In outliving their many enemies, Jews have unwittingly made them immortal. Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Cossacks, Nazis: all of these survive in the amber of Jewish memory. We gloat about having outlasted them, but they’re never really gone: their spiritual heirs might try to angle for another bite of the genocidal apple.
On Hanukkah, it is the Greeks’ turn to be remembered. But it’s more than that: they serve as shorthand for the danger of assimilation and spiritual effacement, the urge to fit in by forfeiting unique spiritual physiognomy for a metaphoric nose job. Haman threatened Jewish bodies: Antiochus had designs on the Jewish soul. In this reading, Purim is Warsaw in 1938, and Hanukkah is New York in 2021. Growing up, rabbis in school would draw parallels between the cool kids in Seleucid Greece and the hip crowd in SoHo.
The only problem with this equivalence is that it’s wrong, just as the danger of believing that history always repeats itself is that sometimes it doesn’t. What is interesting and confounding about the American Diaspora is not how it resembles experiences of the past, but how it does not. Its challenges are not a repetition of Jewish history, but a new development in its unfolding. The playbook is that there is no playbook. The sooner we come to terms with the awkward fact of our uniqueness, the sooner we can seize its many advantages.
The first American distinction that makes a difference is that we are not oppressed here. Hanukkah is about not assimilation but forced assimilation. The heirs to Alexander the Great banned essential Jewish practices: it was cultural change by way of a jackboot. The Establishment Clause of the U.S. The Constitution precludes the United States from instituting an official state religion: the Puritans remembered all too well the Church of England’s crimes against their ancestors. At the core of American power is not a person or an image but a set of documents.
The second American difference is that Jewish religious life is thriving on these shores. Indeed, we are in the midst of a Torah renaissance that would tempt our pious ancestors to violate the tenth commandment against envy. In fact, the irony of Jewish American life is that its crisis goes hand in hand with its success. Just this week, the President sent an email out celebrating Chanukkah, the Jewish Secretary of State tweeted out holiday wishes, and the Second Gentleman attended a menorah lighting. I’ll get to the dark news in a moment, but it is also vital to see the light.
The final difference is that the Chanukkah story took place in the Land of Israel: it was a battle for sovereignty just as much as for religious freedom. The reign of the Hasmoneans was to be the last time Jews ruled themselves in their homeland until David Ben-Gurion’s Polish accented Hebrew announced the new state two millennia later. Today, Israel’s sovereignty is secure. It is America, despite its manifold blessings, that generates the greater worry for the Jewish future. It is a community with few enemies that nevertheless seems to be its own worst enemy, divided against itself and increasingly hostile or indifferent to the Jewish State across the ocean.
This is not to say that anti-Semitism has vanished from the American scene. Where there are Jews there will be enemies, and if there are echoes of Hellenistic haters today, it is in the form of those who make hostility to the Jewish collective the price of admission. It becomes visible whenever Jews are excluded from the circle of solidarity, when catalogues of hate exclude the world’s oldest one.
The other night I was strolling through Astor Place in downtown Manhattan to meet friends for dinner and was greeted by a familiar scene: Chanukkah music blasting from a rented RV festooned with posters of menorahs and the Rebbe, surrounded by teenagers in black hats and ear-warmers asking me if I was Jewish, by any chance, and if I’d like a jelly doughnut or candle lighting kit. It was *so* public, so outrageously confident, even brash.
I muttered the traditional “chag sameach” greeting and hurried off, but on further reflection I realized that while the organization was Chabad, the spirit was not only Maccabee, but also profoundly American in its gusto for the market of ideas. This is what so many miss: the pure Americanness of so much of what is most vital in Jewish life today, in form if not in content.
That’s the good news. But there is bad as well. The great challenge of the American scene is that there is no script. How do we proceed in a country where we are accepted and yet seem to be shedding literacy and a sense of peoplehood faster than you can say ‘red, white, and blue’? How does America adapt to being a second fiddle Promised Land to an Israel that is less a poor sibling than a powerful cousin? Yes, the Jews of the Chanukkah story assimilated, but they did so on the same soil that Joshua David, Solomon, Isaiah, and Elijah trod. When the oil was lit, it was ready to kindle. There were endless roots. Here, there isn’t much beneath the soil.
America is defined not so much by the pressure exerted on Jews as much as the lack of any pressure whatsoever. The traditional dichotomy between salvation and squeeze has given way to a community that seemingly only gets excited about debating Israel. Outsourcing vitality is a recipe for hollowing out our native vitalities and concerns.
Our mission is to be Maccabees, warriors in a West that sometimes has forgotten what it is fighting for. It is to figure out this strange and wonderful and weird thing called America that desperately needs help in charting its future and recovering its promise for a new day. Just because none of the old enemies quite seem to fit our moment does not mean that fresh ones are not waiting to pounce. But just because the last hand we were dealt was weak does not mean the next one won’t surprise us by its strength.
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