A Chanukah Message for the '90s
Miller, Avis
A Chanukah. Message, for the '90s We American Jews were replaying the struggle of the Maccabees as we tried to keep our Jewish identity in Christian America. AVIS MILLER When American Jews of the...
...They needed oil to rededi-cate the Temple but found only enough for one day...
...For the truth of the matter is that if the goal of the Maccabees' struggle was to stop all assimilation to Greek ways, then they failed...
...Finally, there are those in the middle, rejecting the easy, clear-cut answers of total assimilation or fortress Judaism, those committed to discovering what is worth appropriating from American life...
...The Jews, led by the valiant Maccabees, rose up, conquered the guys with the black hats and cleaned the Temple from the desecrations that had occurred there...
...As for the story of the Maccabees, there were the good guys and the bad guys...
...After all, we were Jewish...
...Our friends who were Christians celebrated Christmas and we celebrated Chanukah...
...We Jews have constantly been enriched by creative encounters with the peoples among whom we have lived...
...But the real villains of the story of Chanukah were those Jews who were his flunkies, who bought into his policy of hel-lenization...
...The guys in the white hats were Jews, but so were many of the guys in the black hats...
...A lovely story, told to us by well-meaning adults who had never read the story of Chanukah, which is found in a collection of post-biblical literature known as the Apocrypha...
...Perhaps the "new take" on Chanukah recognizes that there were really three Jewish groups in that ancient struggle in Judea, just as American Jews may be divided into three groups...
...The Apocrypha contains material excluded from the Hebrew Bible but valuable to the understanding of Jewish life and thought in the period between the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the last centuries before the birth of Jesus...
...There were the assimilationists who wanted to be more Greek than the Greeks themselves...
...Miraculously, the oil lasted eight days until a new source of pure oil arrived...
...If they put a five-pointed star at the top, then we'd put a six-pointed one up...
...They were in control of our Jewish land, and unsuccessfully tried, on point of death, to force us to accept their religion...
...As the Chanukah story has changed, so has the message...
...The Chanukah story may be Apocryphal, but the first time I actually read the First and Second Maccabees it was a revelation...
...We had finally made it into the big-three conference...
...Then there were those zealots who took an uncompromising stand against assimilation, insisting that Jews have nothing whatever to do with the surrounding culture...
...they were lost to the Jewish people, as we are losing substantial numbers of our people to assimilation...
...Their contemporary counterparts are the ultra-Orthodox who barricade themselves against alj nonjew-ish influences...
...Some of them wanted it enough to have their circumcisions reversed...
...Antiochus, the hellenistic heir to the part of the empire of Alexander the Great that included Judea, did indeed try to impose religious'unity on his kingdom in order to make it easier to rule...
...Just as the earlier model of us/them faded, so has the either/or model of assimilation become outdated...
...The Six-Day War had nurtured Jewish pride in our Jewish identity in America...
...The guys with the black hats were the Syrians or Greeks...
...Whither the meaning of Chanukah for the nineties...
...I was astounded...
...Ironically, the Jewish people benefitted from that failure in many ways...
...These were Jews who wanted to play in the gymnasium with the Greek aristocracy of Judea...
...It was no accident that this meaning of Chanukah dawned on us in the seventies, just as the "roots" phenomenon came into vogue...
...They hunted down the arrogant men, and the work prospered in their hands...
...the survivors fled to the gentiles for safety...they forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys that they found within the borders of Israel...
...It was also the era of the Chanukah bush...
...Instead of the gymnasium, we had the lure of the health club" and Saturday soccer enticing us away from the synagogue...
...It was a time when Jewish parents (my fairly observant parents among them) tried to bribe us into believing that being Jewish was better because we got presents on eight days and they got them only in one big dose...
...The Jews, the Maccabee family, were the good guys with the white hats...
...According to First Maccabees: "They organized an army, and struck down sinners in their anger, and lawless men in their wrath...
...AVIS MILLER When American Jews of the baby boom were growing up in the fifties, we were comfortable with our Jewishness in a way that our parents were not...
...We were just different flavors of religious America—Catholic, Protestant and Jew...
...Our Passover seder was influenced by the Greek symposium and the very principles of rabbinic reasoning are based on Greek hermeneutics...
...The whole scenario had changed...
...The most extreme defenders of the Jewish faith were not gentle with their assimilated compatriots...
...Ethnic pride was in...
...The theme of Chanukah was one with which all Americans could easily identify—a popular revolution based on the struggle for religious freedom...
...I was reminded of the famous line from the Pogo cartoon: We have met the enemy and he is us...
...If Christian friends celebrated their winter festival with a decorated tree, we could do the same...
Vol. 17 • December 1992 • No. 6
