Comment of the Week: Hitchens Sucks (Sometimes So Do I)

I’ve kind of abandoned our regularly scheduled posts this week in favor of Hanukkah coverage, but Ariela M left such a good comment that we have to honor it with comment of the week:

Tamar,

I usually love what you write, but here I feel like your response to Hitchens's piece was a bit wimpy.  Let's be up-front here:  the Hitchens essay attacking Hanukah is a load of crap.  He introduces his point by glorifying epicurean culture, which is a bizarre move coming from someone who is quick to see the worst in any contemporary religious culture.  But the Maccabean critique of epicurean Hellenism was totally legitimate.  The epicureans glorified pleasure and physical beauty.  It was about eating whatever you wanted to the point where you got sick.  It was about worshipping perfect naked bodies, and considering physically flawed people to be worthless.  It was about maximizing the pleasure of powerful male heads of household at the expense of just about everyone else -- women, male slaves, etc.  They weren't exactly concerned about the widow and the orphan.

Hebrew culture, by contrast, offered some different values.  Instead of stuffing any old thing that looked good into your mouth, the Hebrew or Jew was supposed to think about each bite that went in and where it came from -- was it killed in a proper manner (kashrut), was it tithed to support the important institutions of society (truma and ma'aser), were corners of the field left for the poor (leket, shichecha, etc.)?  Instead of treating slaves and the poor as though they were sub-human, the Hebrew or Jew had serious constraints on the ownership of slaves and had important responsibilities to the less fortunate in society.  Instead of worshiping physical beauty, the Hebrew or Jew was taught the value of "Physical grace is deceptive and beauty is empty" (from the Woman of Valor verses).

 Besides ignoring the valid reasons that the Maccabees had for resisting being coerced to become Greeks, Hitchens also dismisses Greek imperialism by jumping to the fact that the Hasmonean regime that emerged was corrupt and brutal.  But how does this excuse Greek imperialism or establish that the Jews should have succumbed to it?  As my preschooler would say, two wrongs don't make a right.  As someone older than a preschooler might note, the eventual excesses of the French Revolution are no reason to stop celebrating the Revolution and its motivating ideals.  Similarly, we don't stop celebrating July 4th just because the American revolutionaries tarred and feathered their enemies (but maybe Hitchens thinks we should?).

Hitchens next parts ways with sanity altogether when he blames the Maccabees for creating Christianity in a bizarre twist on the old saw of blaming the Jews for killing Jesus.  For good measure, he pins the rise of Islam on the Jews as well.  So according to Hitchens, the Jews DID "cause" September 11th.

On a more serious note, Hitchens completely ignores what Hanukah has been for the past two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism.  The appeal of a story in which a small band of Jews stood up to a large, powerful empire that wanted to destroy them is not hard to understand for a people who spent much of the last 2000 years living as a small band of Jews dominated, oppressed, and terrorized by large powerful empires of Christians throughout Europe.

Finally, I can't help but point out Hitchens's fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment.  The First Amendment does not privilege "enlightenment" over "faith," as he fantasizes.  On the contrary, the First Amendment, had it existed in ancient Greek Palestine, would have protected the right of the Jews to continue to practice their religion freely, eating their kosher food and worshiping in their temple, free from any coercion by the Greek majority.  Granted, it would also have protected the right of the Hellenizing Jews to assimilate to Greek culture, but it most certainly NOT have protected the Greeks' right to defile the temple and ban Jewish practices.

Finding things to criticize about the texts and actions of people from more than 2000 years ago does not take a genius.  It's easy.  It's cheap shots.  What's challenging is finding continued worth and value in ancient texts and rituals, which is one of the reasons I usually enjoy reading your column.

I have to run to get ready for Shabbat now, so I can’t give the lengthy response that I want to except to say that I dropped the ball here.  My post was written in response to Steve Almond’s piece on Jewcy, and I just added in the line about Slate right before publication, without spending the appropriate time analyzing Hitchens’s writing.  Ariela is right about everything she says here, though I still hesitate to side with the Maccabees with such zeal.  I think Jews should be held to a higher standard, and that should mean an absence of brutality which is just not evident in the Maccabees’s behavior.

At any rate, more on this on Monday.  Shabbat Shalom and Happy Chanukkah to all!