KISLEV HOLIDAYS

Hanukah is the well known holiday that occurs at the end of Kislev and into the beginning of Tevet, the next month. It has no great religious significance, but it’s importance in the United States is elevated as Jewish families compete with Christmas.  It is a post Biblical holiday, commemorating events that happened between 168 and 164 BCE. 

Here’s a quick recap of the story.   The Assyrians, also known as the Seleucid empire, were a Greek or Hellenized empire whose territory included what was called Judea.  They desecrated the Temple in 168 BCE by putting a statue of Zeus in it and holding pig sacrifices. This led to a 3 year guerilla war against them led first by Mattathias and then his son Judah that was ultimately successful in pushing them out of ruling the province of Judea and the restoration of Jewish rule.  The victorious Jews restored the Temple to a state of ritual purity and declared a holiday to celebrate the dedication of the Temple, patterned after the week long festival of Sukkot.

The themes I want to discuss break down into two groups. I will ask a total of 8 sets of questions, one for each night.

·        Themes derived from the history of the holiday.  These include questions around Jewish identity, intercommunal hatred (sinat chanim), the question of how to work with the David and Goliath myth and idols.

·        Themes derived from the timing of the holiday.

The backstory of the history of the Holiday is that Jews in the land of Israel were divided between the push to assimilate into the Greek culture of the ruling empires of the day and preserving our own traditions.  The Seleucid empire typically allowed for the preservation of native cultures but apparently got caught up in an inter communal Jewish fight between a group that favored more cultural assimilation to Greek culture and a group that resisted this.  These factions jousted for the office of high Priest, and the losers recruited King Antiochus IV to invade Judea.  He did that, conquered the temple and instead of just leaving it to the locals, decided to ban Judaism and promote Greek practices such as a statue of Zeus in the temple and sacrifices of pigs.  There is some scholarly belief that he did this in support of the Hellenizing faction of Jews.

This led to a rebellion of the anti-Hellenizing faction, known as the Hasmoneans.  Their military success led to the establishment of the “second commonwealth”  in 142 BCE that was quasi independent but somewhat of a vassal state to the same Seleucid empire.  Then the Hasmonean leadership also turned towards Greek influence and there was more intercommunal infighting, leading to imperial intervention and annexation by the Roman empire in 63BCE, a mere 79 years after the start of the second commonwealth in 142 BCE.

Let’s start with the tension between assimilating into a majority culture versus preserving our own uniqueness.  This was a tension then and obviously is a tension now. One of the core arguments for Zionism is that only in Israel is it possible to live a fully Jewish life because there we are the majority.  The calendar follows Jewish holidays, you don’t have to worry about anti semitism in your schools, people can actually read and speak the Holy Language and even secular Israelis have a knowledge of Judaism that very few of us who live outside of the land actually have. 

Yet for those of us who choose to live outside of Israel, we are faced with a series of questions. What is our relationship with the majority culture as Jews?  What parts of Judaism are meaningful to us and we want to practice and pass down to our children, and what parts are not meaningful to us?

Our Rabbis teach us that the origin of both the war that leads to the creation of the second commonwealth and the destruction of it is “sinat hanim” or inter communal conflict. This is both traditional Rabbinic teaching and the historical reading of the mundane facts of our history.  We see sinat hanim as an active force in our day as well, both in Israel and here in the west. Everybody is convinced they are right and it becomes hard to see how our spiritual/political opponents are also part of the Jewish people.  Somehow I don’t want to claim the settlers who kill Palestinians and steal their land as my brothers and sisters, and they certainly wouldn’t want to claim me as someone who rejects halacha and their view of God. Klal Yisrael, the idea of the unity of the community of Israel is under attack from within.  As I write this, we’re in the midst of a war with the Palestinians because of the actions of Hamas in murdering thousands of Israeli civilians, raping our women and taking 240 of us hostage.  It’s done wonders for our unity, but I’m here to predict that it won’t last. Sinat Hanim is a real threat to the Jewish people—that’s a core lesson of Hanukkah. The Rabbis didn’t blame the Assyrians or Romans for the destruction of the temple as much as they said, look inward, look at our inability to make peace within the community.  

How do we preserve the unity of the Jewish people?  Is it only possible with an external threat?

When I was young  the state of Israel felt itself to be like David surrounded by the Goliath of Arab countries with more powerful armies.  One of the core Zionist messages of the holiday was studying it for how to win a guerilla war based on greater knowledge of local territory.  In this imagination, Israel was like the Viet Cong fighting against the much larger and stronger imperial power that was the United States in the Vietnamese war.  The idea that Israel would become the most powerful army in the region, accompanied by the typical arrogance of power seemed beyond impossible. Times have changed.  Now Israel has the most powerful army in the region and is busy oppressing the Palestinians.  I’m making what I think are simple factual claims, leaving aside the questions of right and wrong or how we should move forward.

I have two concerns here.  It is clear to me that the ideology of winners and losers, of more powerful and less powerful, of master and slave, of oppressor and oppressed, this ideology is a dead end. It is really prevalent in the world, of that there can be no question, but it creates a world that doesn’t work for anyone.  Too many of us have bought into the idea that if only we become Goliath, the master, the oppressor, the victor, everything will work out for us.  It won’t. We are part of an ecosystem, a community of members of the earth and the cardinal rule is that when one part of the ecosystem is sick, everyone suffers. I’m not talking about individuals here, but a group as a whole. 

