Steve Almond – Jewcy

A Very Osama Hanukkah

Steve Almond — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:11:46 +0000

Of the many strange things George W. Bush has said while president, here is one of the strangest: “I couldn’t imagine someone like Osama Bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah.”

Shrub must have figured this sound bite was a slam-dunk. He was wrong. Osama Bin Laden may be the person on the planet most attuned to the joys of Hanukkah. As it turns out, the traditional Hanukkah spiel about the oil-that-was-only-supposed-to-last-for-one-day-but-lo-and-behold-it-lasted-for-eight-wowza is mostly Talmudic PR. Contrary to popular myth, the holiday arose from the exact struggle Bin Laden is waging today: an armed rebellion against an imperial power, driven by religious fanaticism and suicidal self-assertion.

The genesis of Hanukkah resides in the Books of Maccabee. You can be forgiven if you have not read these books–they never made it in to the Biblical canon.* I only read them, in fact, because my wife is converting to Judaism and I wanted to be able to provide her a full accounting of the festival. Weirdly, I happened to have the New American Bible at home, a Catholic version of scripture that includes both books.

1 Maccabees opens with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. The Hannukah story begins around 175 BC, when Antiochus, leader of the occupying Seleucid dynasty,issues a decree forcing the Jews to profane their Covenant: “Women who had had their children circumcised were put to death, in keeping with the decree, with the babies hung from their necks.” The high priest Mattathias kills a Seleucid official, then retreats to the desert to launch a revolt, which under the direction of his sons Judah, Jonathan, and Simon becomes a guerilla war. There’s another word for all this, of course: insurgency.

Judah Maccabee leads the Jews to numerous improbable victories on his way to reclaiming the Temple in Jerusalem, “destroying the impious” (here defined as any Jews less pious than themselves) along the way. Up north, Judah squares off against Antiochus IV’s son, the unfortunately named Eupator, whose army includes armored elephants, the Old Testament equivalent of tanks.

The account of a Maccabee soldier named Eleazer made me queasy:

Eleazar, called Avaran, saw one of the beasts bigger than any of the others and covered with royal armor, and he thought the king must be on it. So he gave up his life to save his people and win an everlasting name for himself. He dashed up to it in the middle of the phalanx, killing men right and left, so that they fell back from him on both sides. He ran right under the elephant and stabbed it in the belly, killing it. The beast fell to the ground on top of him and he died there. (6:43)

Eleazer sounds to me like a Biblical version of the suicide bombers who launch themselves at military convoys in Iraq. He isn’t trying to kill and maim innocent bystanders, so it’s not an exact comparison, but his mindset is essentially the same: He relishes the chance to give his life in exchange for the glory of the cause, and his own name.

I got the same queasy feeling when I read about Judah decapitating the vanquished general Nicanor and putting his head on display in Jerusalem. This might have been how you asserted your might 2000 years ago. But isn’t the gesture really just an old school version of the decapitation videos Al Qaeda uses today to horrify its Western foes?

Judah himself eventually dies, but his brothers Jonathan and Simon carry on the insurgency. Their methods could hardly seem more familiar:

They watched and suddenly saw a noisy crowd with baggage; the bridegroom and his friends and kinsmen had come out to meet the bride’s party with tambourines and musicians and much equipment. The Jews rose up against them from their ambush and killed them. Many fell wounded and after the survivors fled toward the mountain, all their spoils were taken. Thus the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of music into lamentation.

Again, from where I’m sitting this sounds a lot like, well, terrorism. It calls to mind the horrifying images of the 2005 attack at a Jordanian hotel, when members of al Qaida turned a wedding party into a bloodbath.

It gets worse.

Jonathan then cuts a deal to send 3000 of his soldiers — let’s not call them foreign-born terrorists – to help the despot Demetrius put down a rebellion by his troops in Antioch. The Jewish mercenaries kill 100,000 people.

Obviously the Maccabees were in a tight spot, surrounded by hostile enemies and forced to defend themselves in mortal combat. What’s striking is the righteous lust with which they carry out this defense. Because they believe in the one true God, they have no problem with killing innocent civilians, killing other Jews, and killing themselves.

Radical Islam, meet radical Judaism.

I hoped the second book would be a softer ride, one that might tease out the less martial aspects of Hanukkah. Wrong.

2 Maccabees recounts the victories of Judah, only this time the Almighty plays a much more significant role in the combat. Indeed, if the message of the first book was that Jews kick serious ass when inspired by God, the message of the second is that the Jews kick ass because God actively intervenes on their behalf

In one particularly hallucinogenic episode, God helps his people by conjuring a “manifestation” straight from the pages of the Book of Revelation: he takes the form of a “richly caparisoned horse, mounted by a dreadful rider” who attacks one of Judah’s antagonists. Elsewhere, Judah reminds his troops that the Almighty will vouchsafe their victory. The rebels cut down “at least 35,000” of the enemy and “rejoice greatly over this manifestation of God’s power.”

