Dark of the Sun, Dark of the Moon
WASKOW, ARTHUR
DARK OF THE SUN, DARK OF THE MOON: A SEASON OF OUR JOY ARTHUR WASHOW Eight-thirty on a Tuesday night in late December, 1970. The streets are dark and gloomy. There is no moon. Glancing south on...
...So we had our new Maccabees —more effective generals than most generals, more effective fund raisers than most fund raisers, more effective Americans than most Americans...
...Grew up beyond the old collision between the Rabbi and the Maccabee...
...Another hubbub of agreement, and somebody began to sing: "Mi yimalel g'vurol Yisrael...
...He frowned and shrugged...
...They had built Jewish Might and Jewish Power—and then they made deals with Roman Might and Roman Power, deals that turned out disastrously...
...It's as if the Rabbis picked it up, decided they didn't need it or couldn't use it, but tucked it carefully away in the secret treasury for the day when we would need it...
...ah, then it will be different...
...Why did the rabbis not declare that the Books of the Maccabees were part of the Biblical canon...
...But the process of discovery was slow...
...Perhaps it also represents a way of stepping beyond the old debate between the Land of Israel (represented by the Maccabees) and the far-flung Diaspora (represented by the Rabbis...
...L'cha Adoshem azamaira...
...You're under arrest...
...If we were trying to strengthen that feeling in ourselves, would we do Chanukah in any other way...
...So why did the Greeks pick that day...
...And so on, up to eight...
...All of us feel the solstice question, the darkness question, at the marrow of our bones...
...Everybody bases Chanukah on history...
...Year after year, Chanukah changed as we got deeper and deeper into wrestling with the religious tradition...
...Somehow my despair helps power my recovery...
...Almost all of them were secularists and atheists...
...Cold, dark, lonely without the moon...
...You must feel desperate—having turned history around only to find physical nature itself unchangeable...
...Experiencing the growth of light...
...The police had threatened to arrest anyone who demonstrated closer than 500 feet from the Soviet Embassy...
...In fact, I can almost get myself to feel that if it weren't for the dark, the cycle couldn't continue...
...The Second Book of Maccabees says that Chanukah was a way of celebrating Sukkot late—since they didn't have the Temple at Sukkah-time that year, they couldn't do it right...
...As the law commands, he ordered back to their homes those who were building their houses or were newly wed or who were planting vineyards, or who were faint-hearted...
...but that when Messiah comes, the path will be according to Shammai...
...So it's the really darkest moment of the year...
...Hillel's answer is a kind of put-on...
...So that, they said, was the reason for eight days...
...It provides a way to pull together the experience of freedom won by struggle and freedom won by study...
...Hillel said we should begin with one and add one each night till we have lit all eight, because "we promote in holiness but we do not reduce...
...Seven years later, the month before Chanukah, a cluster of Fab-rangeners begin to talk about it: "It's the time of dark...
...At that last Chanukah, Fabrangen (a Yiddish word that means "coming together") was on the edge of birth...
...for the sense of growing light is what makes Chanukah our festival of hope...
...The king who wants all his peoples to assimilate—not only the Russians but us too...
...Or rather— it means that I accept despair as part of the cycle...
...But my mind's eye can see the way ahead, because I know the dark is going to end...
...Experiencing each time the difference of dark and different kinds of light...
...And how do they answer...
...But we don't have to...
...The song grew louder...
...Why did the religious tradition give us a Haftorah to recite on Shabbos Chanukah that comes to its climax: "Not by might and not by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts...
...A buzz of agreement...
...Half a dozen murmurs and nods went around the circle...
...This time there were eight candles to light, and we had brought menorahs...
...Trees blurred, rocks wavered, everything became unclear...
...Then all the Gentiles will know that there is One who saves and liberates Israel...
...It was they who had organized the massive relief efforts for the survivors of the Holocaust...
...Judah then appointed leaders of the people, officers over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens...
...That is the whole Torah, all else is midrashic explanation...
...A long pause...
...Is that good teaching for us...
...It was the Zealots who finally could win only the deadly victory of mass suicide on Massada—while the rabbis were determinedly teaching Torah and accepting martyrdom only when they had passed on their learning and were being stopped from teaching any more...
