Rabbi Mark Fasman

The Maccabees live. At least, their battle goes on.
Here are two passages from the First Book of the Maccabees (as translated in the New English Bible):
At that time [after the ascension of Antiochus IV to the throne in 175 BCE] there appeared in Israel a group of renegade Jews, who incited the people. ‘Let us enter into a covenant with the Gentiles round about,’ they said, ‘because disaster upon disaster has overtaken us since we segregated ourselves from them.’ The people thought this a good argument, and some of them in their enthusiasm went to the king and received authority to introduce non-Jewish laws and customs. They built a sports-stadium in the gentile style in Jerusalem. They removed their marks of circumcision and repudiated the holy covenant. They intermarried with Gentiles, and abandoned themselves to evil ways….
When the king’s officers come to Modin, Mattathias (a priest), along with his five sons, refused to submit to their authority.
[After Mattathias finished speaking] a Jew stepped forward in full view of all to offer sacrifice on the pagan altar at Modin, in obedience to the royal command. The sight stirred Mattathias to indignation; he shook with passion, and in a fury of righteous anger rushed forward and slaughtered the traitor on the very altar…. ‘Follow me,’ he shouted through the town, ‘every one of you who is zealous for the law and strives to maintain the covenant.’
As a child, I learned the heroic tale of Judah Maccabee, leader of the fight of the Judeans against the Syrian Greeks. But the real battle that was taking place was internal, a struggle between Judaism and Hellenism within the Jewish population itself.
What is the difference between Greek culture and Jewish culture?
Rabbi Ken Spiro has written: “To the Jews, human beings were created in the image of God. To the Greeks, gods were made in the image of human beings. To the Jews, the physical world was something to be perfected and elevated spiritually. To the Greeks, the physical world was perfect. In short, to Greeks, what was beautiful was holy; to the Jews, what was holy was beautiful.”
There is much to be said of Greek culture, an ancient culture that is the basis of Western Civilization, and in particular, the humanistic foundation of our contemporary enlightened society. Our lives would be dramatically different if not for the gifts of the ancient Greeks. The Greeks brought their culture to all the lands they conquered, Judea included. That culture included philosophy, art, architecture, history, literature, and athletics. They celebrated the human being, glorifying the beauty of the human body and human intellect.
These things are all part of our culture today. They are how we spend our money and our time, particularly our leisure time. Just think of much of our time we invest in sports – both spectator and participatory. All those hours enjoying literature and the arts. All of our intense focus on the pleasures of the body, from food to sex to spas to vacations in “paradise.” I cannot think of a human pleasure that is discouraged in our society. Other than incest or hurting another person (against their will), is there anything taboo any more?
One of the most significant “discoveries” that marked the beginning of the Renaissance, a period in which classical Greek culture was re-awakened in Western Civilization, was that Earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa. How curious that just as we came to understand that Earth is not the center of the universe, we also began to think and behave as though the human being is.
Judaism itself is a rejection of the idea that the universe revolves around us. We don’t set the standards. For if we place human beings at the center, if everything revolves around us, then it is also true that God revolves around us – we end up creating our gods (if any) in our image. And when it comes to behavior, Judaism believes in righteousness, not self-righteousness.
The core values of Judaism are often in conflict with core values of our secular society. And since Judaism makes so many demands on our time and our behavior, we often find ourselves having to choose between “Greek” pastimes and Jewish obligations. We Conservative Jews are committed to both Jewish tradition and secular society. We live with one foot firmly planted on the side of an enlightened secular society based upon Greek ideals, and the other foot trying desperately to establish or preserve a foothold in Jewish tradition. It’s hard to be enlightened in public and Jewish in shul.
The Maccabees understood how hard it was to navigate between Hellenism and Judaism. For them, it was black or white. In our time, too, there are those who choose one or the other. But we try to live with both black and white. We want both. We are unwilling to give up either. The trick is not to end up with neither.
It is not so difficult to blend Jewish values with secular values. What is tough is to try to blend Jewish behavior with secular behavior. When it comes down to what we are going to do on Saturday, we have to choose one or the other. We could go to a football game, while keeping in mind that it is Shabbat; or we could observe Shabbat and keep in mind that there is a football game. We know what secular Jewish football fans would do. And we know what orthodox Jewish football fans would do. But what do Conservative Jewish football fans do? Do we go to shul and record the game, or do we watch the game and daven at halftime (or do we just pray that our team wins)?
We Conservative Jews are the “Chanukah Movement” – we continue to fight the Maccabees’ battle every day of our lives. As such, perhaps we need to give a new meaning to the candles we light each of the eight nights of Chanukah. If each candle represents doing Jewish things, then adding one candle a day is a reminder that Judaism is not all-or-nothing for us. It is possible to increase our Jewish behavior incrementally, mitzvah by mitzvah. With each added mitzvah, repeated day after day, we experience an ever brighter Jewish enlightenment.
Chag ha-urim same’ach – have a joyous “Festival of the Lights.”