Two very strict Jews of the season

A new friend of mine told me yesterday that he spent last Christmas in a hospital battling kidney cancer, an all too common horror endured by Jews and gentiles alike. What struck me as unique though, while reading his account of his illness, was his reference to the hospital he was in as "the kind with a tortured Jew hanging on every wall". After considering whether or not that was funny or merely provocative, I started thinking about the Jews of the season: Jesus, Mattathias and Judah the Maccabee.

Lately, my kids have been talking about the true origins of Hannukah. It's funny, because my friend, David Bernard (conductor of the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony) just recently pointed out to me that the familiar story of the miracle of the oil is really a cover-up for Hannukah's militant origins. So, I'm grateful to David for spurring me to look into this a few weeks before my kids learned it at Hebrew school.

My local rabbi does not want me to write about Jesus and Mattathias (a hero of the Hannukah story) in the same blog post, for so many reasons, and I can really appreciate how he feels. I agree that, in theory, there should not be any link between Christmas and Hannukah. Hannukah is just about the least significant holiday on the Jewish calendar - actually, it is a festival rather than a holiday, a celebration of a war victory of a few (Mattathias and his sons) against an oppressive government (the Syrians) which had outlawed the practice of Judaism.

So, yes, in JEWISH REALITY, Hannukah is outranked by true holy days like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Shavuot, eclipsed by the festive, harvest beauty of Sukkot and the joyful, even ecstatic celebration of Simchat Torah, and it doesn't come close in significance and ritual to our other eight-day-long festival, Passover (Pesach). It is down quite near the bottom of our list, with Tu B'shevat and Purim, in terms of its importance, and if it weren't for its proximity to Christmas on the calendar, I am quite certain that practically no Christian would ever have heard of it.

HOWEVER. The fact is that whether or not I mention the two holidays in one blogpost
or not, every Christian friend of a Jew is going to wish that Jewish friend "Happy Hannukah" next month, even if they have never once heard of Shavuot and don't quite know how to pronounce Yom Kippur. Yes, we all have a tradition of kindling additional lights on the shortest days of the year, but the real reason that Christians equate the two holidays is because of us Jews. In America, even traditional Jews, including those who would never dream of having a decorated tree in our house, have assimilated to the point where instead of just baking jelly donuts, frying latkes and playing dreidl on the floor, almost all of us give our kids gifts on Hannukah, and not just on one night, like our goyim friends, but each of the eight nights. Oy. (It's no wonder so many Jewish kids end up unwrapping socks by the end of the week, feeding some people's impression that Jews are cheap, when the truth is that Jewish camps cost much more than the YMCA. But I digress.)

I can definitely see that these guys - Jesus and Mattathias - were very different. But they also are more alike than many people may have taken the time to think about. So, with apologies to my rabbi, I invite you to consider this, from www.VirtualJewishLibrary.org:

A perennially interesting, though probably unanswerable, question is how Jesus regarded himself. Did he see himself as the Messiah? Probably, although one must remember that in the first centuries of the Common Era the word "Messiah" had a different meaning than it has today. Contemporary believers usually think of the Messiah as a wholly spiritual figure. Then, it meant a military leader who would free the Jews from foreign (i.e., Roman) rule, bring them back from the four corners of the earth, and usher in an age of universal peace. Indeed, it was precisely because of the military association with the word "Messiah" that the occupying Roman authorities must have seen Jesus as dangerous and decided to crucify him. That the Romans hung over Jesus' body a sign proclaiming his crime, KING OF THE JEWS, again underscores the apparently militant and political direction of his activities.

I shared with my rabbi my observation that Jesus and Mattathias were both very strictly religious Jews, who judged Jews around them for not being Jewish enough.

My rabbi agreed with this.

"They were both Messianic, they both stood up to governmental authorities on behalf of Jews," I continued "and they both objected militantly to the assimilation of Jews in their community."

This is where my rabbi objected. Jesus was not militant; he was peaceful, which is how he wound up on a cross. Mattathias was a warrior who armed himself and his sons and did battle in reaction to an edict that Judaism could not be practiced.

And as always, I responded to my rabbi, "Yes, but..."

(No wonder he loves talking to me. That's just so Jewish!)

I agree that Jesus and Matthathias were very different. Mattathias was so militant that he killed a Jew who was, in his opinion, betraying his people and God by not following the laws of the Torah. But what did Jesus say about such Jews?

According to my erudite friends at virtualjewishlibrary.org:

The New Testament depiction of Jesus suggests that he was largely a law-abiding and highly nationalistic Jew, and a man with strong ethical concerns. Like many of Judaism's great rabbis, he saw love of neighbor as religion's central demand.

So, and this is me talking again, we all know that Jesus would not have killed a Jew who was not being Jewish enough, even though he had very strong feelings about it. In that way, Jesus was very different, i.e. less militant, than Mattathias.

But both Jesus and Mattathias were deeply concerned about Jews not following the laws of the Torah. Here is another scholarly passage on the matter:

Though many Christians are under the impression that he opposed Judaism's emphasis on law, in actuality Jesus criticized anyone who advocated dropping it. "Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law [the Torah] or the Prophets," he declared to his early disciples. I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved." The law's "purpose," of course, is the universal recognition of God, a goal which neither Christianity nor Judaism believes was realized in Jesus' time, or since. Jesus concluded his message with a severe warning: "Therefore, the man who infringes even the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:17-19).

So, there you have it...more evidence that Jesus would not condone Mattathias' vigilante behavior. Jesus was every bit as disturbed by certain assimilated behaviors of his fellow Jews, but rather than getting violent, he went out and preached about it. He warned transgressors that they would pay for their sins, not on this earth, but in Heaven.

But I know that my rabbi's real concern is not that I conflate Jesus and another Jew from ancient times, but that I not conflate the holidays of Hannukah and Christmas. I can't take responsibility for the general confusion among the goyim, at least, not those beyond the reach of my blog anyway. But what we - both the rabbi and I - teach our children about the proximity of the holidays on the calendar is this:

If you are old enough to go to your friend's birthday party and appreciate that it is not your birthday that is being celebrated, then you are old enough to go to your friend's tree trimming and appreciate that it is not your holiday you are helping to celebrate. Likewise, our family has goyim night at our menorah, where we delight in hosting some of our non-Jewish friends during Hannukah, and sharing with them our tradition of lighting candles, singing songs, playing dreidl and eating greasy food -all to commemorate a story about oil that was created to distract from the fact that the origin of Hannukah is really about resisting assimilation and the use of military might to stand up to religious persecution.

Let me be very clear, after all of this: No matter how much two Jewish men may or may not have had in common, Hannukah has nothing to do with Christmas whatsoever.

Season's Greetings!