Telling the story

[liv]

So gool_duck asked me a very good question: How do you tell the Hanukka story? What do you tell?

So with my geeky friends I talk about all the detail, the question of how we got a rabbinic festival out of an Apocryphal book and folk tradition, the rules about what order to light and not making use of the candles.

With my skeptical family I talk about how chanukah is really problematic, and how Granny went to a lecture by a historian of the period who gave lots of reasons why the story as told in Maccabees couldn't possibly have happened, and how we feel uncomfortable celebrating a military victory and the triumph of violent nationalists over assimilated moderates.

With colleagues and people who feel it's polite to ask but don't really care, the tl;dr summary is God performed miracles for our ancestors in those days at this season aka chanukah absolutely fits the joke paradigm for Jewish festivals: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat

With people who are new to chanukah and don't know to ask for the story, well, I begin for them...

No, seriously, mostly I tell it as a story about the occupying empire trying to impose their religion on the Jewish population, and the Maccabees were freedom fighters and once their guerilla campaign succeeded they cleaned out the defiled Temple and then there was an oil lamp miracle. I am aware that delivered the many into the hands of the few has other interpretations, see above re: problematic, but that's not on the whole what I'm celebrating at chanukah. And, well, when I'm teaching Christian children I down-play the part about how a human being can't possibly be God, and how it's really really wrong to make statues and images of God.

This weekend my OSOs came up with their two younger kids, partly in order to join the synagogue chanukah party. We also went to the excellent Gladstone Pottery museum, and played a lot of games and gave eachother chanukah presents, Triominos and some dessert wine for me, toys from the museum shop for the kids. Not to mention that I joined my loves for the church service for Gaudete Sunday which was full of seasonally appropriate rejoicing.

So yesterday afternoon I orchestrated the community to bring their chanukiyot and light them all together, about a dozen families I think, that's a lot of candles, especially on eighth night. And we sang Maoz Tzur to something approximating to the correct tune, and I had the kids play human dreidel for chocolate coins and then for pennies when we ran out of those, and we ate soooooooo many doughnuts and quite a lot of latkes and other sorts of fritters. (Boyfriend thinks that a religious custom of eating lots of doughnuts is a great idea, and I concur.) I told the story by getting the kids to act things out, the teenagers were too cool and the baby was too little but the three to seven age-group were pretty enthusiastic, and Judith was really good in the role of her near-namesake Judah, she's been paying attention through the week and gave all the right answers to my prompts.

The truth is that chanukah has not only acquired borrowed importance by proximity to Christmas, it's acquired warm fuzziness too. Chanukah is really not at all the season of goodwill, it's the season of, living as a minority in a dominant culture sucks, please send Divine support for our nationalist cause. We invite our non-Jewish friends to join us for doughnuts and candlelighting, and sometimes dignitaries at various levels do little chanukah ceremonies to show friendliness to the Jewish community, and it's all very cute. But the content and the history of the festival is mostly about how multi-culturalism is a bad idea, and it has probably the most explicitly anti-Christian content of anything in our calendar. Still, pretty much all of rabbinic Judaism is about reinterpreting traditions for the context we find ourselves in, and I think multi-cultural celebrations are pretty appropriate in terms of increasing light and joy.

Comments

[lethargic_man]

Chanukah is really not at all the season of goodwill

Well, Judaism and Christianity agree that the run-up to New Year is the season of goodwill to all men (and women); they just disagree about when that new year is.

and it has probably the most explicitly anti-Christian content of anything in our calendar.

? Are you referring to your "the part about how a human being can't possibly be God" above? This is not something which I've ever associated with Chanukah before.

[liv]

Well, I'm mainly slightly embarrassed by the notorious last verse of Maoz Tzur, and even though that doesn't get sung very much, even the first verse is not exactly interfaith-suitable. But it's mainly the whole context. It's all about not assimilating, and the main culture that we're being adjoined not to assimilate to is Christian culture. When people tell the story with the slant that it's about the freedom to be Jewish monotheists when the ruling power are forcing you at swordspoint to worship statues of their emperor, that has very strong resonances with living in (particularly pre-Reformation) Christian Europe. And yes, I know the real historical Hasmoneans were kind of into forced conversion themselves, but it's still. It feels like the arc of chanukah is a bit, God redeemed us from oppressors all these other times in history, we'd quite like to be free of the Christians now, please. It's possible tisha b'av is worse, but nobody thinks 9 Av is a nice warm fuzzy festival of inviting our friends to light pretty candles and eat tasty food in the first place.