...Maybe there's a connection underneath—they knew Sukkot had been a time for sun-worship that they turned around, so they could do the same for Chanukah...
...The "Green Mountain Boys" of old Judea...
...For me it means hope when I'm feeling worst...
...The reading began again...
...The kind of Jew Americans could be proud of...
...We could do it eight different ways, with eight different overtones...
...Not the world of sharpness and clarity that we saw this morning, but this world of fuzziness, uncertainty...
...Your own despair and darkness can help open it...
...So if we do something with it, we make it Jewish...
...The notion of reducing light seems pessimistic and austere...
...Shammai said we should begin on the first night by lighting eight candles, then reduce the number night by night until we are left with one...
...In late 1970 the one group was flowing into the other...
...as if they were vaguely puzzled...
...Heaven forbid we should ever abandon the law and its statutes...
...There is a debate in the Talmud's passages that raises one more puzzling tracery of^dark and light...
...Gradually we loosened up...
...Who can retell the things that befell us, who can count them...
...When they won, they made themselves kings as well as priests—fusing two kinds of power that the ancient constitution of Israel had kept separate, in check and balance...
...But if we look again...
...Cup the candles close to us...
...danced their way off around the corner...
...We have them today chiefly because the Christian Church declared them part of its "Old Testament...
...And blew it out...
...Go and study" means, "Invest the rest of your life in wrestling with Torah...
...A holiday of our own to demand the junior high school give a play about...
...That instead of striving to dispel the darkness, we should enter it...
...Go and study...
...One of us—a young guitarist named David Shneyer—had recently begun to write and sing some new melodies to old Hebrew songs and verses...
...Them—all the vaguely WASPish professors, businessmen, and statesmen who would grade us, hire us, rule us...
...The prestige of the rabbis had begun to evaporate as the modern world unfolded...
...In ordinary history we must struggle and wrestle, go and learn...
...Two of the great rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, leaders of opposing schools, disagreed about Chanukah as they did about many matters of Jewish practice...
...It's not as if it's evil for us to focus on the dark-light side of Chanukah...
...Matches flashed, hands cupped around them, candles began to flare up and catch hold, to burn steadily...
...Who is Shammai, and what might he be teaching us...
...And anyway, what would it mean to say this aspect 'isn't Jewish...
...I look outside, it's so dark that I can't see my way ahead...
...Still, that doesn't explain why they wouldn't point it out...
...Shammai strikes him across the head with a ruler...
...Really dark...
...There are a few small religious movements that have had solstice festivals, and maybe some of us have felt good about that—but they were spiritually decent people...
...And to remind ourselves— and them—of what the candles mean, we will read the story of the Maccabees...
...The rabbis decided for Hillel, as they almost always did...
...Isn't that exactly what we've always done...
...Somebody in the circle called out, "Let's dance our way across the street and leave our candles on the fence in front of the Embassy...
...The Fabrangen house opened a month later, to the joyful tunes of David Shneyer and Shlomo Carlebach and the Chassidic dancing of one of those young lawyers who had been so unexpectedly arrested—Rob Agus...
...Some could be for the Maccabees, some for the miracle of the oil and 'By My spirit, says the Lord' as well as some for dark and light...
...Well, I want to show you more light than you dream possible...
...Perhaps, like a Zen Rabbi, he tried to answer with the answer that lies beyond reason and study...
...Maybe they were afraid to...
...Instead he looked around at the listening faces, said: "I guess this is obvious, but it's overwhelming me...
...So they might easily confuse one practice with its context...
...Shivering—not only the political atmosphere but the physical atmosphere was notably colder—we gathered in our circle...
...Nobody says a word about the dark, about the solstice, about the moon, about the sun...
...So for thousands of years, Jewish experience seemed to be teaching that the rabbis were right, and the Maccabees partly wrong...
...The rabbis were down the drain...
...For it was the Zealots who burned the food stored inside the Temple walls to force the Jews to sally out against Vespasian's Legions—and lost...
...Really looked, at the flame...
...We said the blessings...
...The Fabrangen generation grew up after that shift in Jewish history...
...Let us cry now to Heaven to favor our cause, to remember the covenant made with our fathers, and to crush this army before us today...
