Radio Free New Hampshire: My Annual Chanukah Column

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

Priesthoods belong to settled cultures. They mark agricultural surplus, centralized administration and social hierarchy. Prophets ignore those things. They are individuals who claim a special relationship to the divine. Prophets and priests are natural opponents. Nothing rattles an established priesthood like a new vision of truth.

Ancient Judaism mashed those forces together. Our sacred stories make Moses and Aaron brothers, permanently yoking them to drive our nation forward: Moses, the greatest solo prophet of them all, worth five full books on his own (if you’re counting, Samuel has two); and Aaron, the head of our fledgling spiritual aristocracy.

That duality endured. We had kings to tend our politics and we had prophets to rail against those kings for refuting the word of God. Judaism remained combustible, always ready to tear itself apart. Yet the whole made more than the sum of its parts. People need priests to see them through life. It helps to rest in the arms of tradition. People also need revelation; they yearn for the ineffable. From its tangled roots, Judaism succeeded in meeting its adherents’ contradictory needs.

This project suffered its first existential crisis when the Northern Kingdom fell (the prophets had a field day with that), then its second when the Southern Kingdom fell (ditto). Then came Cyrus the Great and the period of the Second Temple, when we were granted autonomy within a larger empire. Then came the Greek conquest; then came the war that is commemorated with our holiday of Chanukah.

Rural clans fought against a Hellenized elite. Sounds good on the page – poor but idealistic rebels defeating large and impersonal forces. Leave it there and you have a good story. Looked at more closely, you have an even better one.

That Hellenized elite held Jews and Greeks both. It argued that the old Israelite religion no longer suited the times. The victors ended up agreeing; after founding their newly independent state, they also became Hellenized. Their tiny reconstituted kingdom never gained its footing. Larger empires dominated it. The final empire was Rome, and Rome wiped it from the map (literally—their cartographers wrote “Palestine” instead of “Judea”).

After that happened, the world got another holiday: Christmas. Jews returned to rebellion. We could not abide the loss of our second kingdom. And in the wake of one of those failed revolts, a new Jewish leader tried again to meld Greek and Jewish ways. His name, of course, was Joshua. Most know him as Jesus.

Jesus was not a second coming of the Hellenist elite; to the contrary. But he also felt that the faith of his day was failing to meet the needs of its people. To which the answer must be: it depends on how you saw those needs. Did you want to keep a temporal state or were you willing to abandon that goal? And from that original disagreement, more disagreements followed.

Judaism has always been both a faith and a nation. Both have evolved over time. Neither looks like it used to. Jews today come in different races; they speak different languages; they follow different traditions. Yet all still respond to what happened thousands of years ago, so Judaism itself remains what it has always been: a swirling combination of earthly and holy concerns, packed together in a single frame. It’s as jammed with energy as an atom and just as impossible to split.

Progressives claim they can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. It must make them feel better to say that; it gives them a moral leash. Yet you can oppose Netanyahu without opposing Israel; you can oppose the war in Gaza; you can oppose settling the West Bank; you can favor an independent Palestinian Arab homeland; you can do all those things without opposing Israel. Being anti-Israel has to stand on its own, as a statement of unique malice.

Yet how can we forget, how can we not protest, how can we not insist that certain types of evil come to an end? This happened: 750,000 souls were expelled from their homeland by the sea. The invaders raped and murdered their innocent victims. The survivors have been forced to live in filthy camps. The women are made subservient. The men get drafted into new wars. Children must fend for themselves.

Surely something must be done. But nothing gets done, because that situation is taking place today in Western Tigray, part of Ethiopia. It is only one of the myriad conflicts in our world that have nothing to do with Jews, nothing to do with Israel, nothing to do with people wearing keffiyehs, and therefore nothing to do with fascism or fashion or American politics at all. So the kids don’t march.

Chanukah starts on Sunday. This year in particular, it’s a hard holiday that recalls hard times.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.