Internal and External Identities
A third Hanukkah reflection
Maybe I’ll write eight Hanukkah reflections—one for each day. Or maybe I’ll publish today’s third edition and move on. Like I said yesterday, it’s not like these are planned. If the ideas flow and my fingers tap, I’ll keep posting! How do you like these daily reflections for this holiday? Here are reflections one and two.
While the (Greek) Seleucids were the muscle behind one side of the Hanukkah conflict, the side opposite the Hasmoneans, the core of the Hanukkah narrative is best cast as a Jewish civil war: a clash between so-called Hellenized Jews, Jews aligned with the Seleucids, and Jews who resisted the embrace of Greek philosophy who were aligned with the Maccabees/Hasmoneans.
When I wrote yesterday in a sort of Hanukkah primer, I shared that the Seleucids had desecrated the Temple; in fact, they were ordering sacrifices to the idols they constructed as a new state policy. We positioned the Maccabees as rebelling, expelling the Seleucids, and re-dedicating the Temple, signaled by the sanctification of the oil and the menorah lighting.
Our lesson yesterday was to recognize that the Maccabees lit the oil despite knowing their supply was inadequate to maintain a fire that was instructed to burn day and night perpetually. I suggested that this gives us good reason to take up the work of justice, even without guaranteeing that we can achieve it.
Today, I want to shift gears and address another issue: If we focus on the warring factions on either side of the civil war, is it always right to resist encroaching culture? Or, in a more limited scope: Are the Hasomoneans necessarily on the right side of this historical conflict? Are the Greek Seleucids and Hellenized Jews necessarily in the wrong?
The religion of ancient Israel is one borne out of other Canaanite/Ugaritic traditions around Southwest Asia. The Gd of Israel is a composite figure of other gods, El, Elohim, characteristics of Baal, that represent the blending of different peoples and tribes, the synthesis of cultures, and the outcomes of conflict. This does not mean that the blending of traditions unfolded under some grand design or during a defined period. Instead, texts and traditions served different purposes in different settings, and accommodations and redactions adjusted ancient texts to fit new dynamics. Nearly one thousand years separate what we take as the earliest literature of the Tanakh and the post-exilic Torah in its near-final form. I won’t rehearse all the considerations of Biblical source criticism here, but the Bible is a library of books expressing different perspectives and ideas.
Many grounding narratives of the Hebrew Bible were borrowed or at least influenced by narratives, legal codes, and the characterizations of gods of surrounding peoples. Viewed through this lens, maybe it is not surprising that resisting assimilation is a major feature of Torah. Consider this from Deuteronomy 12, some of the oldest material within Deuteronomy (likely pre-exilic material from the 7th century BCE):
If anyone secretly entices you—even if it is your brother, your father’s son or your mother’s son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend—saying, ‘Let us go serve other gods,’ whom neither you nor your ancestors have known, any of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far away from you, from one end of the earth to the other, you must not yield to or heed any such persons. Show them no pity or compassion, and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them and afterward the hand of all the people. Stone them to death for trying to turn you away from the Lrd your Gd, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Then all Israel shall hear and be afraid and never again do any such wickedness (NRSVUE).
It is, of course, easy and obvious to read this as terrible rhetoric about stoning people to death, even from within your own tribe, for turning others in the tribe away from the Gd of Israel. I don’t want us to get caught up in the rhetoric. Whether these legislative injunctions were ever practiced is an open question for archeology and history. I want to draw us to the core message: turning away from the Gd of Israel toward other people's practices is a capital offense.
The worry over adopting other practices—or the worry over assimilation—is a perennial theme in Jewish history. Our conception of holiness itself is to be set apart. We are a people set apart, a “holy nation”; our cultic (worship) instruments are set apart from the common. The idea of chosenness that fuels conspiratorial thinking about Jewish supremacy—and, unfortunately, internalized attitudes of Jewish supremacy, too—is a misunderstanding of this “set apart” nature. We conceive of ourselves, or historically, we have conceived of ourselves, as a nation of priests who must obey Torah to fulfill our covenant with the Gd of Israel. We have a law to obey. We have a part to play in bringing about an age of abundance, peace, and gathering of all the earth’s nations.
Shit, I suppose that does fuel a little supremacist thinking! Let me go on.
As anciently as this 7th century BCE text I’ve just quoted to the Ezrah-Nehemiah reforms and return to Jerusalem two to three hundred years later that instructed ancient Israelites returning to Jerusalem to dissolve their marriages to foreign partners, and through the conservative rabbinate of modern Israel that dictates Jewish identity, legal marriage status, and citizen status, to the fault lines today about Zionism as a component of Jewish identity, we’ve been a people hounded by our own assimilation boogeymen and internal criteria for identity.
