The Maccabees are best understood as moderate fanatics. They were not in total revolt against Greek culture...On the other hand, they were fighting heroically for their traditions and the survival of their faith...They had no interest in religious liberty within the Jewish community and believed religion was a collective regimen, not an individual choice.
They were not the last bunch of angry, bearded religious guys to win an insurgency campaign against a great power in the Middle East, but they may have been among the first...The Maccabees became religious oppressors themselves, fatefully inviting the Romans into Jerusalem...Settlers in the West Bank tell it as a story of how the Jewish hard-core defeated the corrupt, assimilated Jewish masses...But there is no erasing the complex ironies of the events, the way progress, heroism and brutality weave through all sides. The Maccabees heroically preserved the Jewish faith. But there is no honest way to tell their story as a self-congratulatory morality tale. The lesson of Hanukkah is that even the struggles that saved a people are dappled with tragic irony, complexity and unattractive choices.
That was brought to you by David Brooks via Jeffrey Golodberg at the NYTimes.
It drew a few letters:
...That the casting off of the Seleucid yoke involved violence by the oppressed Jews is a truism. But bloodshed has attended many rightly venerated stands against oppression, including the one at the birth of our own country. Ideals are not always easily defended.
Reducing the defense of the essential Jewish ideal to an “insurgency campaign,” where “the good guys did horrible things,” is the sort of simplistic revisionism that is, in these deconstructive days, as misleading as it is common.
(Rabbi) Avi Shafran
Director of Public Affairs
Agudath Israel of America
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