This year’s first Chanukah candle will be lit on the evening of Wednesday, Dec. 25, in a remarkable ecumenical link-up of Christmas festivities and the Jewish celebration of candles and latkes, sufganiyot and the singing of “Maoz Tzur.” For most of us.
On the other hand, IfNotNow will be joining Rabbis4Ceasefire and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice in a Zoom event that night and every other night of Chanukah. Their purpose? To “increase, escalate the sacred … lifting up our sacred visions and carrying them with us into the fights ahead.”
What will they be doing to achieve this?
They will “gather for 15 minutes each evening to light candles, sing a song and together lift up a sacred vision of hope.” Their hope? Their sacred visions? The Rabbis4Ceasefire elaborate, knowing:
“there is no military solution to our horror … we are in deep grief … our grief [is being used] to justify genocidal violence directed against the people of Gaza. … In the face of this terrifying, violence, we say no! We uplift the Torah value of v’chai bahem—live by Torah. … We ask you to join our calls for a complete ceasefire now.”
While it probably is clear that their political orientation and security outlook—not to mention their presentation of a factual narrative—is wrong and topsy-turvy, and their heart-on-sleeve morality is corrupt, I find the rooting of their ideology and actions on an interpretation of Judaism and Jewish history not only annoying and ridiculous but repugnant in its intent.
In 167 BCE, a family-based band initiated guerrilla attacks on the Greek-Syrian occupiers of Judea in response to the policies of Antiochus. The foreign ruler had begun a policy to repress the Jewish religion and proscribe public observance of Jewish laws. A year earlier, in 168 BC, he had already desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem with an introduction of pagan rites and sacrificing an unclean animal within the Holy of Holies. He prohibited circumcision. The Sabbath was affected and worse, Jewish leaders succumbed to the blandishments of Hellenization.
Eventually, the Hasmoneans were victorious and adopted the nom de guerre of Maccabees. The battles were costly. The main ones took place at the Ascent of Levonah, Beth Horon, Emmaus and Beth Tzur—all in the area of today’s Judea and Samaria. These are the very areas the three above-mentioned organizations wish to empty of Jews. One can only marvel our progressive anti-Zionist Jews are not boycotting the holiday.
The Maccabees then took Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple sacrificial service on Mount Moriah. This is the site these organizations insist Jews should yield their sovereign control over it. Moreover, Jews today entering the site are anathema to IfNotNow and other radical progressive Jewish groups.
Despite all this history, Chanukah—the holiday that commemorates all of this military and religious activity—is chosen for the purpose of encouraging Israel to yield up its security and halt its war of self-defense. This act of duplicity and absurd reversal of the Jewish narrative highlights everything these groups oppose; in their twisted logic, they reveal their agenda of uprooting Jewish tradition and national identity.
As Rabbi Dahlia Marx has researched, a previous parallel effort to erase Jewish national identity occurred in the early Reform Judaism movement. She writes “anti-nationalist approaches predated Zionism by many decades” and notes that in 1812, David Friedländer declared an Israelite should “pray for blessing and success for my king, for my fellow-citizens, for myself and for my family—not for the return to Jerusalem, not for the restoration of the Temple and the sacrifices. Such wishes I do not have in my heart. Their fulfillment would not make me happy. My mouth shall not utter them.”
It is now 2024 and 212 years later, and despite the return to Jerusalem, the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish national home and the restoration of at least a Jewish presence in the courtyards where the Temple stood, there are Jews who are not only unhappy and their hearts empty of Jewish solidarity but are actively engaged in a campaign to undermine all that has been achieved.
Lending their influence to block sales of arms to Israel, claim equality of Jewish and Arab security reality and thus cleansing Arab terror, supporting the false charge of Israeli “genocide,” reinventing the Yizkor service and seeking the fracturing of the American Jewish consensus, among many other subversions, are all intended to pull down the pillars of the Jewish people’s ethnic community identity.
Their efforts to “speak in the name of Jews” should be stymied by a counter-information and educational program. Those who promote them and lend them platforms should be apprised of the danger of their cause and the messaging in which they engage. This is not solely a matter of another group of anti-Zionists but of Jews who walk a heretical line within the Jewish collective, undermining from the inside.