The second book also places a disturbing emphasis on martyrdom. The most famous example is the story of a Jewish mother and her seven sons who refuse Antiochus’s order that they eat pork. The story illustrates the cruelty of the Seleucid soldiers, but its real emphasis is on dying for a cause:

At that, the king gave orders to have pans and cauldrons heated … He commanded his executioners to cut out the tongue of the one who had spoken for the others, to scalp him and cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of his brothers and his mother looked on. When he was completely maimed but still breathing, the king ordered them to carry him to the fire and fry him. As a cloud of smoke spread form the pan, the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die bravely…

Which they do.

I am going to resist using this story to suggest that torture doesn’t really work, because I think it speaks to a broader pathology—the mindset that exalts a noble death above all other human courses.

One other passage in 2 Maccabees is nothing short of eerie. It’s the retelling of a story about Nehemiah, the leader who had helped rebuild the Temple wall after the Babylonian Exile. During the exile, the priests took some of the sacred fire of the Temple altar and hid it in the hollow below a dry cistern. Hoping to rekindle the altar flame, Nehemiah sends the priests to retrieve the hidden fire, but they come back with a thick liquid instead. “And when the materials for the sacrifices were presented, Nehemiah ordered the priests to sprinkle the liquid on the wood and what was laid upon it.” (7:21) A great fire blazes up and everyone marvels. The King of Persia declares a miracle. The material, whatever it is, comes to be called naphtha – which, translated from Greek, means “petroleum.”

I wish I were making this stuff up. But it’s really and truly in the book. Twenty two hundred years ago, with insurgents and imperialists doing battle in the Middle East, people were agog over the miracle of petroleum.

In recent years, Jews have made an understandable decision to steer people away from the violence in Hanukkah’s exegetical basement. As an assimilated and not-very-observant Jew, I grew up hearing almost exclusively about the miracle of the oil.

The only thing I knew about the Maccabees was that they were heroic defenders of the faith who had something to do with the Jewish Olympics. The modern holiday has been recast as a cheery Festival of Lights, a counterpart to the bright tinsel of Christmas. It’s the same impulse that leads Christians to repackage Easter as a vista of bunnies and candy eggs, rather than the commemoration of a brutal public murder.

But this kind of soft-pedaling distorts our history and distracts us from the true meaning of our holidays. Hanukkah really is about a violent insurgency. It’s about the lengths to which the oppressed will go to defend their beliefs. But it’s also about a strain of unchecked aggression that infects those who are convinced that God is on their side. It’s precisely the sort of holiday story, in other words, that might force us to confront the moral crises of our present historical circumstance – before we go the way of the Maccabees, or their imperial enemies.

