As the flames of the eight night of Hanukkah 5780 flicker toward completion, I am reminded that Jewish text comes in all forms. Usually when we refer to text, it might be Torah, Mishna or Talmud. But tonight, as reflect on the past seven days of Hanukkah, my thoughts turned to a piece of graffiti in South Tel Aviv(see photo). For me, this graffiti too is text. It made me stop and think. It made me examine where I was within that story. Text should make us think. Yes, it should teach us, but it should also challenge us to find ourselves within it’s content. It should encourage us to examine our own values and thoughts.
Look at the text of the Hanukkah story, the Book of Maccabees. Two books, written by different authors, with different viewpoints on the value of martyrdom, preserved predominantly by The Church because the Rabbis decided not to include it in the Jewish Canon. It is a story of a revolt against the Greeks launched by the priest Mattathias and later led by his third son, Judah ‘The Maccabee’. It is a war against the Seleucids (Syrian Greeks) and Hellenism. But even before that, it is a struggle against the Jews who were homegrown Hellenists.
Hellenism represented an ‘enlightened’ world view. After all, the Greeks were the powerhouse in the area and nations which had refused to accept Hellenistic views and practices were disappearing rapidly. As a result, the local Jews began to acculturate. They began to pick up so many Greek rituals and thoughts that they began to loose the Judaism which had preserved them for generations. For Mattathias and his followers, the universal focus of Hellenism constituted a danger to their ancestral religion and God. There could be merging between the two, but more and more it seemed that Judaism was being abandoned for Hellenism.
This is no different from the challenges that face us today. Hellenism is consumerism. Hellenism is ‘keeping up with the Jones.’ Hellenism is Westernization. Hellenism, is assimilation. For the Maccabees, the essence of the battle was not against picking up Greek practices, it was against the loss of Judaism when Hellenism became the overwhelming priority.
Some 50 years ago, JTS Chancellor Gerson Cohen, argued against the thought that Jews survived only by remaining a people apart. Rather, he said “a frank appraisal of the periods in which Judaism flourished will indicate that not only did a certain amount of assimilation and acculturation not impede Jewish continuity, but that in a profound sense, this assimilation and acculturation was a stimulus to original thinking and expression, a source or renewed vitality.” (Jewish History and Jewish Destiny, 151)
Assimilation in it’s essence is not a threat to Judaism. Until it takes over and makes us walk away from our Judaism and God. 1800 years after the Maccabees, I had the opportunity to take a tour with Niro, a graffiti artist himself, in Tel Aviv. When he shared the stencil graffiti pictured above he talked about the uniqueness of a Jewish state where the God of the religious and the god of secular Israeli’s (sheckle) are often at odds. Where, he asked, are we in this spectrum? Is there a conflict between the two? Has God been replaced by the new god of money?
The lesson of Hanukkah is that if Jews assimilate too much, we lose our own way, and Judaism is lost. The question of Hanukkah is how much distinctiveness should we maintain? Where is the line between living as the other and losing Judaism’s unique and beautiful qualities? How do we live in today without losing the Jewish children and grandchildren of tomorrow? It is the balance between the two that Hanukkah invites us to explore. So this year, as the lights of Hanukkah fade, let us think about what plays the role of Hellenism in our lives and where we want the balance between that and Judaism to be.
I later found out that this graffiti was actually a piece of Niro’s work.