Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 13th December / 23rd Kislev 5786

NOT ADAM TONIGHT

The winter solstice has always wanted a story. When the days shrink, the cold closes in and the light seems to be dying, human beings instinctively look for a festival that says: no, the darkness will not win. In the ancient Mediterranean this meant Saturnalia, Kalendae, bonfires and torches; for us, in Europe, it may mean Christmas, a Christian solstice feast of light-in-the-dark, birth-in-midwinter, hope against despair.

This was a problem for the Rabbis of the early centuries, living under Greek and then Roman rule, surrounded by exactly these kinds of winter festivals. They knew that their people did not live in a vacuum. Their communities were exposed to, and often attracted by, the same solstice rites and celebrations as everyone else. The question was: how do you acknowledge this very human experience of darkness and returning light, without simply being absorbed into the religious world of the empire?

That is why the Talmud, [Avodah Zarah 8a], spins its strange little tale about Adam and the first winter. Adam sees the days getting shorter and shorter and the light disappearing. He panics and says: “Woe is me! Because I sinned, the world is becoming dark and returning to chaos; perhaps this is death, decreed upon me from Heaven.” In fear, he fasts and prays for eight days, as the daylight continues to dwindle. Then the solstice comes; the days begin, imperceptibly, to grow longer. Adam realises that this is simply minhago shel olam, the natural order of the world, not the end of creation. So his fear turns into joy, and he celebrates.

The Talmud then adds a sharp little coda: Adam originally established this festival “for the

sake of Heaven,” but in later generations the nations took it over and turned it into their own winter festivals. So look how smart the Rabbis are. They do not deny that there is a universal human fear of the dark and a universal human joy on the winter solstice. They even build a story around that: a story of winter and hope, of light shining in the darkness, of a weary world rejoicing, of the promise that the night will not have the last word; a story of light that belongs to all humanity. But of course, Hanukkah is another story.

At Hanukkah we tell a very specific tale: how the Syrian-Greek empire rose up against Your people Israel, banned Torah, defiled the Temple in Jerusalem, and tried to erase Jewish worship and identity; how a small band of Jews, the Maccabees, fought back, drove them out, and liberated and rededicated the Temple; how, according to the later tradition, they found only one small cruse of pure oil, enough for one day, and yet the light burned for eight days until new oil could be prepared. That is the story we bless every night: not just winter and hope in general, but this people, this Temple, this tiny flame that should have gone out and somehow did not. And if we want a neater formulation of what Hanukkah is about, we do not have to look further than what our own liturgy tells us. In Al ha-Nissim, the special paragraph we recite on Hanukkah (in our Siddur it is on p. 374), we say:

“In the days of Mattityahu, son of Yohanan the High Priest, the Hasmonean and his sons, when the wicked Greek kingdom rose up against Your people Israel, to make them forget Your Torah and violate the laws of Your will…”

The language here is not universal. It is not “all people everywhere.” It is “Your people Israel”.

Maimonides, [Hilchot Ḥanukkah 3:1], adds one line that rabbis almost never quote in sermons: “The Hasmoneans […] appointed a king from among the priests, and sovereignty returned to Israel for more than two hundred years, until the destruction of the Second Temple.” That is as blunt as it gets. Hanukkah is not about a generic human longing for light, but about Jewish resistance, Jewish worship, and above all Jewish political power. Hanukkah is fiercely particular, unapologetically Jewish, about survival and self-determination – not just candles and songs.

One may well wonder: how did we get from that very Jewish, very political story to the Hanukkah as it is so often presented today, the festival of “religious freedom for all”?

The pattern is familiar. Over the last century or so, especially in the West, we have told and retold the Maccabees as pioneers of freedom of conscience, champions of minority rights, defenders of everyone’s right to worship, or not, as they choose. In this way Hanukkah has become a winter celebration of tolerance, pluralism and human rights: the Jewish holiday that proves we belong inside a wider, liberal story. And in our Anglo-Jewish world there is now often a second step. Hanukkah becomes not only a symbol of general religious liberty, but also a kind of prophetic festival of social justice. The language is that of “prophetic voices”, “speaking truth to power”, “standing with the oppressed”. It is thoughtful, learned and morally serious.

The question is not whether those causes are important; many of them are deeply rooted in Torah. The question is what happens to Hanukkah’s own narrative in the process. Because the axis has shifted. Hanukkah no longer tells, at its centre, the story of a small people

struggling against erasure, of the rededication of the Temple or of the return of Jewish sovereignty. It becomes, instead, a drama that our liberal, post-Christian society finds more familiar and comfortable: Jews as the conscience of the world; Jews as critics of their own power; Jews who are allowed to exist only as allies of other people’s revolutions.

