The following is a transcript of Episode 167 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, and we’re recording on Thursday, December 7th, 2023. 

I learned this morning about the passing of my teacher and friend, Rabbi David Ellenson, a Torah giant and truly a great person. So today’s episode and the Torah we’re going to study is dedicated to his memory. This is going to be the first Identity/Crisis in two months that’s not explicitly about the war, but to be honest, it’s still going to be about the war. 

We’re now in Hanukkah, one of our strangest holidays. I think it’s the only holiday that we celebrate that’s explicitly modeled on a different holiday. Hanukkah is a conscious remaking of Sukkot, an eight-day festival earlier in the liturgical year that couldn’t be adequately celebrated back in that fateful year in the second century BCE. When they reconsecrated the temple, they had the opportunity to remake the holiday in the dead of winter.

Honestly, I can’t help but connect Hanukkah this year to the way Sukkot was interrupted so violently for all of us two months ago. A lot of people have observed that Sukkahs are still standing in some of the southern communities in Israel where the Hamas massacres took place, reminders of a holiday that couldn’t be completed and may never be observable the same way again. 

But back then, there was another reason to make Hanukkah like Sukkot. For Second Temple Jews, Sukkot was the most politically significant holiday of the year. It was a holiday loaded with messianic symbolism, celebrated with metaphors of war. Objects like the lulav and etrog, which the Bar Kokhva revolt centuries later imagined as weapons. You can see it on their coins in their iconography. 

Sukkot involves marching around the temple, punctuated with war chants, save us, Hoshana. When the Hasmoneans led their revolt to recapture the temple, it’s no surprise that they wanted to channel the militarism of Sukkot in investing their military victory with religious significance. So here we are now, a couple thousand years later, in the midst of an awful war and celebrating a holiday that’s about war. 

My colleague, Elana Stein Hain, has a nice piece up on the times of Israel today, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes, in which she shows the way in which our Hanukkah echoes some of the under-examined elements of the original Hanukkah, including the fact that we celebrate Hanukkah now as though it’s about the winning of a war, when in fact, Hanukkah was established to mark the middle of the war. For Elana, this is an opportunity to think about gratitude for the work as it’s still ongoing, still unfinished. 

It feels especially fitting for a war that Israel speaks about today as though it will be able to win, when most wars in the past 50 years have never really been able to achieve closure, and Hamas is going to be a really difficult enemy to entirely defeat. 

Now, a few years ago I collaborated with the folks at BimBam, which was a Jewish media company that produced a lot of videos as a form of Jewish digital storytelling. At the time I wrote the scripts for two videos that went beyond the usual work that they did, commenting on Jewish texts, to tell important stories of Jewish history, and in my case, these were the story of Masada, and then another video about the Bar Kokhva revolt. 

I studied ancient Jewish history and rabbinics for my doctoral work, and my scripts offered some ideas that I felt weren’t all that radical, specifically the thesis that rabbinic Judaism de-emphasized military aspects of the Chanukah story and instead made the story more spiritual. Ideas like light in the darkness, the miracle of the oil. I pointed out that it seemed to me at times that Chanukah in Israel and in America basically feel like different holidays. They’re connected to realities of different lives, Zionist in Zion, diasporist in diaspora. 

And to this effect, there are daily Twitter wars around this time of year about whether Hanukkah codes as a Zionist holiday celebrating a military battle or diasporist rooted in the struggle against assimilation. And you know, at the time when we produced those videos, several of my colleagues in Israel really didn’t like what they saw as my insinuations about Israeli Hanukkah for reasons I still haven’t been able to fully parse.

Because after all, anyway, the answer can be both. Hanukkah can mean both of these things. Holidays expand and contract over time for the cultures and contexts in which we live. They absorb meanings based on what Jewish people need from them at any given time. I’m not sure they need essential meanings as much as elastic meanings. 

But I’ve never stopped being interested in the elasticity and plasticity of Hanukkah in particular. Maybe because so much of Hanukkah feels so deeply on the nose of modern Jewish politics. Mmost of the time, and especially this year. 

For several years, I’ve been following the scholarship on this question of today’s guest, Rabbi Dr. Joshua Kulp, a scholar of ancient Judaism, like me, and a teacher at the conservative yeshiva in Jerusalem. I’ve seen him advertised as speaking and teaching about something that I always took for granted, that the rabbis despised the Hasboneans, opposed them, and de-emphasized their role in Jewish history. Josh apparently disagrees. 

And in the spirit of a debate for the sake of heaven, one of those things that I actually feel channels may be one of the lessons of this holiday more than anything else. I invited him today to share some Torah about Hanukkah. And by that I mean the Hanukkah that once happened and the Hanukkah that we are also awkwardly, tentatively celebrating this year. 

