HE FELL ASLEEP AND DREAMT A SECOND TIME; HERE, SEVEN EARS OF GRAIN WERE GOING UP ON A SINGLE STALK, FAT AND GOOD, AND HERE, SEVEN EARS, LEAN AND SCORCHED BY THE EAST WIND, WERE SPRINGING UP AFTER THEM. THEN THE LEAN EARS SWALLOWED UP THE SEVEN EARS FAT AND FULL. PHARAOH AWOKE, AND HERE: (IT WAS) A DREAM!

             (Bereishit 41:5-6)

 

BETWEEN FAITH AS SATISFACTION OF NEEDS AND FAITH AS A MISSION

Said Rabbi Yochanan: The wicked exist by their gods, "Pharaoh dreamt and behold, he stood over the Nile", but the righteous, their God exists by them, as is written "And behold, God stood above him and said I am the Lord, God of Avraham."

(Bereishit Rabba 69)

 

On first thought it would seem that both Pharaoh and Yaakov, who represent the wicked person (rasha) and the righteous man (tzaddik), are cognizant of man's standing before God; both worship Him. But there is a world of difference between the religiosity of the rasha and that of the tzaddik.

In Pharaoh's view, God is the tool, the means, the instrument for the advancement of his - Pharaoh's- interests, his status, and his existence. The meaning of this belief is that his god is the basis of existence, i.e., God for the sake of man; translated into real terms, the mythological concept of "the gods of Egypt" means the Nile, which provides life and support for Egypt; therefore Pharaoh dreams of himself as "standing over the Nile." Why does he bow to Nile as his god? Because this god of his is the supplier of all his needs, he serves him as befits the ruler of the great Egyptian empire, guaranteeing its existence. Thus we see that Pharaoh, King of Egypt, serves his gods because his gods serve him. Pharaoh's religious faith is expressed by his rising in the morning and thanking his gods for all that they do for him, hoping that they will continue to act on his behalf.

The opposite is true of the tzaddik. He does not ask that his God bear him and supply his needs. He takes it upon himself to serve his God. In this sense, it may be said that he carries his God. Thus, his God is sustained by him... Say, then, this is faith in terms of the mission that this standing before God imposes upon him, or, in the terminology of the Midrash, "to be tzadikkim, bearers of the Lord."

(Y. Leibowitz, " Seven Years of Discussions of the Weekly Parasha, pp. 156-157)

 

 

MACCABEES, RABBIS AND HELLENISTS

Mordechai Beck

 

The story is told of a hasid who entered his Rebbe's court one day and heard the Rebbe sing the most elevating, wordless tune , a niggun. Everyone who heard it was enraptured. The Rebbe himself was clearly in ecstasy. When he finished the niggun, the Rebbe's disciple approached him in awe and trepidation and said: "Holy Rebbe, that was such a beautiful melody. But tell me, doesn't it come from the opera La Traviata? The Rebbe fixed his blazing eyes on the trembling hasid and said: "I heard it from the Holy One Blessed be He. But where did you hear it from, you apikoros (heretic)!
This apocryphal tale is a trenchant example of the interplay between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures. On a more abstract level, it suggests the larger question that lays behind the festival of Chanucah. Is there any such thing as a 'pure' culture? Is there any way in which Judaism - or, for that matter, any other civilization - can ever remain 'uncontaminated' by its surroundings and by other civilizations? Does this desire for exclusivity not carry with it potential dangers of its own, extreme examples of which have been only too apparent in our own fragile times? And if it is, practically speaking, impossible to close off the outside world, what remains of the meaning of Chanucah, whose celebration is rooted in the clash of Jewish and Hellenistic values? We have already raised the question as to why the Rabbis do not recall in much detail the actual historical events that gave us the festival.

