Religion & Beliefs
A Very Osama Hanukkah
By Steve Almond / December 4, 2007
Of the many strange things George W. Bush has said while president, here is one of the strangest: “I couldn’t imagine someone like Osama Bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah.”
Shrub must have figured this sound bite was a slam-dunk. He was wrong. Osama Bin Laden may be the person on the planet most attuned to the joys of Hanukkah. As it turns out, the traditional Hanukkah spiel about the oil-that-was-only-supposed-to-last-for-one-day-but-lo-and-behold-it-lasted-for-eight-wowza is mostly Talmudic PR. Contrary to popular myth, the holiday arose from the exact struggle Bin Laden is waging today: an armed rebellion against an imperial power, driven by religious fanaticism and suicidal self-assertion.
The genesis of Hanukkah resides in the Books of Maccabee. You can be forgiven if you have not read these books–they never made it in to the Biblical canon.* I only read them, in fact, because my wife is converting to Judaism and I wanted to be able to provide her a full accounting of the festival. Weirdly, I happened to have the New American Bible at home, a Catholic version of scripture that includes both books.
1 Maccabees opens with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. The Hannukah story begins around 175 BC, when Antiochus, leader of the occupying Seleucid dynasty,issues a decree forcing the Jews to profane their Covenant: “Women who had had their children circumcised were put to death, in keeping with the decree, with the babies hung from their necks.” The high priest Mattathias kills a Seleucid official, then retreats to the desert to launch a revolt, which under the direction of his sons Judah, Jonathan, and Simon becomes a guerilla war. There’s another word for all this, of course: insurgency.
Judah Maccabee leads the Jews to numerous improbable victories on his way to reclaiming the Temple in Jerusalem, “destroying the impious” (here defined as any Jews less pious than themselves) along the way. Up north, Judah squares off against Antiochus IV’s son, the unfortunately named Eupator, whose army includes armored elephants, the Old Testament equivalent of tanks.
The account of a Maccabee soldier named Eleazer made me queasy:
Eleazar, called Avaran, saw one of the beasts bigger than any of the others and covered with royal armor, and he thought the king must be on it. So he gave up his life to save his people and win an everlasting name for himself. He dashed up to it in the middle of the phalanx, killing men right and left, so that they fell back from him on both sides. He ran right under the elephant and stabbed it in the belly, killing it. The beast fell to the ground on top of him and he died there. (6:43)
Eleazer sounds to me like a Biblical version of the suicide bombers who launch themselves at military convoys in Iraq. He isn’t trying to kill and maim innocent bystanders, so it’s not an exact comparison, but his mindset is essentially the same: He relishes the chance to give his life in exchange for the glory of the cause, and his own name.
I got the same queasy feeling when I read about Judah decapitating the vanquished general Nicanor and putting his head on display in Jerusalem. This might have been how you asserted your might 2000 years ago. But isn’t the gesture really just an old school version of the decapitation videos Al Qaeda uses today to horrify its Western foes?
Judah himself eventually dies, but his brothers Jonathan and Simon carry on the insurgency. Their methods could hardly seem more familiar:
They watched and suddenly saw a noisy crowd with baggage; the bridegroom and his friends and kinsmen had come out to meet the bride’s party with tambourines and musicians and much equipment. The Jews rose up against them from their ambush and killed them. Many fell wounded and after the survivors fled toward the mountain, all their spoils were taken. Thus the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of music into lamentation.
Again, from where I’m sitting this sounds a lot like, well, terrorism. It calls to mind the horrifying images of the 2005 attack at a Jordanian hotel, when members of al Qaida turned a wedding party into a bloodbath.
It gets worse.
Jonathan then cuts a deal to send 3000 of his soldiers — let’s not call them foreign-born terrorists – to help the despot Demetrius put down a rebellion by his troops in Antioch. The Jewish mercenaries kill 100,000 people.
Obviously the Maccabees were in a tight spot, surrounded by hostile enemies and forced to defend themselves in mortal combat. What’s striking is the righteous lust with which they carry out this defense. Because they believe in the one true God, they have no problem with killing innocent civilians, killing other Jews, and killing themselves.