Also my Christians don't think that January 1^st is the new year, they begin the year at the start of Advent, and it's the season of goodwill because they're happy about Jesus' birth, not because it's the new year. But I think the general concept is right, it's part of the problem where chanukah is falsely equated to Christmas just because it happens to be roughly at the same time of year.

[lethargic_man]

I'm mainly slightly embarrassed by the notorious last verse of Maoz Tzur,

As you probably know, there's a debate as to whether that verse is original. It's not even printed in many siddurim, including the Singer's Prayer Book.

even the first verse is not exactly interfaith-suitable.

I am very strongly in favour of using Hertz's modified wording for the first verse (לעת תשבית מטבח וצר המנבח). There's none of the arguments against modifying the wording here that there are for the fixed liturgy and, living in a time when the general population seems to be turning against religion in general, it behooves us IMO not to go around singing things that would fuel the antireligionists' cause if they knew about it.

Hertz's wording was used in the later impressions of the first edition Singer's Prayer Book; I don't know why they reverted to the traditional wording for the second edition.

It's all about not assimilating, and the main culture that we're being adjoined not to assimilate to is Christian culture.

Except that the story antedates Christianity.

When people tell the story with the slant that it's about the freedom to be Jewish monotheists when the ruling power are forcing you at swordspoint to worship statues of their emperor, that has very strong resonances with living in (particularly pre-Reformation) Christian Europe.

Maybe it might have for people at the time; that doesn't mean it has to for us now. Some of the minor Jewish festivals (Tu Bishvat is the other one I'm thinking of) have been reinterpreted again and again and again; we don't have to consider ourselves beholden to an interpretation for a former generation. I went off Chanukah a bit for some years because of you and other people fretting about how it's glorifying religious fundamentalists, but decided in the end that I like Chanukah because we take what had been the glorification of the cause of religious fundamentalism and subvert their message completely to recast it as a celebration of religious tolerance.

[liv]

Oh, I completely agree with all of this, that is in fact why I do invite my non-Jewish friends, including the actual Christian ones, to join me in celebrating chanukah. And I do like R' Hertz' revision to the song, definitely. And absolutely, subverting or reclaiming problematic festivals is basically the entire point, and that's what I was trying to say in my post.

I am not unaware that the story as such predates Christianity, but the festival as we celebrate it has accreted several centuries of history when most Jews were living in Christian environments.

[hilarita]

Yes - the Book of Maccabees turns up in Catholic Apocrypha*. It is a fine example of torture porn (there is some extremely lovingly detailed description of the torture of the Jews by the Romans), and one of the most disturbing things I read during my degree.

Early lives of the Christian Martyrs are strongly influenced by this over-excitement by torture. (From the period where the Romans were exercising equal opportunity oppression on both Jews and Christians, before the Christians became the oppressors. )

(This is more in the nature of a footnote as to how some bits of Christian tradition interacted with the Maccabees. Sadly, not in a way that stopped Christians slaughtering and torturing people.)


*Think of the apocrypha like the songs rejected by artists that get released after their death - not *exactly* part of the canon, but still worth a look.

[liv]

AIUI Maccabees is actually in the Bible for Catholics, it's the Apocrypha for Protestants and has a kind of weird status we don't really have a name for for us. That's a really interesting connection between the explicit torture descriptions in the book and the ones that end up lives of Christian martyrs, though, thank you.

[hilarita]

So that's not quite true. The Apocrypha turn up in copies of the Catholic Bible and are labelled as such (so there's an Old Testament Section, the Apocrypha section, and the New Testament section, each containing books), but they don't make it into e.g. the roster of readings at Masses and in other services. It's clear they're the B team of Bible Books. The Apocrypha usually don't appear at all in Protestant Bibles (unless it's the very high church Anglo-Catholic bits of Protestantism).

There's also even more apocryphal Apocrypha - things like the Gospel of Peter and so on (see New Testament Apocrypha trans. by MR James). One of these apocryphal bits contains the totally awesome story of the child Jesus, which I will summarise in a not totally authentic style here, just because it's great.

Small child Jesus is playing with some children beside the river. Jesus gets angry with the other kids and kills them for disrespecting God. Mary comes along and says, 'Now Jesus, that wasn't very nice, was it?' Jesus is very sorry and resurrects them all.

This nearly made me laugh out loud in the Bodleian.

[ex_inklessej388]

Close. Was it not the 1534 Luther Bible that first included the apocryphal books as a seperate section within the Bible? I am also pretty sure that most protestants use apocryphal books as part of their lectionaries (differing from the Catholics). However, they do not use this as scripture for the basis of doctrine formation (which is contrasting to Catholics who have used aprocryphal books to justify doctrine).