Where in your life does this win-lose ideology show up?  What would happen if you shifted it?

My second concern has to do with limits and justice. Our society has decided to ignore limits, but ignoring the limits of our ecosystem is going to bite us in the behind, that’s for sure.  How do you follow a just path when you have the strength to just take what you want and follow an unjust one?   How can humans restrain themselves and live within limits? How can we live in such a way to preserve the world for the seventh generation, as the Iroquois teach?  How do we change ourselves so that we choose the right thing, that just because you can doesn’t mean you should?    This is an area of spiritual growth for all of us.  

The victorious Hasmoneans cleaned the temple of the statues of the Greek Gods, aka “idols.” We can read this in a literal way of course, but we can also read this metaphorically. Idols are things you worship that don’t lead to the divine.  Material wealth is an obvious one in our society.  But there are less obvious ones.  For instance, I believe that we have made idols of ourselves.  We worship a human centric universe in which we are distanced from the more than human world.  Rather than being a part of creation, we have set ourselves as human beings separate and over against it.  That’s making an idol of ourselves.

What are the idols in your life?  How is your life influenced/dominated by things that don’t lead to the divine? How do you need to cleanse yourself and get back on a righteous path?

Hanukkah occurs at the darkest time of the year—literally. The holiday is the only Jewish holiday that actually occurs over two months—the four days leading into the new moon and then through the fourth of Tevet.  These are the days when the moon is at its smallest and sheds the least light in any given thirty day period.   Further, Hanukah occurs at the time of year when the days are shortest and the nights are longest here north of the equator.  The cleaning of the temple was accompanied by relighting the menorah. That’s why a core ritual practice in Hanukkah is lighting candles.  We are compelled to look towards questions of light and darkness.  

What in you needs to be relit?  Look towards something you have been passionate about it the past, where your ardor has dimmed.  Where in your life needs more light? Look towards areas of your life that feel unclear, murky.  

One less obvious theme is that for pastoralists raising livestock, the fall breeding period has come to an end.  Sheep and goats have gestation periods of about 5 months, and cows have 9 months, like humans. Livestock farmers work hard to control the timing of breeding and birth, usually gearing it towards the time of grass growth so the nursing mothers have lots of milk for their babies and for the humans, if the animals are milked. If I were raising sheep or cows, I’d want my babies born in the March-May timeframe because the deep freezes of winter which are stressful for young ones would be over and there would be plenty of grass for the mothers and babies. Deer, the herbivore of choice in suburbia, has a 200 day gestation period and almost all the does who will get pregnant already are by the time Hanukkah roles around, so they can give birth in late Spring. Stags rut in early Fall and then breed through the Fall. So the does have babies in their bellies, waiting for spring, the return of warmth and grass, to give birth.  I always think that we are not as different from cows, sheep and deer as we might like to think. 

What is growing in your belly, waiting for the warmth and fertility of spring to come forth?

The depth of darkness and light shining on it in the holiday also stirs up the idea of the shadow, at least it does to me. Our shadow, as Jung used the term, is what we can’t see or acknowledge about ourselves because we are convinced it is evil. Left unaddressed, our shadow sides wind up too often projecting our evil onto others, and then acting as if the other were the evil that lives inside of us.  We see this throughout the developed world today where the autocrats claim they are defending democracy while doing everything they can to destroy it as one simple example.  

All of us have a shadow side. Our spiritual task is to acknowledge that we have a shadow and work to bring it to light so the evil within us is not running the show.

Recognizing your shadow is a really difficult task—if it were easy, by definition it wouldn’t be your shadow. In my limited experience, it’s a thunderbolt like a spiritual awakening only accompanied by an urge to puke.  I remember when I realized that I was arrogant as a compensation for the fact that I actually thought I was stupid (to be clear, the shadow side here is the arrogance).  Oh boy, did I feel sick. 

The great news about recognizing the shadow is that it allows us some freedom. I remember someone telling me some time later that one of my virtues as a leader is that I didn’t feel like I had to be the smartest person in the room or the center of attention. But before my recognition of this shadow side of myself, I did need to be the smartest person in the room.  It showed up as arrogance and talking too much, not allowing room for others’ contributions.  Sound like any boss you’ve ever had?

One of the practices I intend to undertake this Chanukah is to think each day about something I am not acknowledging about myself.  As I light each candle, I will pray that the Hanukkah light ting will illuminate some part of my shadow self.

What are some parts of your shadow self?

QUESTIONS

• What is our relationship with the majority culture as Jews?  What parts of Judaism are meaningful to us and we want to practice and pass down to our children, and what parts are not meaningful to us?

• How do we preserve the unity of the Jewish people?  Is it only possible with an external threat?

• Where in your life does this win-lose ideology show up?  What would happen if you shifted it?

• How do we change ourselves so that we choose the right thing, that just because you can doesn’t mean you should?

• How is your life influenced/dominated by things that don’t lead to the divine? How do you need to cleanse yourself and get back on a righteous path?

• What in you needs to be relit?  Look towards something you have been passionate about it the past, where your ardor has dimmed.  Where in your life needs more light? Look towards areas of your life that feel unclear, murky.  

• What is growing in your belly, waiting for the warmth and fertility of spring to come forth?

• What are some parts of your shadow self?