...A national liberation movement...
...Even if it makes the battle harder...
...It was they who had backed up Israel, won it support, helped it survive and entrench itself...
...For most of us, Chanukah had been the "counter-Christmas...
...It was lined with police...
...The solstice belongs to both...
...The rabbis, as the Talmudic process went forward, had deeper and deeper doubts about that family of guerrillas and generals...
...That was the last Chanukah together of a group called "Jews for Urban Justice," and the first Chanukah together of Fabrangen...
...One Shabbos evening at a farm we were trying to make into a kibbutz, a few of us went wandering after our Friday evening service, trying to find the highest hill from which to watch and contemplate the land...
...Where the Maccabee depends on human political courage and the Rabbi on God's Spirit, adding the solstice to the experience of Chanukah puts the inner life of the Jew in tune with the outer life of the universe...
...The eighth night was not so simple...
...Was it so obvious to the rabbis that they didn't bother...
...It was they who had benefited most from the massive upward social mobility of millions of American Jews in the prosperous generation after World War II...
...Turning to look just across the street, we watched two policemen walk back and forth in front of the gray stone building...
...If we're into the solstice, we should be outside...
...To this Mattathias replied in a ringing voice: 'Though all the nations within the king's dominions obey him and forsake their ancestral worship, though they have chosen to submit to his commands, yet I and my sons and brothers will follow the covenant of our fathers...
...We have eight nights...
...As if God were saying— 'You've done all this work to win the Temple back, only to find'yourselves stymied after all—because there's not enough oil to keep the light burning...
...But let's come back to us...
...Maybe they were surrounded by idolators and tyrants who celebrated the solstice and also desecrated the Temple, executed people for following Torah, and so on...
...If that side wasn't relevant to Jews 2,000 years ago— maybe because they were farmers— then if it becomes important to us, we should be grateful that the resource is there in our tradition, ready for us to hear it and draw on it...
...We ought to sing a Chanukah song, we really ought to dance the way the Russian Jews do...
...Not just the sun...
...It is as if there were two models of the Jew at stake here: the Maccabee and the Rabbi...
...Look—they rededicated the Temple on the 25th of Kislev because the Greeks had desecrated it on that day three years before...
...The dark/light motif is important to us—why...
...If it was they who helped us realize there was something more in Chanukah, I'm not ashamed...
...We learn this story as a way of celebrating Hillel's openness...
...Them—John Glubb Pasha and his Arab Legion...
...Heads nodded, voices gathered into the slow and stately chant: "She'asah nisim iavoteinu . . . bayamim hahem bazman hazeh...
...Grew up, you might almost say, in a different world, a different history, from the one where Rabbi versus Maccabee was the crucial issue...
...As its members deepened their understanding of Jewish tradition and values, the group began to see its social concerns as rooted in Jewish religious tradition and began to redefine itself as a community centered around the religious tradition...
...In every age a hero or sage came to our aid...
...A voice began to read: "The King then issued a decree throughout his empire: his subjects were all to become one people and abandon their own laws and religion...
...We looked around at each other, began to laugh: all four of the lawyers who were supposed to protect us had been swept up in the arresting net...
...Perhaps it was only after the debate between the Rabbi and the Maccabee was over that we could focus on the solstice part of Chanukah...
...From the Mystery...
...Somebody lifted up a menorah...
...The Maccabees, whatever they became, started out as tiny seeds of light against the overwhelming night of defeat, tyranny, idolatry...
...Whether it's 'factually' true or not, it's 'truthfully' true...
...If so, he failed...
...How could the tradition have forgotten it...
...Do we want to set aside the darkness aspect of Chanukah because it isn't Jewish...
...And Passover is in 'the month of Spring.' They didn't think that's so obvious it doesn't need to be mentioned...
...For me there's another piece of it...
...Perhaps Shammai is teaching us that the real enlightenment of Chanukah comes not from light, but from the darkness...
...All week there had been Jewish vigils at the Embassy...
...So if you look at the Maccabees and the miracle that way, the solstice fits right in...
...We had finally agreed to insist on gathering and lighting our candles, but to disperse if we were ordered to...
...One shaky laugh: "We could try...
