This was a D’var Torah from 5777 (2016), for Parashat Vayeshev and the beginning of Chanukkah.
Chanukkah starts tonight, the story of the Maccabean Revolt. It seems crazy to be talking about rebellion in December. This is a time when people want to curl up, stay inside, and keep warm. It’s a time when people are on vacation. The world isn’t fully staffed, and if you were planning a revolution you wouldn’t want to do it this week. Purim and Pesach make so much more sense. The rebellions against Pharaoh and Haman are celebrated in the spring, when things are coming to life, people are starting to thaw out and move around, and there are symbols of new potential everywhere.
So there must be a special message, some reason to celebrate rebellion this month, beyond the historical anniversary of the rededication of the Temple. As many of us studied a couple weeks ago, the Talmud tells us that the roots of the winter holidays in all cultures and religions come from Adam and Eve, who came to realize that you can’t rebel against nature. You can’t change the earth’s orbit. It will be dark when it will be dark, and it will be light when it will be light. And yet here is Chanukkah, with its opposite message – that we can rebel against darkness. Or at least, that we can start being rebels when it’s dark.
There are rebels everywhere in relation to Chanukkah and to Parashat Vayeshev. Adam and Eve were the first rebels against authority, they risked their lives and they lost their homes and their easy life because they rebelled. The Talmud gives them credit for inventing Chanukkah, which then was lost until the Maccabees rediscovered it. In the Torah today, you’ve got Yosef, rebelling against his father’s authority. And the two ministers of Pharaoh, the baker and the cupbearer. They were thrown in prison by Pharaoh, and it seems to me that their crimes must have been plotting against Pharaoh.
And back to Chanukkah, we have the family of the Chashmonaim, Matityahu and Yehudah Hamaccabi, all their family and followers. Clearly the Torah and the calendar are not taking any time off in December from the theme of rebellion.
So I want to draw out some lessons about being rebels, from the parasha and from the holiday.
We talk in our culture about rebelling in very romantic terms. It’s Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Rebelling is the opposite of comforming, and who wants to be a comformist? A rebel is someone who marches to her own beat, who challenges assumptions and eventually prods the rest of us to learn something that we had been blind to.
But that’s too easy a picture of what it means to be a rebel. The hard part is deciding when to rebel, facing the risks, and figuring out how to make your rebellion effective.
What can we learn about being a rebel from Yosef?
I’m calling him a rebel because that’s how he saw himself. That’s what we saw in his dreams. He dreamed of the sun, and the moon, and eleven starts bowing down to him. And these wren’t just symbols of his parents and brothers, but symbols of authority in general. But Yosef’s rebellion, his intuition that he shouldn’t accept things as they were, didn’t connect to any purpose at first. He tried to step forward before he knew what his cause was.
Yosef separated himself from all the peole around him. It was actually his destiny to help all of them, to save their lives. He really did need to be at the head, because his dreams were true. No one else could have pulled off what he did eventually.
But at the start, Yosef did not ask the question of where his dream, his divine charge, was supposed to be leading him. He was intoxicated by the thought of his potential power. If Yosef had tried to connect himself to the source of his dreams and his inspiration, he would have started wondering things before he told everyone about the dreams. He would have figured that as a great-grandchild of Avraham and Sarah, his rebellion must have some mission of justice and righteousness. He would have started to try to figure out how that should translate in his generation.
I think it’s fascinating that Yosef’s first dream was about sheaves of grain bowing down. In next week’s parasha, Pharaoh tells him about a dream involving grain, and Yosef immediately understood what it meant. He knew that the dream was about famine and saving people from hunger, and he knew that he had to be the one to do it. But Yosef couldn’t see that in his own dream, not yet. He saw the power part, but not the purpose. What he saw in Egypt, he couldn’t see in his own land.
Yosef was a youthful rebel – without a cause at first. He wasn’t wrong that the existing order wouldn’t keep his family alive, wouldn’t allow his people to endure – but that’s all he had. And like Adam and Eve before him, his poorly-worked-out rebellion led to a lot of suffering, for himself and also for the people connected to him. That’s not the kind of rebel any of us would want to be right now.