Radical Islam, meet radical Judaism.
I hoped the second book would be a softer ride, one that might tease out the less martial aspects of Hanukkah. Wrong.
2 Maccabees recounts the victories of Judah, only this time the Almighty plays a much more significant role in the combat. Indeed, if the message of the first book was that Jews kick serious ass when inspired by God, the message of the second is that the Jews kick ass because God actively intervenes on their behalf
In one particularly hallucinogenic episode, God helps his people by conjuring a “manifestation” straight from the pages of the Book of Revelation: he takes the form of a “richly caparisoned horse, mounted by a dreadful rider” who attacks one of Judah’s antagonists. Elsewhere, Judah reminds his troops that the Almighty will vouchsafe their victory. The rebels cut down “at least 35,000” of the enemy and “rejoice greatly over this manifestation of God’s power.”
The second book also places a disturbing emphasis on martyrdom. The most famous example is the story of a Jewish mother and her seven sons who refuse Antiochus’s order that they eat pork. The story illustrates the cruelty of the Seleucid soldiers, but its real emphasis is on dying for a cause:
At that, the king gave orders to have pans and cauldrons heated … He commanded his executioners to cut out the tongue of the one who had spoken for the others, to scalp him and cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of his brothers and his mother looked on. When he was completely maimed but still breathing, the king ordered them to carry him to the fire and fry him. As a cloud of smoke spread form the pan, the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die bravely…
Which they do.
I am going to resist using this story to suggest that torture doesn’t really work, because I think it speaks to a broader pathology—the mindset that exalts a noble death above all other human courses.
One other passage in 2 Maccabees is nothing short of eerie. It’s the retelling of a story about Nehemiah, the leader who had helped rebuild the Temple wall after the Babylonian Exile. During the exile, the priests took some of the sacred fire of the Temple altar and hid it in the hollow below a dry cistern. Hoping to rekindle the altar flame, Nehemiah sends the priests to retrieve the hidden fire, but they come back with a thick liquid instead. “And when the materials for the sacrifices were presented, Nehemiah ordered the priests to sprinkle the liquid on the wood and what was laid upon it.” (7:21) A great fire blazes up and everyone marvels. The King of Persia declares a miracle. The material, whatever it is, comes to be called naphtha – which, translated from Greek, means “petroleum.”
I wish I were making this stuff up. But it’s really and truly in the book. Twenty two hundred years ago, with insurgents and imperialists doing battle in the Middle East, people were agog over the miracle of petroleum.
In recent years, Jews have made an understandable decision to steer people away from the violence in Hanukkah’s exegetical basement. As an assimilated and not-very-observant Jew, I grew up hearing almost exclusively about the miracle of the oil.
The only thing I knew about the Maccabees was that they were heroic defenders of the faith who had something to do with the Jewish Olympics. The modern holiday has been recast as a cheery Festival of Lights, a counterpart to the bright tinsel of Christmas. It’s the same impulse that leads Christians to repackage Easter as a vista of bunnies and candy eggs, rather than the commemoration of a brutal public murder.
But this kind of soft-pedaling distorts our history and distracts us from the true meaning of our holidays. Hanukkah really is about a violent insurgency. It’s about the lengths to which the oppressed will go to defend their beliefs. But it’s also about a strain of unchecked aggression that infects those who are convinced that God is on their side. It’s precisely the sort of holiday story, in other words, that might force us to confront the moral crises of our present historical circumstance – before we go the way of the Maccabees, or their imperial enemies.
* * *
RELATED LINKS:
In Slate, Christopher Hitchens agrees that Hanukkah is predicated on some less-than-enlightened principles. Being Christopher Hitchens, he also calls Judaism "an ancient and cruel faith" and suggests that Hanukkah violates the first amendment; hilariously, Slate illustrated this rant with a picture of an adorable Jewish child lighting the menorah.