...Judah said to his men: 'Do not be afraid of their great numbers or panic when they charge...
...To be honored, but only in the context of remembering that the real miracle was what God did at the Temple's eternal light, not what Judah had done on the battlefield...
...It was the Zealots who refused to negotiate with Rome after Bar Kochba's first successes—and lost when Rome reinforced its armies...
...Maybe it was too clear that the pagans cared about the solstice...
...But a heavy mist crept up from the river, and we found ourselves lost and wandering...
...The non-Jew goes to Shammai with a question: "Can you teach me the whole Torah while I am standing on one foot...
...Not in Maccabees, not in the Talmud...
...Them—the British Empire when it jailed our new brave Maccabees in Palestine...
...Then Judah, his brothers, and the whole congregation of Israel decreed that the rededication of the altar should be observed with joy and gladness at the same season each year, for eight days, beginning on the twenty-fifth of Kislev...
...For them—for us—the old debates between Zionism and Diasporan-ism have little meaning...
...She closed the book, looked around at the circle, and said: "How shall we end this...
...Somebody called out, "Let's gather in a circle...
...There was, indeed, an old hostility between them...
...And dancing in a whirling spiral, the crowd crossed the street, paused before the astonished policemen to impale their candles on the spikes of the fence, and just as the police were saying, "You can't do that...
...And then, why did the rabbis answer by telling not the story of the guerrilla battles, but a strange tale not mentioned by the Maccabees— a tale in which the miracle of eight days' light flowed from one day's supply of oil...
...It was they who had won more and more political clout for Jewish organizations in America...
...He looked at the police milling around, shrugged, began to teach us a song that came from Psalm 101: "Of love and justice I will sing...
...We stopped and waited...
...A holiday of our own with candles to put in the window...
...Remember that passage in the Mishnah about Sukkot, 'Our fathers stood here and faced east to worship the sun, but we do the same celebration except we worship God.' " "That's interesting...
...The prestige of Jewish guerrillas and Jewish generals rose as they created a Jewish state...
...But more: even under extreme pressure, even when they're defending the homeland and the Temple, they obey Torah...
...The solstice doesn't matter agriculturally," said somebody else...
...That conversation represents not the abandonment of Chanukah as a celebration of freedom, but a deepening among Fabrangeners of a sense of where that freedom comes from...
...They celebrated the rededica-tion of the altar for eight days...
...The moon is gone...
...The winter solstice...
...On the anniversary of the day when the Gentiles had profaned it, on that very day, it was rededicated, with hymns of thanksgiving, to the music of harps and lutes and cymbals...
...The wagons drove away...
...If we add the solstice to our sense of Chanukah, no reason we have to give away the rest of it...
...In accordance with the royal decree, they put to death women who had had their children circumcised...
...The guerrilla fighters who go into the hills...
...Perhaps Shammai, in his austere way, tried to enlighten his questioner in one bold stroke...
...Them—the husky football players who called us sissies for getting A's in history...
...A holiday to stir us to vague romantic thoughts of beating "Them...
...Sure a new kind of Chanukah...
...To begin with, almost all of us had grown up with a Chanukah that echoed the meaning of the Maccabees...
...Remember how our fathers were saved at the Red Sea, when Pharaoh and his army were pursuing them...
...Year after year, what we learned made Chanukah more puzzling...
...Slowly, gradually, one candle at a time—but enter it...
...But in our century, bold political prowess had come back into its own...
...And looked...
...Still...
...Like . . . like . . . Suppose on the first night we sat in a circle with the menorah in the middle...
...They wanted to be free to be more Jewish in their lives...
...And looked not at their flames but at the shadows that they cast...
...Perhaps a Chanukah in which the solstice is visible can only be experienced by a generation of Jews who have one foot in the Land of Israel and the other in Diaspora—and feel both feet necessary to their firm footing in the world...
...At every paragraph the book was handed to the next person in the circle, and there was a pause while he or she searched out the right place...
...Tonight there is a physical danger to Jews, but not to us...
...Quickly twelve men and one woman were surrounded, told to line up...
...Went dark again...
...There had been a long internal discussion: was it worth being arrested...
...By the end of Chanukah, we see it barely glimmering again...
...And then lit two candles...