The festival that once marked Jews fighting for Jewish power is reused to celebrate Jews who speak against Jewish power. Again, that prophetic instinct is not foreign to our sources. But structurally, you can feel how Hanukkah is being read through the lens of liberal Protestantism. It is no longer a Jewish religious holy day so much as a celebration of a religion that transcends its own particularity, confesses its sins, and offers itself in the service of a universal ethic of justice and rights. The only truly acceptable Jew becomes the one who would rather stand outside his own camp and denounce it.

A Jewish festival whose core story is about Jewish endurance and Jewish sovereignty has been reframed as a call for Jews to repent of power, to universalise their experience, and to stand with other people’s struggles. That is not just a different emphasis; it is, in effect, a different religion’s Hanukkah. It is not the Hanukkah of the Al ha-Nissim prayer. It is a post-Christian Hanukkah.

When I say that this way of talking about Hanukkah is post-Christian, I do not mean that it is secretly trying to convert anyone. I mean that we live in societies that no longer believe or practise Christianity, but whose moral reflexes are still shaped by a Christian story. Even secular people around us instinctively think in terms of the innocent victim, the guilty powerful, the call to repentance, the hope for redemption. That is what I mean by post-Christian: the theology has faded, but the emotional and moral language is still Christian-shaped.

So when Hanukkah is retold mainly as a story about “religious freedom for everyone”, or as a

platform for Jews to criticise Jewish power and stand with other people’s struggles, that is a post-Christian retelling. It takes a very Jewish, very awkward story, about a small people fighting for its own survival, its own Temple and its own sovereignty, and fits it into a pattern our surrounding culture already loves: the virtuous victim, the repentant community, the universal message of justice.

And it is not accidental that, inside this way of talking, one of the great Jewish stories of the last seventy-five years almost never appears. Those self-appointed prophetic voices rarely mention the story of the expulsion of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, nor the fact that hundreds of thousands of those Jews were quite literally saved by the existence of a Jewish state. And you can see why. That story is about an indigenous Middle Eastern minority, stripped of citizenship and property, rescued, with all the imperfections and pain you like, by Jewish power. It does not fit easily into a post-colonial script in which Jews are primarily imagined as white, Western colonisers. So it tends to be softened, marginalised, or simply forgotten.

There is, I would suggest, a deeper theological project behind these universal Hanukkahs: an attempt to elaborate a post-colonial, post-Zionist theology, in which Jewish particularity and Jewish sovereignty are always the problem to be confessed and overcome. In that theology, the ideal Jew is the one who feels at home in Western liberalism, who distances himself from Jewish power, and who offers his own festivals as metaphors for other people’s struggles.

Rabbi’s Address (cont.)

Again, the ethical concerns are often genuine and serious. But if they become the only way we can tell the story, then it is not really Hanukkah any more. It is a Christian-shaped, post-colonial moral imagination speaking through Jewish candles.

So we now have, at the very least, two Hanukkah lights on the table. There is Adam’s light – the universal human festival of the solstice: fear of darkness, relief at the returning sun, joy that history is not collapsing. It belongs to Adam ha-rishon, to the nations, to everyone. And there is the Maccabean light – the fiercely Jewish light of a minority who refuses to assimilate, who purifies a defiled Temple, reclaims political sovereignty, and then lights lamps in “Your holy courtyards.”

Since the time of the Talmud we have been aware that these two narratives are different, and that they both coexist, at different levels, in Hanukkah as a festival. So the question is: what do we celebrate on Hanukkah? When we say, “Hanukkah is a festival of religious freedom for everyone,” we are putting Hanukkah back into Adam’s story, a story of universal human fear and hope, of abstract “freedom to worship,” a story that fits perfectly into Christian-shaped Western civil religion. That story is not wrong; it is indeed in the Talmud . But if it becomes the only story we tell, we quietly dissolve the particularity of Al ha-Nissim and of Rambam. We have turned the Maccabees into extras in someone else’s movie. And, as we have just seen, once we do that it becomes very easy for certain specifically Jewish histories simply to vanish from view, including the expulsion of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries and their rescue by Jewish power and by a Jewish state. At that point we are no longer only choosing one narrative over another; we are drifting into a post-colonial, post-Zionist theology in

which being Jewish becomes a sin to be confessed and overcome.