Josh, thanks for coming on the show. So first of all, tell us the thesis. The title of the class that I know you’ve given in a few places is, I’m holding it up here. I do this sometimes in the podcast, even though nobody can see what I’m holding. Did the rabbis oppose the Hasmoneans? I think your approach is that the conventional wisdom is yes, and you don’t feel that’s the case. Tell us why.

Joshua: First of all, thanks for having me, Yehuda. I’ve always found, like you said, Hanukkah to be a very interesting story because it’s a little bit of like a mirror. We look at Hanukkah and we see in Hanukkah the story that we want to see in Hanukkah. And I think there’s a very strong tendency to basically not pay attention all that well to the textual clues, to really examine the text, to think of the nature of the text, and instead to just try to like put onto Hanukkah and onto the Hasmoneans, and we should maybe distinguish between Hanukkah and the Hasmoneans, because those are not the exact same subject. 

The rabbis’ relation to Hanukkah, which is a holiday that they had inherited from an earlier period, could be a little bit different than their attitude towards the Hasmoneans. First of all, we have to realize that the rabbis are interested primarily in two endeavors. One of them is to talk about Jewish law. An immense amount of energy goes into talking about Jewish law. 

And then I would say moral messages, what we might call aggadah, how does one behave, a certain amount of theology, virtually all of rabbinic literature is didactic. So anything they look at, they’re always going to ask the question, what can we learn about it for our day? They show very little interest in history. 

You can say the same thing about the period after the Hasmoneans were gone, the destruction of the temple. Rabbis are just not interested in history. When you see the texts about the destruction of the temple, they’re almost always, what can we learn? What kind of messages can we learn for our lives? They often blame themselves for the destruction of the Temple because you really can’t learn all that much just from blaming an external enemy. 

But what you can do is ask yourself the question, what could we have done to avoid those consequences? It’s a question I think we’re better off asking long after the events are finished. While you’re in the midst of the events, you don’t want to point… I don’t think people want to point the finger at themselves for horrible things that are happening to them. We can see this happening in Israel right now.

But Chazal is living long after the demise of the Hasmonean Empire. The height of the Hasmonean Empire was probably from about 130 BCE, I believe, lasted until 37 CE, but it was already well into its demise by the middle of the first century BCE.

And when we speak about rabbis, we’re talking about people who came in to start really composing literature in the second century CE. So you’re talking about 150, 200 years, and some texts even much later than that, 300, 400 years. The idea that the rabbis would need to even take a stance about the validity of the Hasmonean kingdom, which would so long ago been erased from the world. 

And it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, if you ask me. It doesn’t make sense that the rabbis would care about a kingdom that came so long ago. And there are very, very few texts in rabbinic literature about the Hasmoneans. Now, we can talk about, I think, a richer idea than just about the Hasmoneans is the nature of Hanukkah. What are we celebrating in Hanukkah? This is a very famous debate. Is it al hanisim, which is largely about the military victory? Although the military victory is attributed to God. This is not a military victory attributed just to our own power, or is it focused on the nes pach hashemen, the miracle of the cruise of oil that we’re all familiar with that lasted eight days. That’s something that a lot of people find very interesting.

Yehuda: Yeah, so we’ll come back to that in a second. I mean, one of the things that you learn when we do this line of work with historians, especially around ancient Judaism, is this great line, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, right? The fact that there isn’t literature about something doesn’t mean that it is deliberately being erased. 

But it does seem like that’s one of the arguments that people will use about the Hasmoneans, and I think you would push back against this, that the fact that the rabbis talk very little about the power structures that immediately preceded them might in and of itself be evidence that the rabbis don’t particularly like the Hasmoneans. And would you basically push back and say, no, the absence of the fact that they talk about them very little doesn’t mean that they oppose them, but it might just mean that they don’t care about them?

Joshua: Or they didn’t even know that much about them.

Yehuda: Uh-huh.

Joshua: The books of Maccabees, the second book of Maccabees, there are two main books of Maccabees. There’s three and four, but they don’t have to do with the Maccabees themselves. The first and the second book of Maccabees are about the story of the Maccabees as we know them. The second book of Maccabees was written in Greek, and I don’t know how much the rabbis ever read Greek books. They certainly don’t talk about reading Greek books.