...We will not obey the command of the king, nor will we deviate one step from our forms of worship...
...Instead of giving up he goes to Hillel, who says to him (quoting one verse of Torah): "Love your neighbor as yourself...
...He shook his head, passed the book on...
...Glancing south on Sixteenth Street, we could see the White House glimmering in its floodlights...
...So this is a different aspect of the nature cycle...
...Jewish fighters had come back into their own...
...I don't even know what that would mean, 'setting it aside.' Not feeling it any more...
...Veterans of the anti-war movement had agreed to join the candle-lighting, a well-known writer named Karl Hess was coming'—the man who had on Barry Goldwater's behalf written the line "Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice" and had since declared himself an anarchist, a localist, a proponent of neighborhood-level technology, an opponent of war and militarism whether American or Soviet...
...A long silence...
...In the famous story of Hillel teaching Torah to a non-Jew, there is a half-forgotten passage on Shammai...
...All the people prostrated themselves, worshipping and praising Heaven that their cause had prospered...
...You may be right, in fact I think you are right, but there's not a breath of this in the tradition...
...We've marched together against the war and against racism, maybe we should do this together too...
...Who did miracles for our forebears in these days, at this season...
...I'm glad you said that...
...Feel like the early cave folks, fire is precious, especially in winter...
...What's religion for if not to help us draw on our deep feelings, tune in with the rhythms of the world and turn all that to help us help each other...
...The time we fear the death of the sun, and we light the candles to bring back the light...
...After the fifth reading somebody took the book, but didn't read from it...
...The reader laughed: "I guess that brings us more or less up to date...
...Wait a minute...
...That Jewish world in which the Talmud was the portable Constitution, the portable culture, a portable economy— almost a portable countryside—that world had come unraveled...
...Only after several paragraphs about the candles do the rabbis say, "What is this Chanukah...
...Right...
...To put it all together, why did the rabbis feel so uncomfortable about the one element of Chanukah that to us has been most comforting—precisely the element of beating Them at Their own game...
...Usually we would do this in our homes, but the Talmud tells us to do it in the window— where the world can see—unless the physical danger to Jews would be too great...
...They will not tolerate idolatry, but they welcome conscience that cares about life...
...Since you didn't leave it all to Me—since you took the trouble to make and find one flask of oil for yourselves—I'll show you that the world can open up...
...And what of Chanukah...
...Wait a minute...
...We look puzzled at each other...
...Sukkot is the harvest time and Shavuot the time of first fruits, when the barley has been harvested," he says...
...On the twenty-fifth day of the month, Kislev, they offered sacrifice on the pagan altar which was on top of the altar of the Lord...
...What if we really focused on the candles, built up the intensity of lighting lights against the dark...
...And finally we began to wonder: what if this is the real world...
...when Messiah comes...
...Then we will be able to hear the answer that comes from an utterly unified body-with-soul, in which every act, every movement, is Torah...
...Here, this street, is our window to the world...
...Not rabbis chanting Torah, not this mysterious baby-child in Bethlehem, but really American heroes: guerrillas defeating an empire...
...It feels like obvious truth to us...
...They just left out this important fact about why the history happened then...
...Chanukah is close to the solstice, but always it's the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the end of the lunar month...
...Of course we don't have to choose...
...Copyright © 1979 by the author...
...We arranged to have four lawyers present...
...Perhaps it represents an integration of the Maccabee and the Rabbi...
...A holiday of our own with gifts—eight nights of gifts...
...When the day is shortest and the night is darkest...
...I think they're all linked anyway...
...The miracle of oil was God's intervention against impossibility—making light where the very natural order itself dictated there could be only darkness...
...No moon, just stars, pretty cold...
...Even closer to the bone, as kings they had used their power for the Sadducees, the priestly political party, and against the Pharisees, those forerunners of the rabbis...
...If we could really take those intervals of darkness into ourselves,/^/ those times of despair . . . Chanukah for grown-ups, or for growing up...
...Try the oil...
...To You, Adoshem, Til sing praises . . . L'David mizmor . . . Chesed u-mishpat ashira...
...Nobody...
...They recognize the same kinds of conscientious objection against being a soldier that we have been defending...