* * *

Am I A Jewish Writer? And Does It Matter? A Self-Interview

Steve Almond — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:03:41 +0000

My new book of essays, (Not That You Asked), covers a lot of ground: literature, politics, pop culture, sexual shame. It also includes a piece called “Ham for Chanukah” about my unique brand of pork-intensive Judaism. As might be expected, several concerned readers have emailed – including but not limited to my mother – wanting to know how a Jewish writer could sink so low. Recently, I sat down with myself to discuss the matter: So Steve, for the record, are you a Jewish writer or not? Well, Steve, I'm glad you asked. Lots of authors dance around questions like this, but I’m a wretched dancer. The answer is yes. You don’t find that description reductionistic? Of course it’s reductionistic. But it also happens to be factually accurate. I’m Jewish. I’m a writer. Ergo, I’m a Jewish writer. I’d prefer that critics focus on my work rather than me – every honest writer would – but I gave up on that dream long ago. And frankly, I find the other labels I get slapped with much more offensive. Such as? “Literary pornographer.” “Left-wing blowhard.” That kind of thing. Every time I put I book out, it’s the same mishagoss. The critical culture of this country has become infected with a disease I’ll call PeopleMagazinitis. Rather than writing about the quality of the prose and ideas and emotions within a book, they write about the author. Reviewing has become a form of gossip mongering, rather than aesthetic assessment. And I’m not just talking about the trashy outlets, either. The almighty New York Times Book Review pulls the same crap. Okay, so we’ll stick to the text. In your essay “Ham for Chanukah” you confess to being an atheist. Would it then be fair to call you an atheist writer? If you must label, I’d prefer Jewish atheist writer. You don’t see any contradiction there? Only if you define Judaism as a religious identity. Or even more narrowly, as a theological identity. But Judaism – especially in this era, especially in the United States – is a cultural and ethnic signifier more than anything. It means you come from a particular set of bloodlines, a particular set of intellectual traditions. In my case, two of my great-grandfathers were rabbis. But they were also cranky, difficult patriarchs. And so their children turned away from the formal practice of Judaism. But they remained culturally identified as Jews. That doesn’t really explain the “Ham” part of “Ham for Chanukah.” Ah yes, the ham. That comes from my maternal grandmother, Dorethea. She was a German Jew who immigrated to America a few years before World War II. Her reaction to the devastation of the Holocaust was to deny her Jewish identity. I can’t explain precisely why, but I suspect that, like a lot of Jews, she felt guilty for having survived the Holocaust and blamed herself, and maybe her Judaism, for all the tumult. Whatever the psychological particulars, she became a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church. And she insisted on celebrating Christmas. At which she served ham? Well, not every year. Mostly, it was turkey. But we still did the whole holiday schmeer: the tree, the tinsel, the cookies.
As a culturally identified Jew, wasn’t that odd? It was totally fucking nuts. But when you’re a kid, you’re really more focused on gifts than identity. And it wasn’t like my parents hid the fact that we were Jews. We did celebrate Chanukah and Passover, and we had informal bar mitzvahs at home. Still, our brand of Judaism was pretty watered-down by assimilation. So I never made my Jewish identity a central part of my writing. It would have felt phony to do so, to claim that kind of ownership. Especially compared to writers like Nathan Englander and Shalom Auslander, guys who grew up with Judaism as a central and radical aspect of their lives. Before them, you had guys like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Shalom Aleichem, who were writing from within the shetl experience. So now it sounds like you’re saying you should be considered an “assimilated Jewish atheist writer.” There’s really no winning with you, is there? What I’m trying to suggest is that this extratextual labeling is a sucker’s game. All the guys I mentioned above do write about the Jewish world. But their work inevitably grapples with themes and feelings that are universal. That’s how art works. You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy (or even understand) their work. Just like you don’t have to be a member of the British landed gentry to enjoy Jane Austen. Okay, fine. No more labels. But I do think it’s fair to ask how Judaism has influenced your writing. Oh, absolutely. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m a man without a religion. From the outside, it might sometimes seem like that, because there’s nothing in my work (or even in my name or my physical appearance) that screams Jewish! In my case, the links to Judaism are subtler. For instance, in one of the first stories I published, “My Life in Heavy Metal,” I used the word “kvell.” Now, there aren’t a lot of non-Jews who use that word. But my mom used it all the time (because her parents spoke Yiddish), so it was something I heard growing up. And it was the exact right word for the sentence in question. But even more than trafficking in Yiddish words, I think of my work as having a Jewish attitude. Meaning what? Meaning neurotic, self-deprecating, smart-alecky, moralizing. Oh, and guilt-ridden (though I suppose that falls under the broader category of “neurotic.”) I think you just dug yourself a bit of hole. Why? Did I miss an adjective? No, but I don’t think your fellow Jews are going to appreciate being reduced to a series of adjectives. Actually, you’re right. I forgot an adjective: contentious. If these descriptors cause offense, I hereby apologize. But I don’t take them back. These are the attitudes I associate with the Jews I know, and I do so lovingly. I like that we’re big mouths and that we know how to crack jokes at our expense and that we’re honest about our doubts and in our concern for the world. And I do believe that the most important part of being raised Jewish – the one part that seems to have stuck for me – has to do with a determination to find, or create, meaning through words. Isn’t that what the Bible amounts to? It’s a bunch of Jews telling stories in an effort to make sense of their world and their role within it. This is what all the great Jewish intellectuals have been up to, from Maimonides to Marx and Freud. And I’ll add Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth to that list. We’re preoccupied by the life of the mind, by consciousness itself.
Now you’re sounding like a booster for the whole “Chosen People” line. Oh, nonsense. I’m not suggesting that Jews have the monopoly on intellectual achievement or self-reflection. But you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize the emphasis that gets placed on ideas and learning in a Jewish home – even in secularized one like mine. There’s an ambition there, a stubborn vitality. You can hear this even in the Jewish liturgy. As you might guess, I’m not a regular at Synagogue. But I’ve heard the Yom Kippur services a few times, and what always strikes me about them is the emphasis not on acts of atonement, but simple attention. The whole idea is to recognize the splendor of the universe, and to give thanks. God becomes a form of gratitude. Writers have the same agenda. We’re in the business of pricking readers’ consciousness, enticing them to slow down and experience the richness of the world inside and around them. This, by the way, is why my wife and I hope to raise our daughter Jewish. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Given the declared atheist thing, it seems odd to impose a religion on her. Maybe. But I think you can raise a child to have religious identity without pushing them into a specific belief. My wife Erin wanted to convert to Judaism because she respects the values of the religion – that emphasis on ideas and learning. As for me, I want Josephine to know who and where she comes from, that she owes her existence to a particular history of sacrifice. I want her to know that her great-great grandfathers, cranky or not, were passionate thinkers. I want her to celebrate Passover in a manner that compels her to recognize that her ancestors, people of her own blood, endured hardship so that, thousands of years later, she could sit around stuffing herself with roast chicken and matzo balls. And I want that moral knowledge to inform how she views her own world, the social conscience we hope she’ll develop. But that doesn’t amount to a kind of “buffet Judaism”? Just picking and choosing what you like, with no deeper commitment? Yeah, it does. And so what? I’m not interested in forcing my daughter to commit to the parts of Jewish tradition that oppress women, or denigrate other cultures, or presuppose a God that endorses bloody wars. That stuff is medieval. We’ve got enough medieval notions coming from the right wing of this country at the moment. What I want is for Josie to feel a sense of wonder and humility as she moves through the world. I want her to remain curious. More than anything, both Erin and I want her to be a reader. And I think being raised Jewish, or semi-Jewish, can only help.

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