The first book of Maccabees was written in Hebrew, according to basically all scholars, but probably that the existence of a Hebrew copy seems to have been lost at a very early period. The rabbis, there are a lot of stories, a fair number of stories in Josephus. Josephus tells the stories of the Maccabees. There are a fair number of stories in Josephus that appear in the rabbis, but that’s not because the rabbis knew Josephus. It’s just there were stories circulating around. The books of Maccabees were probably not included in the canon because the second book of the Maccabees was written in Greek and there are no Greek books in our canon. And the first book of Maccabees probably was just too late. There are no books in the canon that were described events that happened after the fourth century BCE. 

So I don’t think that the rabbi is purposely censored. By the time you get to the rabbi, he’s talking about 100, 150 CE, it’s not the rabbis that centered the books of Maccabees out of existence. They seem to just have been lost, or the first book of Maccabees was just lost. It was preserved in the Septuagint, but the rabbis don’t use the Septuagint. The rabbis use the Hebrew text of the Bible. 

So they very rarely talk about it, and we can talk about certain texts, but some texts have certain members of the Hasmonean dynasty that are positive. For instance, Yohanan Cohen Gadol. That’s a Maccabee. He’s a later Maccabee, a later Hasmonean. 

Yehuda: He’s basically John the High Priest. 

Joshua: John Herkinus is how he’s known in English. He is a descendant of the Maccabees. He’s in the Hasmonean line. And he is in the first mission of a vote as being part of the transmission of the oral Torah. There are, I believe, one or maybe two slightly negative stories about him in the Talmud, and there’s not that many stories, period, but the rest are all positive. 

King Yanai is another Hasmonean king. If you really read the stories there, King Yanai comes off as sort of neutral. He’s not a character that we find all that interesting because we don’t learn that much from him. He’s almost treated as if he’s like a Roman or a Greek king.

What the rabbis are more interested in is what did they do to cause King Yonai to be angry at them. It’s a far more interesting question to them. Now, I don’t want to say that the rabbis had a positive appraisal of the Hasmoneans. I just don’t think it registered all that much to them. The same way, if you look at the Book of Kings, the rabbis don’t have that much interest in the book of Kings, because it’s largely historical, and rabbinic literature is much more of a religious didactic, legalistic, halakhic nature and not it’s not Josephus. It’s not even close to Josephus.

Yehuda: Okay, but that itself seems to me a political comment. And by the way, for our listeners, we are gonna kind of compile some of the texts that we’re casually referencing here in ways that people can kind of follow along a little bit. 

It’s not an insignificant divide between the historical legacy and the religious legacy. And another way to portray that is the Hasmoneans, in a lot of ways, symbolize secular power, and the rabbis come along much more interested in religious power. And may be conscious of the fact that based on the historical record that’s not in Jewish tradition, that’s in the historians, so to speak, the Hasmoneans are kind of bad. They’re bad kings. They do kind of, they expand the boundaries of the land of Israel, they conquer a whole bunch of people, they seem to be kind of corrupt. 

So that’s why I think this hypothesis has emerged among scholars and maybe even among Jews that like there’s a conscious choice being made here, that when it comes to preserving the arc of Jewish history and the stories that we want to tell, Hanukkah’s good, then there’s like a dark period, and it only gets interesting and important again once the rabbis are in charge of Judaism. 

So that’s why I think, that’s the thrust of the critique is that they are erasing something that looks to them like a version of secular power and actually assimilationist in its own right in the pursuit of something of like resetting what the religious map of leadership is supposed to look like.

Joshua: Yeah, I don’t think rabbis are conscious, are doing that. I mean, I think that the Hasmonean texts and the history probably was gone by the time the rabbis came into, I don’t want to even say power, because we really don’t know what power of any sorts the rabbis had. You’re talking about a very large gap in history. Most people think the books of the Maccabees were written and they were in existence by the end of the first century BCE. It’s another 200 years, the rabbis, in order to erase the memory or have any conscience of doing this, would have to know who the Hasmoneans were. 

Now, I’m not arguing that the Hasmoneans were good kings. My impression is that all dynasties have lots of bad kings. You know, you look at the Books of Kings, there’s a bunch of terrible kings. Well, I mean, use that as a foil. The Book of Kings is full of terrible kings. It’s all right there for everybody to read. And yet the rabbis don’t oppose the Davidic dynasty. You can oppose individual political leaders without opposing the entire system. 

I also don’t, as I said, I don’t think the rabbis register all that much about the Hasmoneans. What often then happens is there’s one step further that they oppose the Hasmoneans and now they also oppose militarism. They oppose war. That’s not a necessary… I mean, they could go together…But it’s not a necessary step. You can be opposed to a particular military leader or a particular regime without being a pacifist. I mean, this happens all the time. 