...One of them pitched his voice a little higher: "The mitzvah, the commandment, is for each of us to light one candle tonight...
...But the Rabbis never wrote off a minority position...
...Suddenly the captain said: "Where are you going...
...This speaks so much to us...
...So when we began, Chanukah for us was a story of beating Them at Their own game...
...Grew up of it, from it—and beyond it...
...Grew up much more self-confident as Jews than their forebears, and hungering for some flavor of Judaism they had never quite tasted...
...Not celebrating it...
...The police herded us into paddy-wagons...
...And we are grateful...
...Not recognizing the feelings that we have...
...Then, early on the twenty-fifth day of the ninth month, the month of Kislev, in the year 148, a sacrifice was offered as the law commands on the newly made altar of burnt-offering...
...Somebody else called out, "Maybe we should come here a week from tonight, on the last night of Chanukah—and bring some non-Jews too, there are plenty of other people who love freedom...
...Arthur Waskow is the author of Godwrestling (Schocken Books) and the editor o/Menorah, a monthly newsletter of Jewish renewal...
...And then we lit one candle...
...And when new "maccabees" arose against Rome, Zealots who imitated the Maccabean struggle against Antiochus by struggling to expel Rome from Judea, that ended in disaster too...
...Good midrash...
...When we were feeling most uncomfortably squashed by the overwhelming use of Christmas symbols, songs, and stories by the American mass media, there came Chanukah to give us a rallying point...
...This article is part of his work-in-progress on the round of the Jewish year, Seasons of our Joy...
...And after the Holocaust, the prestige of Torah and Talmud declined even more...
...In the dark...
...And maybe neither the Maccabees nor the rabbis wanted to honor that custom.—So they described Chanukah in wholly historical terms...
...A woman's voice from the circle: "Let's say the blessings together and then light the candles while we're reading...
...Perhaps this was Shammai's teaching: that ultimately, at the deepest root, the Dark is light enough...
...We may start while we are standing on one foot, but we cannot finish there...
...At first we tried hard to pin it all down, get it all straight, know where we are...
...We picked up the Book of Maccabees to read again, and a police captain interrupted: "In accordance with the law, I order this assembly to disperse...
...People began to walk— slowly, reluctantly, beginning to sing...
...Rav Huna said, we may not use on Chanukah—even on the days that are not Shabbos—the kinds of wicks and oils we may not use on Shabbos...
...To be remembered, but cautiously...
...Over the years, the Fabrangen began to discover a Chanukah that ran deeper than the pages of the Maccabees...
...Indeed, the story begins there...
...We held our hands across our eyes, even...
...If Chanukah were just the winter solstice, then the sun would be dark but the moon would often be bright...
...Here we will light our candles...
...Again we chanted the blessings, lit the candles...
...And the plunge into darkness in between...
...And a memory of heroes, a different kind of Jew...
...Wax dripped from the candles onto the pages...
...And in America, prestige in the Jewish community shifted from the rabbis to the organizers and fund raisers...
...they won not by God's Spirit but by Might and Power...
...Nobody bases it on nature...
...The Soviet authorities have passed sentence of death on some of us who wanted to leave the Soviet Union so badly that they tried to steal an airplane to do it...
...They used to say that the Jewish life-path should be walked according to Hillel, in ordinary history...
...Right...
...Maybe there was a general Mediterranean custom of having a festival then to recognize and turn around the dark-time...
...Why did the Talmud back into its tale of Chanukah—not with a special section like the one on Purim or the one on all the fasts, but in the middle of a discussion about the kind of candles we should use on Shabbos...
...Jews for Urban Justice had begun as a secular-Jewish social-action group concerned about the rights of Blacks in America and Jews in the Soviet Union, the destruction of Vietnam and the dangers of nuclear war...
...The mist and darkness made everything into a mystery...
...Then: "Well, suppose that's true...
...Somebody reaches over to pick up a copy of the Torah, the five books of Moses, and starts looking up the different holidays...
...And about thirty young Jews, wearing scarves and sweaters, slowly shuffled themselves into place...
...Let ourselves feel like the earth...
...If you're worried about the crops, rain and cold and warmth are the critical issues—not the longest and the shortest days...
Vol. 5 • December 1979 • No. 1