In the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Danya Ruttenberg takes a more positive approach, looking for the good in a holiday that celebrates Jew-on-Jew civil war.
Correction, December 14: The original piece mistakenly stated that the Books of Maccabee were removed from the Biblical canon in the third century. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
POST A COMMENT
"And just rename your magazine 'Goycy' while you're at it."
http://www.goycy.com
They're a sister site of ours
Holy F***ing S**t.
Why don't you just sew your foreskin back on?
And just rename your magazine "Goycy" while you're at it. Nothing Jewish about it, as far as I can tell.
Actually, Osama could not appreciate Hanukah, because he could not endorse how we remember and commemorate the events of the Maccabee revolt. Rather than celebrate martyrdom and war, the Rabbis placed the focus of the holiday on non-violent, spiritual renewal. The Rabbis were well aware of all the problems the author points out, which is why he decided to exclude these books from the Jewish biblical canon (and why Mel Gibson made noises of making a Maccabee film).
There is insightful revisionism, and then there is the type that simply proves that black is white and gets you run over at the next zebra crossing. This is the latter.
your reply was dead on!
This is what Chris Hitchen looks like wearing a yarmulke
http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/2007/11/hitch-in-shul.html
Don't bastardize our history like that. How can you call yourself a jew?
So Osama Bin Laden is a crypto Jew?
Some interesting comparisons here, but there are a couple of logic flaws.
Firstly, I hate to sound like a post-modern cultural theorist, but you are applying current moral standards to a very different era, when slaughtering one's enemies was quite usual. Parts of the Bible are extremely bloodthirsty, with vast amounts of smiting, slaughtering and exterminating, so there's not much point focusing solely on the Maccabees. (Of course Auschwitz, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur etc show the hypocrisy of our supposed respect for the laws of wars.)
The main difference is, of course, that OBL seeks terror and murder for its own sake. The deaths of thousands of innocent civilians is an end in itself. The Maccabees were fighting for survival.
visit: adamlebor.com
Some interesting comparisons here, but there are a couple of logic flaws.
Firstly, I hate to sound like a post-modern cultural theorist, but you are applying current moral standards to a very different era, when slaughtering one's enemies was quite usual. Parts of the Bible are extremely bloodthirsty, with vast amounts of smiting, slaughtering and exterminating, so there's not much point focusing solely on the Maccabees. (Of course Auschwitz, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur etc show the hypocrisy of our supposed respect for the laws of wars.)
The main difference is, of course, that OBL seeks terror and murder for its own sake. The deaths of thousands of innocent civilians is an end in itself. The Maccabees were fighting for survival.
visit: adamlebor.com
I get your point about suicide bombers willing to die for their cause. OK.
But, um, who is the empire and who is the victim?
To compare Al Qaida and the so-called "insurgents" to the Maccabees, and therefore the Greeks to the US or UN or {fill in your good-guys of choice} is insane.
You pretend to say that the US invaded the Midle East and slaughtered those peaceful Muslims, who were just minding their own business. That Bush exiled their religious leaders and replaced them with his own hand-picked, bastardized pretenders. And that those poor, put-upon Muslims dared to fight back because their prophet told them to.
You wanna draw a comparison? OK, only if ancient Israel was evangelical, had its designs on world domination, developed clearly superior military power, invaded Athens, Cairo, Babylon, Rome, suppressed their people, and tortured to death a thousand innocents for every rebel.
The torture you cite from the Book of Maccabees is indeed gruesome, and is very close to what was taking place in Baghdad before {thank G-d} the regime change. You libs like to think such 'torture' takes place in Gitmo, where the detainees' rights are protected more than US citizens.
Dream on.
Hag Sameach.
There's a logical hole in your premise. Either you're Orthodox and interpret the bible literally, and this seems unlikely. Or you've reached some understanding of yourself as a Jew which isn't wholly dependent on the words of the Bible. Your comparison to OBL only makes sense if you pretend that the moral norms are constant over time. Suicide bombing, like polygamy and stoning adulterers, is not a part of modern morality. I have always heard that, after the Holocaust, the Maccabees and the story of Massada were resurrected because they depicted Jews who fought back. Can you really begrudge us that? For me, Chanukah is a holiday about Jewish survival, despite civil war and constant opression. We are the miraculous oil that lasts (no, not literally). B'yamim hahem, b'zman hazeh.