Yehuda: Great, so let’s take a text on that actually, because I think that linkage between the actual specific rules of the Hasmoneans and the militarism of Hanukkah travels together a little bit, as you indicated. Here’s the most famous Talmudic text about Hanukkah, Shabbat 21b. The text reads as follows. I’ll just read the paragraph. We’ll learn it together. “What is Hanukkah? ‘Mai Hanukkah?’ The Sages taught on the 25th day of Kislev, there are eight days of Hanukkah. A person may not eulogize on them and may not fast on them.” That’s the kind of negative way of saying these are special days, what you can’t do. 

“When the Greeks entered the sanctuary, they defiled all the oils that were in the sanctuary. When the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruise of oil that was placed with the seal of the high priest. There was oil there to light. Only one day a miracle occurred and they lit from it for eight days. The next year the Sages instituted these days and made them holidays with Hallel and thanksgiving.”

Hard not to read that text as, yeah, the fact that they won a battle, insignificant. Really interesting is they only had a little bit of oil and it lasted for eight days. It sounds from a kind of cursory reading that there is a kind of marginalization of the Hasmoneans. They’re not the ones who make the holiday and the marginalizations of the power that’s actually going on here.

Joshua: Yeah, so this text obviously is one of the most well-known texts in all of Judaism, I think. Vered Noam, a very well-known scholar here in Israel, a winner of the Pras Yisrael Prize for scholarship, wrote a long article about this. 

Basically, there’s two parts of this text. There’s a part of it, the beginning, that’s called Megilat Taanit, the Scroll of Fasting, and that is an ancient list of days, mostly Hasmonean victories, in which we don’t fast. And then we get an explanation of those days that sort of grew over the course of many centuries. And that text that you’re reading is a Babylonian rendering of that text that explains the holiday of Hanukkah. 

But what we’re missing, what I think most people are missing, is the question that text is asking. There are two puzzles with Hanukkah. One is why is it a fire holiday? We take this for granted. But it is not all that apparent that Hanukkah should be a fire holiday. After all, we’re singing Chanukat Hamizbeach, the dedication of the altar. Now there are fires on the altar, but we all know that that’s not the fire that we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating the fires of the menorah. That’s why we light a menorah or a chanukiyah. 

And the other puzzle with Hanukkah is why is it eight days? All of the other holidays in Megilat Ta’anit, military victories are one day, or almost all that celebrate military victories. All are one day. Why is Hanukkah eight days? Those are two puzzles that rabbis and commentators have been asking since the beginning. 

Now, there are other versions of that text. The other versions of that text were preserved throughout Jewish history, a little bit more marginalized. They were preserved outside of the context of the Babylonian Talmud, and none of them originally mentioned that miracle. And when you read those texts, they keep coming up with all sorts of hodgepodge, you know, extemporary readings of, why is it eight days? Oh, it took the Maccabees eight days to rebuild the altar. It took the Maccabees eight days to rebuild the menorah. it took them eight days to do this or that. 

None of them mentioned this miracle. They all have trouble with that eight days. Some of them, I think, mention what I think is the simple reason is that the Maccabees were trying to emulate the earlier two dedications of the altar. That would have been the first one by Moses in the Torah and later on by Solomon in the dedication to the first temple, both of which there are texts that seem to say that they lasted eight days.

It’s not hard to imagine the Hasmoneans in the 2nd century BCE trying to say they have the same legitimacy as Moses and Solomon. After all, the Hasmoneans shouldn’t be the high priests because they don’t come from the right priestly line, nor should they be kings. It took a while for them to be kings, but they’re certainly not in the kingly line. So the Hasmoneans having to defend their own legitimacy, I think, is the reason why Hanukkah is eight days. 

By the way, you led with the comparison with Sukkot. That only appears in the second book of Maccabees. And I think that that’s doing the same thing. I think the second book of Maccabees is also already trying to ask the question, why is it eight days? And they link it up with Sukkot. I don’t think that that’s the original reason why Hanukkah is eight days.  And by the way, the second book of Maccabees also has a fire tale. They have this strange story that they hid in the times of the first exile. They took some fire from the altar and hid it in Babylonia. And then Nehemiah brought it back and they were rededicating the altar. It’s a very strange, not well-known story. 

But they’re also trying to explain why Chanukah is a fire holiday. 

Yehuda: So where do you think it really comes from?

Joshua: Why do I think there’s a fire holiday?

Yehuda: What’s the original Hanukkah, as you understand it?

Joshua: So I think probably the original eight days, my, and this is a little bit of a theory, the theory that makes most sense to me is that the Hasmoneans were trying to create a holiday that was as legitimate as Moses’s dedication of the altar and Solomon’s dedication of the altar. The Hasmoneans had to constantly battle for their own legitimacy, both as high priests and as kings. And that makes sense to me, historically. 