In the historical record, the main villain in the Chanucah story is Antiochus Epiphenes IV, the ruler of the Greek-influenced Seleucid Empire, who cruelly suppressed Jewish religious practice - including the Sabbath, temple worship and circumcision - and who backed up his religious persecution with the slaughter of thousands of pious Jews. Yet hundreds of years later, when the sages of the Talmud came to record the events, none of these cruelties are mentioned. Instead, it is the Hellenistic culture that the Seleucid Greeks tried to impose on the Jews that is considered as the main reason for the Hasmonean uprising, perhaps marking the first real cultural war, led by the priestly family of Mattathias (Mattitayahu) the High Priest. In this view, the Jews, living in their own territory, with their own Temple, waged a war not over physical survival but over principle. Their fear was that their Syrian-Hellenistic overlords would plant a cultural Trojan horse in their midst and thus undermine their values from within. Ironically, as the Hasmoneans' control of the country continued, they gave themselves the title of kings - a nomenclature that had disappeared with the destruction of the first temple and subsequent exile to Babylon - thus shifting the focus of their leadership from spiritual to political. Slowly, too, their regime came to resemble that of the Hellenistic Greeks and thus raised the ire of the contemporary sages. Hellenistic culture had penetrated deeply into the Hebraic consciousness. Hundreds of Hebraized Greek terms and words appear in the Talmud. Some of the greatest sages rejoiced in Hellenistic names. One of the first sages mentioned in that most philosophical of tractates, Pirkei Avot, is Antigonus of Socho, a pure Greek name (1:3). Before he became a Talmudic sage, Resh Lakish was a gladiator. Is this borrowing of others' cultural baggage forbidden, or impossible if the Jewish people is to keep its uniqueness? On a broader level what did the Hasmoneans (or some of the later sages, let alone many contemporary ones) fear in these foreign intrusions? Was knowledge of any sort foreign to Judaism? Not according to some of our most respectful sources. The great poet and philosopher of Medieval Spain's Golden Age, Yehuda Halevi, wrote "The Kuzari": "The members of the Sanhedrin were bound not to let any science - real, fictitious or conventional - escape their knowledge, magic and language included. How was it possible at all times to find seventy scholars unless learning was common among the people? If one elder dies another of the same stamp succeeded him. This could not be otherwise, as all branches of science were required for the practice of the divine law." Halevi, in the guise of the book's Rabbinical presenter, list various disciplines such as agriculture, husbandry, astronomy and music, which were necessary to possess in order to understand the Torah. For Halevi - considered to be the most 'purely Jewish' of medieval philosophers - the source of all these disciplines may be traced to Solomon to whom "all the inhabitants of the earth traveled in order to carry forth his learning even as far as India." Then this process took off on its own track: "Now the roots and principles of all sciences were handed down from us first to the Chaldeans, then to the Persians and Medians, then to Greece, and finally to the Romans. On account of the length of this period..it was forgotten that they had originated with the Hebrews, and so they were ascribed to the Greeks and the Romans." (Kuzari part 2: 64-66, emphasis mine).

Similarly, Maimonides, the temperamental opposite of Halevi, observed: "that many branches of science...were once cultivated by our forefathers but were in the course of time neglected...the natural effect of this was that our nation lost the knowledge of those important disciplines." (The Guide to the Perplexed, 1:71). Interestingly, both Halevi and Maimonides were practicing medical doctors, and presumably benefited from a secular scientific training, while the latter also based much of his philosophical writing on Aristotle.