Do us all a favor and convert to Christianity since you're already half-way there. You know nothing about Judaism. Your wife's conversion is a sham. The minute you two break-up she'll be back to being a good Jew-hating Christian shiksa. Judaism doesn't need two anti-semites pretending to be Jewish. Stop annoying real Jews and celebrate Christmas with your shiksa and now or future Gentile children.
"Jews have never believed that it is our right to destroy our
enemies, rather defend our lives and fate."
Tell that to the people who lived in Jericho before Joshua showed up.
–Z
Yet another non-affiliated individual who likes to look for any given
reason to have nothing to do with observing/celebrating. His arguments
aren't worth the webspace they're posted in. Anyone who has a couple of
brain cells to rub together for warmth knows this isn't what happened.
What does an individual full of absolute hatred who wishes to destroy
the world outside of his own have to do with people defending their
rights??? The Maccabees were on the DEFENSIVE during the battle. Bin
Laden decided to attack and kill thousands of people who never did
anything to him. I would be more than happy to engage the author in a
discussion but know that will never happen.
The people who write self loathing rubbish such as this rarely stand
up for themselves knowing that a simple preschooler clearly has a
better grasp on the reality than they do. As a self described
"assimilated and non-observant Jew" on what basis is your education
that you are able to make these claims? For that matter which observant
Jew crossed you so that you felt the need to try and attack those that
believe? Jews have never believed that it is our right to destroy our
enemies, rather defend our lives and fate. The Maccabees did not seek
out the Greeks they were being killed and their homes, the temple and
everything else in their life was being stripped from them by an
oppressor. They did not go an invade those in other lands nor did they
attempt to rule their enemies.
I hope your wife has better sense than to take your word for these
things and accept your opinions as fact. If she actually wants to learn
about the religion, she should seek out her own information from
reputable sources.
check me
http://jewschool.com/2004/12/08/who-are-todays-maccabees/
Almond, you are wrong. The true meaning of a holiday is contained in how and what is celebrated. Chanukkah is as much a celebration of suicide murdering as Thanksgiving is a celebration of the genocide of the American Indians. Some people might celebrate the genocide of the Indians at their Thanksgiving dinners (ala Robert Jensen) but to most people it is a holiday that honors generosity, gratitude and charity. If you and your wife celebrate Chanukkah by revering the brutality of war and the murder of innocents you are free to do so but it's clear that your wife missed some crucial ideas in her conversion process and that you learned nothing about Judaism when you were raised. Note also that when you are basing conclusions about Judaism and its beliefs you should actually use Jewish sources.
One crucial bit that she (and you) should know is that not everybody's actions in the Bible are considered to be moral. Another bit is that Judaism is a progressive religion and that means that as we move forward in time we learn more and more on how to behave morally. The moral code of the past seems brutal by today's standards. Hopefully it will always be so. The one thing you may have right is that the moral code of Osama and his lackeys is about two millenia behind our own.
To the editors of Jewcy: This ignoramus makes some suggestions that are just disgusting. You should be above publishing them. For example, the allegation that Channuka is a celebration of brutality and murder that is intentionally misrepresented to the world is typical of the drivel you would find in the protocols of the elders of zion. I like Jewcy but if I see more of this crap you'll have lost a devoted reader.
You left out the part about them wanting to celebrate a second Sukkot because the one they had celebrated in that year was in the mountains, so they celebrated it at the Temple after it was rededicated. Eight days of Sukkot… Eight days of Hanukkah…
But I do think you're right in that the true miracle of Hanukkah is people willing to fight and die for a cause, especially when the odds are against them. How many times have we actually been the likely winner when we fight? Yet compare that to how often we've been victorious.
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