The fire holiday, look, Josephus, in the first century CE, says that the Jews call it Urim, lights. He doesn’t call it festival of lights, he just says lights. And he says, we don’t know why. Maybe it’s because they came from darkness to light. Right? 

Yehuda: Yeah, it’s Equinox stuff, you know.

Joshua: Just, it could be, right? So, it could be. I think that my point with Josephus is that he doesn’t know why it’s called lights. He doesn’t connect it to any miracle. Probably the original reason is everybody has light holidays in those days. 

Yehuda: Right, in darkness. 

Joshua: That’s very common. The earlier texts, I don’t think it’s till you get to the rabbis that you get to any ceremony of lighting a Hanukkah menorah. You have evidence that Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disagreed with it in rabbinic literature. Only in the Babylonian Talmud. The Mishnah, a second-century CE text, the Mishnah already refers to a Hanukkah lamp. So we know that rabbis, as long as we can know rabbinic literature, they were always lighting a Hanukkah lamp. 

But there’s no evidence about a Hanukkah lamp earlier than rabbinic literature, which isn’t saying that much, there’s not a lot of literature between… Right, there’s not a lot of literature about anything, so I don’t want to make too much out of that.

Yehuda: Yeah, about anything. Okay, so. Alright, so here’s my favorite part of this text in Shabbat 21b that I actually think fewer people pay attention to, which is what happens next in this text, which I think is the encoded reference to what’s going on in Hanukkah. But this is just my own theory. The text goes on after it establishes Hanukkah, it says as follows, “We learned there,” right, in other words, in reference to that, “a spark that emerges from a hammer that goes out and causes damage, the one who struck the hammer is liable.”

I think that’s code! Right? This is Jewish law. I know you don’t buy it. I think this is code. Jewish law. The rabbis have now totally changed the channel. They’ve said, I’m talking about Hanukkah, and now I teach you something else in relationship to nothing that logically follows, that if a person strikes a hammer in the public domain and a spark comes out of that hammer and causes damage, it doesn’t matter that you didn’t directly hit the hammer to cause the damage. The spark that gets created there is the person who hits the hammer.

Who do we think the hammer is? And by the way, the next line, which is even better, I know you hate this, but I think it’s right, here’s the best part, then it goes back to Chanukah, which is, it says the example, a camel laden with flax that passes through the public domain. So now let’s say you imagine like, the public domain is like the narrow alley in the Shuk, right, so in the public domain, this camel is covered in flax, and its flax goes into the stores, and it catches fire from the storekeeper’s lamp, and it sets fire to the building, the camel owner is liable because it’s laden too heavily. However, if the storekeeper places his lamp outside, the storekeeper is liable. 

What is the time of year in which we place our lamps outside, which is Hanukkah? In other words, I think, I know this is like a little too neat. I think what the rabbis are basically saying here is, great, we have this holiday that’s about fire connected to politics and it is flammable. It’s inflammatory, it creates conditions around which we kind of don’t really like and it represents putting fire in the public square. Now tell me why it’s, why you, I know why you love it, but tell me why you hate it.

Joshua: Well, I mean, you’re a great rabbi. You really are a great rabbi. 

Yehuda: I’m not a rabbi, actually.

Joshua: I know, I know, but you act like a rabbi and that’s enough for me. It’s good drash. Look, this is what the rabbis do on virtually every page of the Talmud. Those are two Mishnayot, two Mishnas from Bava Kama. And they’re the only places that mention anything like Hanukkah, anything about Hanukkah. Hanukkah is very rarely, there’s a few Mishnas about the Torah reading, but that’s not all that interesting.

So what you have here is what I would call Masachet Chanukah Haktanah, a small tractate of Hanukkah. All of the information about Hanukkah gets concentrated into those about two, three pages in the Talmud. And quite naturally this happens on every page of the Talmud. They look for whatever Mishnah mentions Hanukkah and they learn what they can from those Mishnayot. They debate those mishnas. Whatever, whatever material is there, it very rarely has any connection to what came before it. 

Now there’s another big problem, which I’m sure you realize about this. The rabbis don’t know the word Maccabee. This is a puzzle that no one really knows. The rabbis only refer to them as Hasmoneans, and the books of Maccabees call them the Maccabees. Maccabee famously comes after Judah Maccabee. They say it’s because some kind of hammer reference to him. No one knows why Judah Maccabee was called hammerhead. Some people think it was his head looked like a hammer. All of the brothers get these nicknames in the books of Maccabees. The only one that we really remember is Judah. 