I suppose that framing tips my hand. I do not think the idea of insular, clearly defined, and halakhically (Jewish law)-mandated identity conditions are altogether healthy for our people. But I do see that they have been required. And perhaps still are, in some respect, but I want to entertain these ideas in the concluding paragraphs.
My wife and I have three boys—Isaac, Noah, and Gideon. Gideon, our youngest, is a natural athlete. I’m certainly no athlete, and I’m not sure I really understood what it meant to be a natural athlete until Gideon came along. His older brothers did some little league baseball and rec soccer, and proud dad here, they have their strengths, too, but Gideon, hand that kid any ball, racket, stick, bat, glove, or mitt, and he’ll be at least competitive within a couple of hours. The kid has an innate sense of strategy and body coordination to execute his brain's direction.
I want to be careful how I proceed here because my values of love, belonging, justice, trust, kindness, and compassion were authentically and informatively passed down from my dad and our family on that side. Watch my mannerisms, hear my voice, or get a sense of my personality, and you’ll see my dad.
But here is the other identity-shaping reality: revealing my Jewish ancestry to me was like discovering the innateness of Gideon’s athletic ability. There was something that made sense about learning my biological grandmother and aunts and uncles on the other side of the family are Jewish.
Speaking of being hounded by assimilation, this tenuous and insecure identity and imposter syndrome has hounded me.
While reading about Hanukkah this week, I came across this December 2016 opinion piece published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The author suggests the Hanukkah story, “underscores the eternal battle of the Jew—to preserve the values of brotherhood and mutual responsibility above all else.” He warns, “Within every Jew there is a Hellenist whispering that it is better not to unite and be like everyone else, chasing egoistic pleasures. After all, isn’t this the way of nature?”
For Jews, we have two conceptions of identity: one that we define for our own communities and another that is thrust upon us from the outside.
A (Jewish) mother of a girl I dated some time ago—herself the child of immigrants who fled Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe, remarked on this wrestling with my identity (paraphrasing), “If they start rounding us up again, they’ll take you, too.”
She was right. Whether she meant to land on this distinction or not, definitions for legally standing Jewish identity within our community differ from external definitions. Should someone outside the community be defining populations by whether their parents or grandparents are Jewish, as they did in 1930s Germany, I doubt an adequate defense will be, “Yes, but while I have this matrilineal decent, I am not halackhically Jewish in the sense that I was not raised Jewish.”
The Beit Din has no authority in the face of autocracy.
The fear over assimilation is that we may intermarry ourselves into non-existence. Or I take it that is at least one fear. Or as the Haaretz article worries, “Todays [sic] world needs unity [among Jewish people] more than it needs clean air, and it really needs clean air.”
So, we are brought back to the question of encroaching culture: Are the Hasmoneans necessarily right and the Jews, with backing from the Seleucids, necessarily in the wrong?
The Hanukkah narrative grows with nuance the more we study its backstory. While I looked to ground yesterday’s Hanukkah reflection in the Torah and Talmud—two central cores of Jewish life and practice—today I’ll say that if we are committed to any sort of ethnic, tribal, or global-family conception of our peoplehood, we must also affirm an identity for ourselves that respects our felt sense of being; our sense of who we are.
I think many of us struggle with the question of what it means to cling to an ethnic identifier in 21st-century America. More broadly, what does it mean to align with a peoplehood group at all? The worries over eugenics, race science, supremacy, and ethnic cleansing are the outcomes of rigidly defining who’s in and who’s out.
The concern is prescribing what it means to fit in rather than describing the existing diversity. Am I a threat or an asset?
Where fear that the product of intermarriage and a previously unknown Jewish ancestry like me presents an existential risk to the continuity of our people, I counter that a spicy Jew like me celebrates the power of diaspora that a few families in a Midwestern state with around 10,000 of us in total may have candles burning in our windows on any given Friday evening.
Discovering who we are is discovering ourselves within our people, but rather than a dilution of the whole, the diaspora is our strength in dispersion. Like the Bund used to say, doikayt! “In the early twentieth century, doikayt was an organizing principle for Jews in Eastern Europe who believed in transcultural solidarity” (Ayin Press).
Cal it transcultural solidarity, collective liberation, or class consciousness, the ability to be fully who we are, wherever we are, is a triumph to our continuity. As the labor-class Bund slogan goes, “Wherever we live, that is our homeland,” and I’m happy to be home in who I am.