In his recently published study "Athens in Jerusalem," Tel Aviv historian Ya'acov Shavit analyzes the history of Hellenistic-Jewish tensions from earliest times to our own day. Of course, the framework changes with each period and what was once a specific cultural configuration has, over the generations become a more general notion identified with un-Jewish ideas and concepts. Often, too, Hellenism and its Jewish counterpart became the battle ground for warring factions of all sorts of groups. In the nineteenth century, for example, Professor Shavit writes: "Religious and 'free-thinking' Jews alike used it as a battle cry to be frequently hurled at their adversaries; the 'freethinking' nationalists used it against the anti-nationalist secular (Reform) Jews; the ultra-Orthodox, against their freethinking nationalist opponents. One of the inevitable results of the double use of this sign was to kindle the debate on the essence of the festival of Chanucah that flared up in the 1880's between different camps in the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) movement. "The free-thinking members of this movement claimed that the Orthodox were treating Chanucah as a part of Diaspora folklore and obscuring its national dimension; the Orthodox argued that the free-thinkers were totally disregarding the religious aspect of the holiday and turning it into a popular national festival. How absurd it is, religious writings repeatedly claimed, that the 'freethinking' Jew should celebrate Chanucah which symbolizes victory over Hellenism, when he himself lived like an out- and-out Hellenist. A secular Jew, therefore, is not allowed to view himself as a 'descendant of the Maccabees.'" (P. 312)

This debate continues right into our own day, as Professor Shavit, an avid secularist, is wont to point out. In Israel, the Chanucah debate merely highlights the extreme tendencies that underpin the on-going debate as to what constitutes a Jewish state. Shavit quotes the former Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapira regarding the attempt to separate religion and state, whose proponents he characterized as "following in the path of the Hellenizers and trying to adopt as their slogan revolt against the people and the unity of the nation."

The most extreme critic of secular Zionism was, of course, the late and generally unlamented Rabbi Meir Kahane who equated Zionism with "Hellenism" and warned that it would place all Jews in danger of collective divine punishment. Others have pointed out that the Hellenistic/Jewish debate is a very complex one, encompassing as it does both high and low culture, rank paganism and sophisticated philosophy.

Shavit observes that in the period of the Second Temple, and thus of the historical Chanucah, "the unceasing spiritual ferment, resulted from the encounter and confrontation with Hellenism. when Judaism was a strong, organic culture of life and so sure of itself and its superiority that Hellenism did not exert a strong influence on it. " This 'Golden Age' became a model for modern Zionists who felt that a revival of a modern Jewish culture in its own land would enable an organic Judaism to emerge which would be "once again receptive to stimulating and enriching influences," as it had once been in the Second Temple period (pp. 334 and 350).

Professor Shavit's analysis, though not lacking in flaws, does suggest two paradoxical positions: on the one hand, it is the conservative elements of Judaism that have generally speaking preserved the tradition over the generations and flourished, whilst many heterodox off-shoots have disappeared through assimilation or internal entropy. On the other hand, as Jerusalem Rabbi and psychotherapist.

Haim Lifschitz has pointed out, Orthodox Jewry has singularly failed to address the challenge of the modern, open, democratic society. The tension between these two positions informs much of the ever vital debate on the nature of Judaism in the framework of contemporary civilization, both in Israel and in the diaspora. Given the ferocity of the debate, and the seemingly endless permutations of the possibilities it suggests, perhaps the real miracle of Chanucah is that there are still Jews around to celebrate it.

Mordechai Beck is a Jerusalem based writer and artist.

 

Readers write:

(Reactions to Jonathan Chipman's article of Parashat Lech Lecha)

It would seem that the "Deny the Occupation" industry has succeeded to the point where Jonathan Chipman can refer to the Palestinians as "people living under what they feel to be occupation." Let's be accurate. Not only do the Palestinians feel that are living under occupation; they are living under occupation.

The occupation is expressed in large part by the fact that there are two unequal systems of justice in the territories - civil law for the settlers and other Israeli citizens, and military law for the Palestinians. So, for example, IDF soldiers keep the residents of Hebron imprisoned in their homes in a extended curfew, and do nothing to prevent Hebron settlers from breaking into stores of the Palestinians and vandalizing them.

Daniel Rorlich, Yerushalayim

 

It is obvious that the election of Avraham and his seed is not just a biological election; this is proven by the possibility of conversion. Many Jewish scholars were converts and the Rambam used their teachings in giving us the "Yad Hachazakah".

