and their external oppressors — it was between Jews who wanted a culture free of outside influences and Jews who wanted to be part of a larger world culture. The Maccabees may, at that moment in history, have been right about what they had to do to preserve the Jewish people, but that doesn't make them any less like the Taliban. Moral of the story: Fundamentalist Jews should tell wishy-washy cosmopolitan pagan Jews to get back in line.
Needless to say, I cannot really integrate this story into my own. So, here's a less historically charged story:
Once upon a time, it was dark, which is bad. Then, with divine help, it got brighter, which is better. Moral of the story: When it gets dark, have faith that it will get brighter again.
That's a perfectly good story, but it's exactly the same as everyone else's, so if that's the best we can do, I'll just be pagan at this time of year, if it's all the same.
What we need is a version of the Chanukah story which abstracts over just some of the details, not all of them. Like this:
There's a light in each of us. Sometimes, people will ask us to hide our light. They may threaten us with exclusion if we let our light shine, or with violence. And we may sometimes give in, and hide our light, and it may even seem to go out entirely. At times like this, we may look within, and take stock of the inner resources that we have for the rekindling of our light, and they may seem inadequate. But, if we dedicate ourselves to letting our light shine, in order to increase the light in the world, then whatever we need to rekindle our light will be given to us, in the form of the very resources we already had, but thought were inadequate.
That's much better, isn't it? Moral of the story: Let your light shine. If anyone tries to tell you not to, kick their ass. I'll help.
I especially like how this new version encourages me to integrate my Judaism with a wishy-washy, cosmoplitan paganism — hey, that's my light, I'm gonna let it shine. At least it's not a state-sponsored, monomaniac-pandering cosmopolitan paganism. That would be wholly evil.
The problem with identifying the darkness of winter with Hellenic civilization is that Hellenic civilization is pretty neat. The problem with identifying the darkness of winter with the tyranny of Antiochus "Epiphanes" is that winter is part of a natural cycle which is necessary for many living things, while the tyranny of religious oppression rooted in hubris is wholly evil and should indeed be banished from the world forever, if it's ever convenient to do so.
Worse, the conflict we commemorate on Chanukah wasn't primarily between my ancestors and their external oppressors — it was between Jews who wanted a culture free of outside influences and Jews who wanted to be part of a larger world culture. The Maccabees may, at that moment in history, have been right about what they had to do to preserve the Jewish people, but that doesn't make them any less like the Taliban. Moral of the story: Fundamentalist Jews should tell wishy-washy cosmopolitan pagan Jews to get back in line.
Needless to say, I cannot really integrate this story into my own. So, here's a less historically charged story:
Once upon a time, it was dark, which is bad. Then, with divine help, it got brighter, which is better. Moral of the story: When it gets dark, have faith that it will get brighter again.
That's a perfectly good story, but it's exactly the same as everyone else's, so if that's the best we can do, I'll just be pagan at this time of year, if it's all the same.
What we need is a version of the Chanukah story which abstracts over just some of the details, not all of them. Like this:
There's a light in each of us. Sometimes, people will ask us to hide our light. They may threaten us with exclusion if we let our light shine, or with violence. And we may sometimes give in, and hide our light, and it may even seem to go out entirely. At times like this, we may look within, and take stock of the inner resources that we have for the rekindling of our light, and they may seem inadequate. But, if we dedicate ourselves to letting our light shine, in order to increase the light in the world, then whatever we need to rekindle our light will be given to us, in the form of the very resources we already had, but thought were inadequate.
That's much better, isn't it? Moral of the story: Let your light shine. If anyone tries to tell you not to, kick their ass. I'll help.
I especially like how this new version encourages me to integrate my Judaism with a wishy-washy, cosmoplitan paganism — hey, that's my light, I'm gonna let it shine. At least it's not a state-sponsored, monomaniac-pandering cosmopolitan paganism. That would be wholly evil.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 05:03 am (UTC)Then I try to think of happy things like dreidles. Everyone loves stupid gambling games. for about ten minutes before it gets old
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 01:40 pm (UTC)Do you have a link to an example of the Chanukah story you don't like?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 08:19 pm (UTC)The Chanukah story that bothers me can only be found by reading between the lines. After all, the moral of the story is be who you are — it becomes problematic when the people who are explaining the story go on to explain who it is that the story is telling me to be.
