Rosh Chodesh Tevet: Refusing Idolatry

The sensation that we are in the same loop of horrors is aggravated every time there is a holiday. Once again, we mark milestones and try to say Hallel when the news – and the world – tells us about Jews acting against everything the Torah stands for. And the Torah we seek to help us make sense of this feels stale and repetitive too.

“Hasmoneans as the bad guys” is a recurring motif in Chanukah conversations among progressive (religiously and politically) Jews. A few years ago a New York Times op-ed made a splash arguing that Chanukah is a holiday celebrating religious zealotry and American Jews who value cultural integration should not engage in such an anti-assimilationist celebration. Many Jewish leaders and scholars pushed back, including my teacher Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who argued for nuance: “The oppression was real, the desecration of the Temple, the demand that we give up everything we [the Jewish people] hold holy was real.”

This year, I have increasingly seen Jewish leftists uplift the argument that the Sages of the Talmud made an attempt to shift the focus of Chanukah from a military victory to a miracle narrative; they mention war in passing, but focus on finding oil and its flames lasting eight days:

מַאי חֲנוּכָּה? דְּתָנוּ רַבָּנַן: בְּכ״ה בְּכִסְלֵיו יוֹמֵי דַחֲנוּכָּה תְּמָנְיָא אִינּוּן דְּלָא לְמִסְפַּד בְּהוֹן וּדְלָא לְהִתְעַנּוֹת בְּהוֹן. שֶׁכְּשֶׁנִּכְנְסוּ יְוָוֽנִים לַהֵיכָל טִמְּאוּ כׇּל הַשְּׁמָנִים שֶׁבַּהֵיכָל. וּכְשֶׁגָּבְרָה מַלְכוּת בֵּית חַשְׁמוֹנַאי וְנִצְּחוּם, בָּדְקוּ וְלֹא מָצְאוּ אֶלָּא פַּךְ אֶחָד שֶׁל שֶׁמֶן שֶׁהָיָה מוּנָּח בְּחוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל כֹּהֵן גָּדוֹל, וְלֹא הָיָה בּוֹ אֶלָּא לְהַדְלִיק יוֹם אֶחָד. נַעֲשָׂה בּוֹ נֵס וְהִדְלִיקוּ מִמֶּנּוּ שְׁמוֹנָה יָמִים. לְשָׁנָה אַחֶרֶת קְבָעוּם וַעֲשָׂאוּם יָמִים טוֹבִים בְּהַלֵּל וְהוֹדָאָה.

What is Hanukkah, and why are lights kindled on Hanukkah? The Gemara answers: The Sages taught in Megillat Ta’anit: On the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the days of Hanukkah are eight. One may not eulogize on them and one may not fast on them. What is the reason? When the Greeks entered the Sanctuary they defiled all the oils that were in the Sanctuary by touching them. And when the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil that was placed with the seal of the High Priest, undisturbed by the Greeks. And there was sufficient oil there to light the candelabrum for only one day. A miracle occurred and they lit the candelabrum from it eight days. The next year the Sages instituted those days and made them holidays with recitation of hallel and special thanksgiving in prayer and blessings.

(Shabbat 21b, translation from Koren/Sefaria)

on the first night this year, my nails matched my menorah!!

The typical use of this sugya argues that Chazal, the Sages, took the story of Chanukah as it is told in the book of Maccabees, which focuses on Hasmonean military victory against the Seleucid army, and instead elevated a more explicitly religious story: that of the pure oil burning for eight days. The claim is that this should be read as a rejection of militarism by our religious leaders.

The most compelling and beautiful articulation of this perspective that I have seen is from Laynie Soloman, who writes in Halachic Left’s Chanukah Reader (highly recommended) that Chazal:

taught us clearly that war has no place in our accounting of the miraculous. When we bless the wonders and miracles that befell our people many ages ago in this season, may we, in turn, be blessed with the discernment and clarity of our sages to disentangle our spirits from militarism and turn our gaze to G-d’s eternal power.

I am stirred by this call to “disentangle our spirits from militarism” and instead return our focus to God – it is a desperately needed cry. And I can’t help but ask: why must we then cast the “heroes of the Chanukah story” as the villains? Even in writing that question the answer feels obvious: the Israeli reclamation of Hasmonean military power has politically tied the Maccabees to a materially violent state power. But I am not willing to let that story win, to concede that the Maccabees’ story is all about violence and the only conversation to be had is about if that violence was good or bad.

Historically speaking, the scholar Vered Noam has argued clearly that “the supernatural basis of the story of the cruse of oil, as well as its representation as the only explanation for the celebration of Hanukkah, is a function of Babylonian inventiveness, motivated by literary rather than historical reasons.” In other words, even Chazal were not intending to elevate the spiritual over the military in the Bavli; they had other goals related to harmonization of earlier sources. Reading historically is, of course, not the only way to make meaning of the Gemara – if anything, I am far more compelled by meaning-making that is creative and relational rather than seeking out “what Chazal really meant.” But Noam’s intervention shows us that it is not so simple to understand the Sages of the Talmud as taking a stand to reject a celebration of militarism.

Whether we focus on miracles or on war, a key part of the Chanukah story is, in the words of our liturgy “עָמְ֒דָה מַלְכוּת יָוָן הָרְ֒שָׁעָה עַל־עַמְּ֒ךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל לְהַשְׁכִּיחָם תּוֹרָתֶֽךָ וּלְהַעֲבִירָם מֵחֻקֵּי רְצוֹנֶֽךָ,” “when the evil Greek kingdom rose up against Your people Israel to make them forget Your Torah.” Both the miracle narrative and the war narrative are stories in which a small group of Jews resist the power of the empire and remain true to Judaism.

Both the endurance of the oil and the victory of the – perhaps zealous – Maccabees over the Greeks are stories that have the Jews rejecting idolatry and empire. Indeed, both stories associate idolatry and empire: the Greek attempts to enforce idol worship and to stamp out Jewish practice, to defile the Temple, combine the might of the conquering army with the compulsion to worship that which is not truly powerful. Both empire and avodah zara, after all, commit the crime of attributing power where it ought not be.

Rosh Chodesh is nothing if not a holiday of refusal. The midrash teaches us that it is holiday by virtue of the Israelite women who refused to participate in the building of the Golden Calf. And the Rosh Chodesh observance “gifted” as part of that tradition is refraining from work, another kind of refusal. So Rosh Chodesh Tevet, on Chanukah, is doubly a moment to refuse idolatry, that false trust in a power that is less than God, the pull to side with conquering powers over that which is holy. All the versions of the Chanukah story teach us that what endures is not power; it is conviction and commitment. Holiness comes from seeking God in all ways, not the shimmering gold that is the idol of might.

The Jewish left does not need to reject the Maccabees. Instead, we can ask: in what ways can we remain steadfast as other Jews side with power to defile the holy? Even as we feel small and outnumbered, how can we allow the depth of our convictions to endure? After all, all of these are stories, and we are always making choices about which ones to elevate, including the “historical.” The story of the weak standing against the mighty, refusing to allow empire to overtake Judaism? That can be ours.