So what might a more honest, more Jewish Hanukkah narrative sound like – one that does not baptise the Maccabees into a Christian or post-Christian moral universe, but also does not collapse into crude triumphalism?

Let me suggest three moves.

First, we reclaim the particular. We dare to say out loud, from the bimah, that Hanukkah is about Jewish self-determination: about Jews fighting not to disappear, about a minority refusing to replace Judaism with a vague set of “universal values”. When Jewish sovereignty is under literal attack, we must proclaim that this holiday was never just about the right to eat latkes in peace. It was about the right of amkha Yisrael to exist as itself, in its land. It was about saying that Jews are not only victims in other people’s empires; we also have the right to agency, responsibility and even power.

Second, we put the universal in its right place. We do not deny that Hanukkah sends a message of hope to all who live in darkness. But we get the order right: the light starts in the very specific story of Israel and then overflows. In a hanukkiyah the shamash stands a little apart. It is like Adam’s light, the basic human capacity to push back darkness, to celebrate the turning of the year, to marvel that the world continues. That light is for everyone. But the eight lights we bless are not Adam’s generic bonfires. They are nerot Hanukkah, “holy” in the sense that we are not supposed to use them for our own purposes. They belong to the story of Mattityahu, of “Your people Israel,” of a particular covenant and a very particular history. We do not get to turn them into stage-lighting for someone else’s morality play. Universal language is allowed, even necessary, but it has to grow out of the Jewish story, not erase it.

Third, we resist the temptation to make ourselves likeable by editing out the conflict. It is very

tempting, especially in progressive Anglo-Jewish circles, to say: “Hanukkah is about religious

freedom, so obviously it is about their freedom, not ours. If we really learn the lesson, we will be ashamed of Jewish power and identify with whichever group is currently cast as the universal victim.”

But the real Hanukkah story says something harder. Sometimes faithfulness to Torah, to peoplehood, to land, puts you at odds not only with empires but with other Jews, with philosophers, with the most sophisticated culture of the day. Sometimes the “progressive”, cosmopolitan side of the story is actually the Hellenist side. And sometimes the people who have turned Hanukkah into an edifying moral tale need to be reminded that Jews from Baghdad and Aleppo and Tripoli did not leave because they were bored of exile, but because they were pushed out, and that they survived because there was somewhere Jewish to go.

Rabbi’s Address (cont.)

We live, in Britain as in America, inside a civilisation whose moral grammar is deeply shaped by Christianity, and now by a post-Christian humanitarianism. That grammar loves stories of innocent victims, of universal rights, of redemption through confession of guilt.

The challenge of Hanukkah is different. It is to stand at the window, in the dark, and light a very

small, very Jewish flame that says: we are not Adam tonight; we are Israel. This is not only about generic “freedom of worship”; it is about the survival of a people with its own Torah and its own destiny. We dare to believe that our particular existence is not an embarrassment to be explained away in universal language, but itself a blessing to the world.

And then, from that place of unapologetic particularity, we can absolutely talk about the dignity of every human being, about the rights of every minority, including our enemies. But that is our Torah speaking, not Adam panicking in the dark and grabbing the nearest available story, and not a post-Christian conscience trying to turn the Maccabees into liberal Protestants with better food.

The usual anonymous critic says that my sermons are boring because I do not call to action. So here is a call to action for you, on this Hanukkah: This year, when you light, you might ask yourself: Tonight, am I Adam, or am I a Maccabee?

Shabbat Shalom

Further reading. For the backdrop of winter solstice traditions that surround Hanukkah and Christmas:

– Roman Saturnalia, Germanic Yule, and other midwinter festivals of light – a useful survey is John Matthews, The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1998). For a classic account of how “Jewish” storytelling in English often borrows Christian narrative structures of guilt and redemption, see Robert Alter, “Sentimentalizing the Jews,” Commentary 40:3 (March 1965), pp. 61–67. On what I have called our “post-Protestant” moral culture – a secular world whose ethical instincts are still formed by Protestant Christianity – a key work is Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For the wider story of post-Christian humanitarianism and human rights as secularised Christian projects, see Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011) and Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). On Jews and power in modernity, and why Jewish sovereignty is such a scandal for many, see Ruth R. Wisse, Jews and Power (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). On the near-erasure, in Western liberal narratives, of the story of Jews expelled from Arab and North African countries and rescued (with all the ambiguities you like) by Israel, see Lyn Julius, Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilisation in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2018). For the specific case of Hanukkah being recast in the language of American liberalism, see Dianne Ashton, Hanukkah in America: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2013).