But the rabbis don’t know that. They nowhere express any knowledge of that. I mean, I don’t feel like I need to argue really against this. It’s a clever midrash. It’s clever. 

Yehuda: It’s clever. It’s clever. I will say, I would like people to listen at home to understand that when one scholar says to another scholar, that’s a great drash, what they’re basically saying is, get off my lawn.

Okay, let’s read another text together, in which you also hear a little bit of the, I think of the rabbinic concern about the Hasmoneans and about militarism, and also the ways in which the Hasmoneans ultimately were bad for the Jewish people. And that’s Talmud in Sota 49b. 

“The rabbis taught when the kings of the Hasbinian house besieged one another,” and this is actually a pretty good rendering of history. The prompt for Pompey to come into Jerusalem is essentially a civil war between the Hasbinian kings. Like the Hasbinians last for about 100 years until they start attacking each other. 

“And the Hyrcanus is one of the brothers, is outside the city, and Aristobulus is inside the city. Every day they would send down coins in a bank box and they would send up daily offerings.” Presumably the animals are outside the city. They’re essentially keeping the temple functioning, these two brothers while they’re in a civil war with one another. “There was a certain sage there conversant in Greek wisdom. He spoke to them in that vernacular of Greek wisdom and said to them, all the while they’re immersed in the temple service, they won’t be delivered in your hands.” 

Meaning this structure that you’ve created of codependency inside and outside the city means that God has little incentive to allow the temple to be destroyed. “The next day the people inside the city sent down coins in a bank box, and they on the outside sent them up a pig. When it reached the midpoint of the wall, it stuck its nails in the wall and the land of Israel trembled for four hundred parsaot.” This scene is memorably captured in the opening of the film The Simpsons. It’s called Spider Pig. At that moment they said, not really.

Joshua: Spider Pig.

Yehuda: “At that moment they said, cursed is the man who raises pigs and cursed is the man who teaches his son Greek wisdom.” I mean, this is basically describing that the Hasmoneans have become so fixated on control of the city and control of the temple that they have essentially forfeited any religious and moral authority. And obviously this assimilation stuff is running through it. So how do you read it? How do you kind of assimilate a text like this into how you think about this issue?

Joshua: Yeah, I mean, look, I’d have to review the text. I was actually just looking at, my chavruta and I are working on a book on basically rabbinic history, but like a popularized version of scholarship on rabbinic history. So I was just looking at, that text appears in Josephus with a lot of differences. 

Look, in the end, what is some what’s the message of that text? Cursed is the person who raises pigs and teaches their child Greek. Right? So the reason for that story to be incorporated in rabbinic literature is clearly the end of the story that the raising of pigs and the teaching of Greek literature is what causes destruction. 

The story of the civil war, there were a lot of civil wars in the Hasmonean period. I mean, powerful leaders in all sorts of nations. Greek literature is just full of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies and Ptolemites and the Romans all going at it all the time. This is just the nature of political fighting in the Middle East. 

The rabbis take these stories, my sense is they take these stories when they can find a broader didactic message. The broader didactic message, the background of the Hasmoneans is just a foil, it’s just a background to tell these kinds of tales. I don’t want to say that the rabbis loved the Hasmoneans. I certainly don’t want to create a picture where the rabbis were militaristic soldiers. 

Another one of my, some of my students call me the myth buster, or occasionally the Grinch who stole Hanukkah. But another one of my favorite stories is in Pesach, in the Passover Seder, the five sages were gathering in B’nei Brak, not to study Torah, but to lead the Bar Kochba revolt. And that’s why the, you’ve heard that one before? 

Yeah. So to that, the same thing I would say. No, there’s nothing strange about rabbis sitting all night and studying Torah. This is what they did all the time. Rabbinic literature is full of stories of them studying Torah. The only people who would tell such a revised version of that tale are people who couldn’t imagine staying up and studying Torah all night, because it’s just not all that interesting.

So they imagine the rabbis must be doing something more interesting, something more relevant to our lives. Oh, they must have been fighting a revolt. That’s a Zionist take of the rabbis or a militarist take of the rabbis. I don’t think that’s true either. I don’t want to say that the rabbis were out there fighting wars. Far from it. Rabbis are a small group of scholars who are interested in scholarly topics. I don’t think they have strong views on militarism. They are so removed from any militant.

Yehuda: You don’t think they have strong negative, you don’t think they have any strong negative views on militarism? But I guess the flip side of, the better version of that question is, what does it look like, and now we can move to the present, what does it look like to be the heirs of a rabbinic tradition that doesn’t have strong views on militarism, and then the traveling, the porting of that holiday into the place actually in the world now where the majority of Jews celebrate Hanukkah, which is in the state of Israel, and in a country in which militarism kind of courses through the veins of the society, what does that mean now?

