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Dec. 9th, 2017 09:38 pmI attended a kiruv group's shiur on Chanukah Monday night. Chanukah's a really difficult holiday for kiruv Rabbis to talk about, because its message is at odds with effective kiruv. The message of Chanukah as I presently understand it is that, confronted with aggressive and rapid assimilation by the faithless during a foreign occupation, a group of militant religious fanatics used violence to seize control of the nation and reimpose theocracy. We celebrate their victory because we share sympathies with the end goals of the religious fanatics. Kiruv tries to say that there is a spark of Jewish faith in every Jew, no matter how disinterested, and the way to win them back is not violence or extremism but through exposing them to the virtues of Judaism and slowly encouraging them to observe one more mitzvah at a time. It's inclusionary and nonjudgemental and doesn't draw bright lines of what's kosher and what's not. It's hard for a kiruv Rabbi to dress up Chanukah for me in a way that seems honest, because they inevitably spend so much time dancing around the unpopular truths of Chanukah. The most common contortion is a sleight of hand attempt to make people forget that the Hellenizing Jews were Jews, and Jews who probably had a lot in common with the targets of Kiruv.
The thing is, though it's uncomfortable to say in pluralist circles, I'm not entirely against the message of Chanukah as I presently understand it. I'm generally a pluralist myself, I certainly believe America only functions when operating on the principle of not attacking people who believe different things than me. But I do believe things and I think those beliefs are worth defending when threatened. I think a pluralist Judaism is distinct from a general pluralist ideology in that it has to defend certain hard lines or it's not Judaism. I think the idea of a holiday where we literally put our Judaism in the window and announce it to the world, and think about the ways in which we value being machmir, is meaningful and congruent with my practice.
But sometimes I'm uncomfortable with this belief of mine. I made "Might Lead to Mixed Dancing" and very intentionally drew almost no such bright lines. I wanted as open a tent as possible, I wanted a tent that recognizes ethnic tribality as conferring as meaningful a sense of Jewishness as religious practice does. It's uncomfortable excluding Jews from Judaism, especially for the obvious reason that I have an awful lot of Jewish friends who don't practice the way I do.
Professor Lawrence Schiffman of NYU once gave a lecture on Chanukah to a group of Modern Orthodox students in which he summarized the historical evidence of the actual Chanukah story and then he stopped to try to draw a lesson from the history. And he said something odd that really stuck with me: "If you think about it, nowadays, WE'RE THE GREEKS!" This was a sort of off the cuff comparison that he didn't entirely flesh out, because I think most of us in the room instantly GOT what he was saying. I think he meant that the Maimonidean thoughtlines that animate Modern Orthodoxy by way of Soloveitchik and Heschel have their origins in a lot of the Greek philosophical ideas that the Hasmoneans were fighting against, and I think he also meant that the Modern Orthodox are based sociologically on the idea that we can borrow ideas from the secular Western mainstream without sacrificing our Judaism. Modern Orthodoxy is a very have your cake and eat it too idea, and having your cake and eating it too is often impossible.
Perhaps the best way to accept Chanukah is to try to have my sufganiya and eat it, too, then. I accept Chanukah as endorsing a view of Jewish particularism that's important to me, even though it inherently alienates people that at some level I think of as still being Jewish. This is stupid and foolish and yet better than any alternative I can think of.
The thing is, though it's uncomfortable to say in pluralist circles, I'm not entirely against the message of Chanukah as I presently understand it. I'm generally a pluralist myself, I certainly believe America only functions when operating on the principle of not attacking people who believe different things than me. But I do believe things and I think those beliefs are worth defending when threatened. I think a pluralist Judaism is distinct from a general pluralist ideology in that it has to defend certain hard lines or it's not Judaism. I think the idea of a holiday where we literally put our Judaism in the window and announce it to the world, and think about the ways in which we value being machmir, is meaningful and congruent with my practice.
But sometimes I'm uncomfortable with this belief of mine. I made "Might Lead to Mixed Dancing" and very intentionally drew almost no such bright lines. I wanted as open a tent as possible, I wanted a tent that recognizes ethnic tribality as conferring as meaningful a sense of Jewishness as religious practice does. It's uncomfortable excluding Jews from Judaism, especially for the obvious reason that I have an awful lot of Jewish friends who don't practice the way I do.
Professor Lawrence Schiffman of NYU once gave a lecture on Chanukah to a group of Modern Orthodox students in which he summarized the historical evidence of the actual Chanukah story and then he stopped to try to draw a lesson from the history. And he said something odd that really stuck with me: "If you think about it, nowadays, WE'RE THE GREEKS!" This was a sort of off the cuff comparison that he didn't entirely flesh out, because I think most of us in the room instantly GOT what he was saying. I think he meant that the Maimonidean thoughtlines that animate Modern Orthodoxy by way of Soloveitchik and Heschel have their origins in a lot of the Greek philosophical ideas that the Hasmoneans were fighting against, and I think he also meant that the Modern Orthodox are based sociologically on the idea that we can borrow ideas from the secular Western mainstream without sacrificing our Judaism. Modern Orthodoxy is a very have your cake and eat it too idea, and having your cake and eating it too is often impossible.
Perhaps the best way to accept Chanukah is to try to have my sufganiya and eat it, too, then. I accept Chanukah as endorsing a view of Jewish particularism that's important to me, even though it inherently alienates people that at some level I think of as still being Jewish. This is stupid and foolish and yet better than any alternative I can think of.