Sixty years after I (as a child) and my parents saw the gentile who grew on the laps of Schiller's poetry, of Kant's philosophy, etc., - that gentile who so attracted us - employed by Hitler - damn his memory - for transport of 6,000,000 to the crematoria; or he remained silent at the sight of the atrocities he witnessed. It is difficult to be impressed by their "universal culture and its morality."

The universal tendencies which you identify in Judaism are important only inasmuch as they are part of Judaism, and not as hypocritical false morality of those who support the murderers from Jenin and Ramallah. Whoever thinks that the murders on the roads of Yehuda and Shomron are a result of "a normal social-national struggle," sees only half of the history. Whoever still thinks that there exists the possibility of a solution based on compromise has no understanding of the basic difference us and them. There were many attempts in Zionist history to reach accommodation. Nine years ago, the late Yitzhak Rabin was lured into making another attempt to reach a compromise with the base murderer from Ramalla, at the cost of a severe confrontation with part of the Israeli nation, only to pursue a doubtful peace.

When we are unwilling to learn from history, locked into a faulted conception, we are drawn to philosophies which caused the murder of a Jew by a mentally disturbed student seven years ago. Perhaps we shall merit that your publication be more genuine, walking in the path of the Jewish people throughout its generations.

Menachem Zilberstein Kfar Sava

 

Rabbi Jonathan Chipman replies:

Both letters deal with marginal points of my article.

Mr. Rorlich relates to the phrase "people who live under what they feel is occupation". My intent was not to deny the existence of the occupation. It was to avoid a political statement on a controversial issue by employing an agreed upon term which emphasizes how things are perceived by the Palestinians, without passing objective judgement on the accuracy of the conception.

Regarding Mr. Zilberstein's letter which plays up the admixture of the Nazis' murderous character with their love for the finest of European music and culture. Of course, I am aware of this, but the fact remains that just as people's faces differ, so do their feelings and approaches to life. My generation, born in post-Shoah America, had experiences quite different from those experienced by European Jewry. For me, and for most of my friends, anti-Semitism was a not a formative experience in our lives and in the fabric of our relations with the non-Jewish world around us. I felt that I was an integral part of the social, cultural, and general political life; I participated in the great protest against the Vietnam War shoulder to shoulder with non-Jews. My motive for coming on Aliya to Israel was the desire to participate in the Jewish culture evolving in our land, and not to escape from insufferable reality; love for Mordecai, not hatred of Haman. (It can, of course, be argued that sooner or later the anti-Semitic demon will raise his head even there. But it is interesting to note that even a highly conservative (small 'C'), personage, in the mold of "Yisrael Sabba", the Lubavitcher Rebbe, of blessed memory, catagorized America as "a kingdom of hessed - of goodness" - i.e., as something different and unique in Jewish history.)

Regarding the Palestinian question - beyond what I already wrote - I will only add a revised formulation of my basic assumption, and that is: the Palestinians, too, are human beings created in the Image, and therefore we must understand their motives in terms of human psychology: anger, frustration, revenge over suffering and the loss of dear ones, the feeling of "no way out" of a difficult situation, etc. - and not as vicious two-legged beasts. Only thus can we begin to find - for ourselves and for them - some way out of this horrible condition which exists here for over two years, which is destroying every positive accomplishment.

 

Editor's note:

There is no question that ideological and political positions are influenced in no small part by formative personal experiences, and in this sense, "there is nothing new under the sun." Rabeinu Hameiri's conception, for example, in no way resembles the view which claims that "It is known that Esav hates Yaakov". The objective of "Shabbat Shalom" is not political statements, but clarification of the Torah value position which believes in the basic Torah principle that all men are created in the Image - with all its ramifications.

 

 

Editorial Board: Pinchas Leiser (Editor), Miriam Fine (Coordinator),Itzhak Frankenthal and Dr. Menachem Klein

Translation: Kadish Goldberg

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