[cjwatson]

The more specific term for this set of books is "deuterocanonical", as opposed to the (proto)canonical set that are also in the Tanakh, and as opposed to the "real" apocrypha which have more doubtful status than either (and thanks for that lovely example!).

Some of the deuterocanonical books are in fact used in the Catholic liturgy; Wisdom shows up quite often, for instance, Tobit is used here and there, and Baruch is even in the beautiful set of readings for the Easter Vigil, which is about as prominent as it gets. I don't think the books of the Maccabees are used very often if at all, though.

Also, while I'm here, liv has been very considerately referring to me only as "boyfriend" since I hadn't yet got round to saying anything publicly, but I have been meaning to out myself so that she can use names if she wants to, so here we are. :-)

[liv]

What a totally appropriate moment for you to introduce yourself, in the middle of a discussion about what is in the Biblical canon :-)

[hilarita]

Serves me right for not being bothered to go and check which ones were in the deuterocanonical set ;)

[wychwood]

You're right that Maccabees is very rare in the liturgy, but I definitely remember being at a week-day service where we had the super-depressing reading about the mother and her seven sons being martyred (2 Macc 7, apparently). So they aren't entirely excluded.

[adrian_turtle]

I don't see how it matters very much that the story antedates Christianity. Pretty much all the rules against adopting the religion of our non-Jewish neighbors are from before Christianity. (Or from before Christians being numerous and powerful.) Yet Jews chose to die rather than convert to Christianity.

I really love the analogy of the 4 children, but if I'm talking about anything beyond the miracle of the oil (like, why did they need a miracle?) I say "some of the Jews had assimilated with their non Jewish neighbors, which was against Jewish law" before going to the specific bit about the sacrifice.

[liv]

Yes, precisely, modern Judaism essentially comes from the crucible of Christian Europe, even the Talmud and Bible commentaries we take as authoritative come from the Bomberg editions, prepared by a Christian and selecting commentaries by scholars who lived in a thoroughly Christian context. It's impossible to even read the original rules against foreign religions from either Tanach or Talmud without that filter we've been using for five hundred years. And obviously those commentaries and interpretations were based on looking for parallels between the texts and what they were experiencing during the Crusades, the Inquisition etc.

I'm glad you liked my four sons riff, I had fun structuring the post around that :-) I'm impressed with your courage in mentioning the conflict between separatists and assimilated Jews; I'm not exactly hiding that, but I'll be more inclined to talk about it with older children.

[seekingferret]

We were talking about יְוָנִים נִקְבְּצוּ עָלַי last night because my aunt and her brother are of Greek Jewish extraction from the Salonika community. And they consider themselves 'Greek' even though they were effectively forced out of the country by anti-semitism, but that identification is complicated for those reasons. And of course the Y'vanim of the verse were not precisely Greek either ethnically or geographically, so it highlighted the confusion of identity even further, of what we mean in the Chanuka story when we talk about the Greeks.

[liv]

Ouch, I can see that's pretty complicated for your relatives. Jews versus Greeks is not necessarily the best summary of the parties involved in the story. Some Reform books have "the kingdom of the wicked Antiochos" rather than "the kingdom of the wicked Greeks" in Al haNisim, but that doesn't fix Maoz Tzur. I had a good discussion with my partners' oldest (teenaged) son about whether it's fair to describe the Seleucids as "Greek", so I was quite pleased he knew about that bit of history.

For similar reasons I get very twitchy when people say "Germans" when they really mean "Nazis", especially since I grew up in a community with a lot of German members, and yes, they do still think of themselves as German, and I can't even imagine how complicated that is as identity goes.

[forestofglory]

I was telling my non Jewish niece the story last night and of course I gave the simple version. But I'd like to learn more about the historical complexity any recommended reading?

[liv]

lethargic_man has some pretty good notes, as a starting place :-)

[sfred]

Thank you for writing about this.

[liv]

:-) I like it when people ask me interesting questions!

[silveradept]

I knew intellectually that Judaism is a religion with a strong relationship to stories, but reading your entries seems to have made it clearer and slightly more terrifying, given the content of the stories.

[liv]

It's certainly true that Judaism is very very connected to stories and storytelling. It's also the case that I'm exceptionally much into stories, even compared to most Jewish people. I sometimes describe myself as a magid, which I translate as 'itinerant preacher' but literally it means 'storyteller'. (The reason I need a title at all is because people think that if I lead services and provide education I must be a rabbi, and it's more effective to give an alternative name for what I do than to just keep on insisting, no I'm not.)

[silveradept]

Being an itinerant storyteller offers more opportunities for wisdom, anyway. Usually accompanied by some "strange" behavior that turns out to be exactly right.