Joshua: For sure. Yeah, the modern message of Hanukkah, my imagination, I haven’t studied this in depth, is that in the Middle Ages, Hanukkah was a minor holiday. And Hanukkah became a major holiday for two reasons in the modern world. The obvious earlier reason is the competition with Christmas, and that the Jews needed a prominent holiday in that time of year to compete with Christmas. You certainly can see in America the prominence of Hanukkah in America is far greater than it ever was in the Middle Ages.

And also it was an attempt by Zionists, early Zionists clearly to find role models in the ancient tradition role models that really were like, I don’t know, a little bit closer to our time than the Books of the Kings. Kings feels very remote. The Books of the Maccabees feels a little bit closer. And we do have a holiday, right? After all, we don’t have any holiday celebrating King David’s victories. But we do have a holiday celebrating Judah Maccabee’s victories. 

So, I mean, you can see that very obviously in Israeli culture and Israeli history, the adaptation of Judah Maccabee as a role model. 

So, but I also think that a lot of times we come to this question thinking about how prominent Hanukkah is in our lives, and then asking the question, why wasn’t it such a big deal to the rabbis? Whereas it probably wasn’t just such a big deal to the rabbis because it was a minor holiday. They probably barely preserved it. My guess is that the only reason Hanukkah didn’t get erased was because it had a mitzvah attached to it. All the other holidays in Megillat Ta’anit, in the Scroll of Fasting, we don’t observe it anymore. Purim we observe, but Purim’s much earlier. 

Yehuda: Purim’s weird. 

Joshua: Yeah, Purim’s weird, but it’s a biblical book, so, you know.

Yehuda: There is a mitzvah attached to it, but the rabbis are also responsible for shepherding and creating that mitzvah. I mean, I’m struck by, what you’ve said here aligns a lot with, you know, with Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes in Zakhor, about how the rabbis are disinterested in history, much more interested in preserving the kind of theological and moral message of history to the extent that they can find it and in religious observance. 

But his example is Hanukkah. He says, we may, we well ponder the audacity with which the rabbis fix the Hanukkah benediction, with the phrase, “Blessed are you, our lord, our God, who commanded us to kindle the Hanukkah lamps.” And he’s right to say, on what planet did God quote unquote command us to light Hanukkah candles? 

So there’s something going on where the rabbis are investing this day with some measure of theological significance connected to obligation. I guess what you’re suggesting is it already exists with the obligation to light, so the bracha doesn’t mean that they’re making it much bigger deal, they’re just kind of leaning into it.

Joshua: Yeah, and we say that, I mean the Babylonian Talmud already asked that question. Where did God give us the commandment to recite the blessings over the Hanukkah candles? But this is something, the difference between something that comes from the Torah or from God and something comes from the rabbis is very much like in flux, I think, in the rabbinic period. And the rabbis don’t make a big difference. 

A teacher of mine once told me, how do we know what it says in the Torah? The rabbis tell us what it says in the Torah. And how do we know that we have to listen to the rabbis? The Torah says we have to listen to the rabbis. So the difference between what we call today D’Rabbanan, D’Orayta, from the rabbis or from the Torah, isn’t really a huge difference in early rabbinic literature. 

But I do really think that the reason why Chanukah, most of that Gemara in Shabbat deals with the mitzvah of how do you light the Chanukah candles? Which direction do you light them? Where do you have to put them? Can you use the candles? What happens if they go out? Almost all of the questions that they ask there are halakhic legal questions and not sort of the deeper meaning. That’s just the literature that we have.

Yehuda: Do you like Hanukkah?

Joshua: Do I like Hanukkah? I mean, I’ll tell ya.

Yehuda: I mean, because you say your students say you’re a myth buster, and you’ve said this, it was a minor holiday in the medieval period. What does it mean to you then?

Joshua: Yeah, so my mother was one of the best gift-givers in the world. She was so careful. I hope she’s listening. She was so careful about giving gifts. We got a new gift every night. She put out a tremendous amount of work. 

Here in Israel gift-giving is not such a big feature of Hanukkah. And I don’t know, maybe children have gotten a little bit more difficult in a world of plenty. So I miss that gift-giving that I had in America. I really do. I miss the cold of America. It’s weird to celebrate Hanukkah in a warm country. I love that coziness of hanging out inside and getting a new sweater, some new socks. So I love Hanukkah, but I think I liked it better when I was a young kid in America, but that might be natural that children like it better. 

It’s also not a day off here in Israel. It’s not as big of a holiday. Yeah, well it is for kids in the school. I guess you, I don’t know. Yeah, I haven’t lived in America in a long time. Yeah.