Last year, when my ambivalence began (before that I had mostly just ignored Chanukah), I did a lot of trying to figure out what various Jewish holidays meant to me. There's an orthodox website, aish.com, which is a comprehensive source for this sort of information, and with which I almost never agree philosophically.
I got turned off by the idea of celebrating the victory of ideological purity over cosmopolitanism. The article about how Judaism (and the spirit of Chanukah) is incompatible with a materialistic philosophy of mind didn't help, either.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-23 05:04 am (UTC)Don't trust Aish. They're into heavy-duty kiruv (outreach), towards a Very Right-Wing sort of Judaism that is really hard to make match with the real world as it currently exists, even when one is looking at much of the Orthodox world as your sample. Aish is possibly worse than Chabad, in terms of indoctrination and the like.
Just butting in to add that. Hope you don't mind. I believe I'll friend you, unless you object. IF so, just let me know, and I'll butt out and mind my own business.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-23 07:26 am (UTC)I just got forwarded an email message from Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun, which I regard as a liberal and progressive Jewish publication. The email seems familiar, so I think it likely that a similar one was among the things that troubled me last year, and apologize for laying the blame solely on Aish. And my concerns with that email are manifold enough that they may merit a whole other post.
I think the message that's bothering me is this: "Chanukah reminds us to be authentically Jewish, and authentic Jews are against X." Typically, X is some way in which the society around us falls short of the ideal. Sometimes, I myself am against X, but the Chanukah story goes on to be about a complete repudiation of the society that suffers from X, and this bothers me, because I don't like to be told that, in order to be authentically Jewish, I have to repudiate something that is just as much a part of who I am. Does that make sense?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-23 03:05 pm (UTC)I think it is rather ironic that a holiday that is so incredibly anti-assimilationist has turned into one of the most assimilated holidays of all- maybe that's a message for/about our extremists and their ideals right there: we're celebrating something we're not entirely sure we stand for becuase it's Way too isolationst for us with a celebration that is (in many folks' minds) almost too assimilationist. That sounds to me personally like a message about the value of balance and moderation.
What troubles me is how we teach Channukah in the religious education systems that I've been involved with, and how I did not know until either late high school or early college that the people the Maccabbeas were fighting were other Jews more than Greeks. I think it could be an interesting tool for looking at internal religious politics and their dangers, and I think that it's a waste that it gets polarized instead.
I see your point, and it isn't one I've thought about much, honestly. But it's a good point. Thank you for adding complexity to a holiday that I've never had much sucess persuading myself to Really think about.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-23 06:12 pm (UTC)Maybe it really is this simple: They tried to kill us. We won. (At what cost? Who are we? What makes us who we are?) Enough with the hard questions — let's eat!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 02:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 08:02 pm (UTC)*googles "Festivus"* Wow, that's bizarre.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-15 08:18 pm (UTC)It's amazing how mass-media and pop-culture can create holidays out of whole-cloth. Fifty or 100 years from now, will Festivus and Kwanzaa seem as normal as Mother's Day and Valentine's Day do now? Kwanzaa is already thirty-nine years old, and it still seems very contrived and unnatural to me. While Mother's Day (proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson in 1914 after a half-century of growing popularity started by the suffrage movement) and Valentine's Day (first mass-produced sweetheart cards produced in 1847) feel pretty much normal, and Thanksgiving (1863) completely so even though everyone knows it was made up.
Wow, I knew Father's Day came about later than Mother's Day, but did not know it wasn't official until 1972! (But first celebrated in 1910.)
I'm guessing that since only 1.6% of consumers say they celebrate Kwanzaa, that it's not just because I'm white that I don't feel like it's a natural holiday, but maybe it biases me. Chanukah, Ramadan, Chinese New Year, etc, totally natural, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-18 03:22 pm (UTC)...well that's a depressing insight.
I'm gonna have to think about that for a bit.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-19 03:49 am (UTC)I think the real moral of the story is that I need to find an online resource with detailed information about the deeper meanings of Jewish holidays that isn't written by folks who are hardcore realists about chosenness. The deeper question, though, is, "How far should the Jewish people be willing to go to protect our distinctiveness?" And I don't know the answer to that one.
But I take heart — and you should, too — in the fact that, in all of the nightmare scenarios of religious oppression that I can readily imagine, Jews, science-fiction fans, and tree-hugging neo-pagans will all side with the resistance, so I won't be forced to choose.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-19 05:42 pm (UTC)Though you can't rule out the dystopian future where science-fiction fans take over the world and it becomes illegal to be a mundane.
:P