Letter from Melanie:
In Israel, tails are up. Despite the acute national trauma over the plight of the hostages, the continuing (if sporadic) missile attacks and the losses of soldiers’ lives that are still being sustained, there’s a general optimism that the Jewish state is winning this war and that genocidal Iran is staring at defeat.
This is because Israel grasped straight after the atrocities on October 7 2023 that it had no option but to fight until its enemies were destroyed as a military threat. Under enormous pressure throughout from the Biden administration to retreat from this goal, Jerusalem resisted because it understood that this would have meant surrender and a defenseless exposure to further exterminatory assault.
Chanukah, the eight-day festival that’s currently being celebrated throughout the Jewish world, marks a similar example of focused Jewish military resistance to extermination. However, this festival is often prettified and not properly understood.
Chanukah is not the Jewish Christmas. Nor does it merely celebrate a reported miracle of oil sufficient for only one day that lasted instead for eight. Chanukah commemorates a defeat by the Jews of a mortal threat to Jewish existence.
When the conquering Greeks arrived in Judea in 325 BCE, they set about eradicating Judaism and installing Greek culture in its place. Even while Greek leaders were declaring Jewish laws as “inimical to humanity,” many Jews were finding pagan Greek culture with its literature and poetry, drama and art, sports and philosophy, mathematics and political theories hugely seductive.
These “Hellenised” Jews even helped the Greeks rule the country by suppressing Jewish practices and persecuting its rabbinic leaders. This caused deep and lethal fissures between the Hellenised Jews and the faithful.
Only when the Greek ruler Antiochus IV hardened anti-Jewish policies by defiling the Temple, as well as outlawing Sabbath observance and circumcision, did the Jews unite behind the warrior Hasmonean family known as the Maccabees. They rose up in revolt for their liberation, defeated the Greeks and recaptured the Temple.
Many Jews find this historical account of what happened rather uncomfortable. The similarities with today are too sharp. Today’s Jews, many of whom live comfortable lives in communities around the world where they have adapted to the culture of their host nations, don’t like being reminded that assimilation poses a deadly threat to the existence of the Jewish people.
These Jews often shudder at those in their community who take a stand against such assimilation and who advocate fighting to uphold their identity and entitlements. Assimilated Jews tend to deride these co-religionists as zealots and extremists to be resisted.
So a historical account in which such zealots actually saved the Jewish people from persecution and extinction is deeply unpalatable. Better to focus on latkes, dreidels and the soft-focus story of the miraculous oil.
Assimilated Jews often regard conflict as the real killer. To them, consensus is everything. It’s an article of faith that “baseless hatred” will bring the Jewish people down — and divisions between Jews are described reflexively as “baseless”.
Such divisions are said to have been the reason that Jerusalem finally fell to Roman conquest in 70 CE, when the Jews were sent into exile with their homeland not to be recovered until 1948.
It’s certainly true that division weakens resistance against outside enemies. However, to say that it’s the one thing that can destroy the Jewish people is not only to overstate the case but to miss a crucial point.
Much more devastating is if the Jews collectively go down the wrong path — if they stop fighting to defend their identity and way of life because they have buckled under enemy pressure or have been seduced by other cultures into abandoning what they are.
The conquering Romans who arrived in Judea in 63 CE and largely oppressed the Jews found broadly three groups in that community: the Sadducee ruling elite who wanted quiet at all costs; the mainstream Pharisees who began by opposing revolt but joined it once it was underway; and the zealots who had become yet more extreme.
The Jewish community was still riven by internal divisions caused by Hellenisation. The masses viewed the Jewish elites who had adopted pagan Greek ways as working hand in hand with the Romans to extort and impoverish them. Roman religious intolerance and oppressive injustice became fused with assimilation and exploitation by their own leaders to provide much fuel for zealotry.
In the final Jewish revolt against the Romans who put it down so brutally, Jews also killed other Jews. It’s beyond doubt that the terrible slaughter that took place was much intensified as a result.
But what destroyed Judea was not Jewish division. It was Roman colonialist aggression. Even if the Jews hadn’t fought each other, the Romans would still have persecuted them.
True, compromise and negotiation are sometimes necessary and useful. During the revolt, the great Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai negotiated with the Roman emperor Vespasian to set up a rabbinical academy at Yavneh, thus facilitating the development of the rabbinic tradition that reinvented Judaism and saved the Jewish people.
But if the rabbinical ruling elite of Judea had prevailed, the Jews would have been a subject and persecuted people in their own land — prey not only to physical aggression but also to galloping assimilation.
Similarly, the revolt against the Greeks wasn’t just a defence against a predatory colonialist power. If the Maccabees hadn’t prevailed, the Jews would have assimilated into Greek culture and largely disappeared.
Of course, divisions weaken a community and undermine its defences. But the real issue is the reason for such division. Under both Greek and Roman rule, it was that too many Jews had forgotten what they were.
And just like today, under both the Greeks and the Romans it was universalism that weakened the Jews. Scorned and vilified for their particularism and drawn into the embrace of a less demanding culture, they became vulnerable as a result to threats of both assimilation and external attack.
Most of today’s diaspora Jews who live in western societies that disdain or even hate them choose not to fight back. Instead, they keep their heads below the parapet, pretend that the threats aren’t as bad as they actually are or choose to suck up to the governing classes who merely flick them aside. Far worse, some of these Jews actively support the ideologies that have the Jewish people in their sights.
This way lies assimilation and thus destruction. To avoid that fate, Jews have to fight for who they are and what they stand for.
Liberals will respond that, since the opposing side thinks precisely the same, who is to say who is correct? From that they conclude that fighting to defeat the other side is always wrong.
This is the trap of moral relativism, which is based on the belief that objective truth doesn’t exist and that everything is instead a matter of subjective opinion.
But that’s a lethal error. There is indeed such a thing as objective reality.
There really are abuses of power. There really is a difference between aggressors and victims. Iran really does pose a demonstrable threat to Jewish life and the survival of Israel. Assimilation really has caused huge swathes of Jews to disappear as Jews.
Not all division between Jews is “baseless hatred”. Sometimes, if one side wins over the other the Jewish people will be demonstrably harmed. Such situations require not consensus but victory for the side that would best prevent such harm.
Of course, agreement is desirable. But if Jews were to agree to a course of action that would result in their wipeout, maybe that kind of agreement wouldn’t be such a good idea.
Conflict is undesirable, division is dangerous, and war is hell. But the alternative may be far worse.