Yehuda: Yeah, there’s a little bit of, there’s some color war. 

Joshua: By the way, oh, I wanted to tell you one more thing, sorry. 

Yehuda: Go ahead. 

Joshua: With my kids ask me when they were little, this is what I wanted to tell you. My kids ask me, Abba, why do we light the Hanukkah candles? What do I say to them? Well, they found one little bottle of oil in the temple and it only lasted for, it was supposed to last for one day and it lasted for eight days. In other words, it’s a great story for kids. 

Yehuda: It is great story.

Joshua: So like, I don’t tell my kids the scholarship I teach to older people. But what I wanted to say, I wanted to say this earlier, is that I think that part of the function of scholarship is to make people a little bit less certain about the truth of their own narratives. I don’t mind people seeing in Hanukkah whatever it is that they want to see. I just want them to realize that what they’re seeing in Hanukkah, or really any aspect of Judaism, is often a reflection of themselves and to have a little bit of modesty, and to say, well, the way I view Hanukkah could be wrong and somebody else could view Hanukkah a totally different way, and they can both be legitimate.

I think that’s part of the role of scholarship in a religious world. It’s not to say that your truth is wrong, it’s to say that your truth is, let’s say, your truth. It’s not an objective truth.

Yeah, I’m sympathetic to that, I guess, with a caveat, which is, one of the instincts of scholars, often because we have access to different source material and a hermeneutic of suspicion about things that people normally believe, is that we’re engaged in a deconstruction process when it relates to the things about human people’s lives that mostly need constructive processes. And it’s hard.

For me personally, the shift from being in the academic world to working in the space that I am now really lives on that exact divide. Do I wanna spend my time convincing people to be less certain of their convictions and to maybe dispute or undermine what they believe to be true? Or do I wanna help people find truths and convictions, not certainties, but truths and convictions that can help them lead lives? I think that’s,

Joshua: Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I feel like, I’m a rabbi and a doctor. And those two roles don’t always sit easily together. But it’s also it’s just that’s how my mind works. I’ve always thought critically, but I’ve always believed deeply in the religious meaning and searching for religious and existential meaning, particularly in Judaism. 

And it’s there are other areas of, let’s say, Jewish scholarship that are even more difficult. When you get to the Bible, it becomes much more difficult. With Chanukah, I feel like we can all agree these were historical events, and we’re on safer ground. But these are difficult questions for scholars who work in religious circles to deal with.

Yehuda: Totally. I’ll ask you one last question, then I’ll let you go. It’s late where you are. You mentioned at the beginning before we started recording that you have three children at war right now in Israel, and obviously we, all of our listeners, are thinking of you and your family and praying for your children, their safe return. Something that you’re thinking about, particularly about Hanukkah, when you’re living with that right now in your life of being at war?

Joshua: Yeah, yeah. So I’ll tell a funny episode. I was just on the plane and I watched Top Gun Maverick. I think it was the first time I’ve watched that show. And of course it’s Top Gun. It finishes with a very emotional, like emotional victory. And I gotta say as an Israeli, there are the consequences, the moral issues of the war. They’re looming and dealing with our own government, what’s going to be the day after. 

But what I really want to see is a victory. I want to see the people who committed these atrocities, I want to see them brought to justice. Probably that’s going to mean the end of their lives. I want to see our Hamas defeated. And I want to see a message sent by Israel that you can’t do that to us again.

It’s going to come out sounding much more militaristic than I normally am. In my normal world, I sort of waffle between the importance of a strong Israel and the importance of a just and moral Israel. But right now, with half of my neighborhood having kids fighting down in Gaza, I want to see them come out safely. But even more than I want to see them come out safely, I want to see them coming out winning, and that we can declare a victory over Hamas.

Yehuda: One day, maybe, celebrate it with a holiday. So thank you all for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest this week, we’re by Joshua Kulp. 

For the next few weeks, Identity/Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter, wishing Mazal Tov to our regular producer M. Louis Gordon on the birth of his son last week. We look forward to welcoming him back in a few weeks after parental leave. Our executive producer is Maital Friedman. The show was produced with assistance from Sam Balough and Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silversound NYC, and our music is provided by So Called. 

Transcripts of our show are available on our website, typically about a week after an episode airs. You can sponsor an episode of the show, follow the link in the show notes, or visit us at shalomhartman.org/identitycrisis. You can always send us ideas of what you’d like us to cover or comment on this episode by writing to us at [email protected]. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, you can sign up for our newsletter in the show notes. You can subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week. Happy Hanukkah. And thanks for listening.