So we turn to Chanukkah, and the first rebel in the story, Matityahu. Matityahu comes down to us as a decisive figure who took matters immediately into his own hands when faced with the decrees of Antiochus. We picture him at the altar in Modi’in, when a Jew comes forward to offer a pagan sacrifice at the demand of the king’s officials. And Matityahu comes forward and kills both the Jewish man and the king’s official, and then calls out: Everyone who is devoted, follow me – and they go together off into the hills, just a few hundred people at first.
But as I read the story in the book known as First Maccabees this year, I noticed something different. Matityahu and his family, known as Chashmonai, were kohanim in Yerushalayim. Their post would have been the Beit Hamikdash itself, the Temple. And First Maccabees says that when Antiochus defiled the Temple, Matityahu and the Chashmonaim did not stand up right there and then. Instead, they left the city and relocated to Modi’in. Modi’in is in the foothills, about halfway between Yerushalayim and the Mediterrean, just north of today’s freeway from Yerushalayim to Tel Aviv.
Maybe they felt they could wait it out there. Maybe they were thinking of organizing an opposition, and biding their time. We know that Matityahu was devastated by what was happening at the Temple. And it wasn’t just Antiochus and the empire. From another book of that century called Second Maccabees, we know that there was infighting among the kohanim at the Temple. Various people were trying to curry favor with the authorities, by offering to share some of the treasury of the Temple with the king in return for an appointment as Kohen Gadol, as High Priest.
So I can imagine that for a time, Matityahu thought that the only thing he could do was to protect his own individual integrity, by going away to Modi’in.
Besides, he was an old man. And he wasn’t a purist – he had led his family to take on at least some of the trappings and ideas of Hellenism. His sons and descendents would have Greek sounding names or nicknames.
But when the decrees and the king’s officials reached Modi’in, Matityahu knew there was no away to avoid a decision. Either go along, or rebel – and he chose the path of rebellion.
Rebelling is not just one choice, but a series of choices. Once the Chashmonaim gathered people around them, they suddenly had a great responsibility for more than themselves and their own conscience. The Seleucid army attacked them on Shabbat, to take advantage of their inability according to the Jewish law at that time of picking up their arms, and many people were killed. So the Chashmonaim invented the concept of pikuach nefesh, of the overriding principle of saving life. Later the rabbis would say pikuach nefesh docheh Shabbat – keeping life going, preserving life, pushes aside the laws of Shabbat. They weren’t Sages – they had to become their own rabbis too.
They had to think on their feet, with opponents on the outside in Antiochus and on the inside in the Hellenistic sympathizers among the Jews, and other groups of kphanim, and possibly other Jewish opponents who were purists and wanted to flee even further.
To be a minority within a minority is part of being a rebel. To be able to improvise, to make choices that were partly wrong and be devastated by that, but to stay committed – these are what it means to be a rebel. To make the choice not once, but over and over again. To have to use power, and to know that as soon as you have any of it you are liable to the same dangers of power that the other side suffers from.
And of course, you have to know as a rebel that at any time you could lose everything, including your life. These are all part of Matityahu’s rebelling, and of what it meant for each of the Chashmonai family.
The easy part of being a rebel is the romantic part. And the first step – deciding what to be against. That’s the Yosef story; that’s as far as he went. It’s not necessarily easy to take that first step, as Matityahu’s story teaches us, and as we all know.
But the real work of being a rebel is the continuation. The continued affirmation of what you are standing and fighting for. The solidarity with others. The tremendous sense of responsibility, that your risks put other people at risk. The commitment not to let defeats or even your own big mistakes throw you off.
So why in the end are we talking about rebelling during this season of darkness, of cold, of winter revels and vacations?
Because, while darkness can slow us down, it can also make things clearer. When everything is dark, a single candle, rebelling against the darkness, is suddenly powerful.
When it’s too bright outside, you can see all the obstacles and all the complexities, and you can come up with all kinds of reasons to accept things as they are, or doubt your power to change them.
A candle in the darkness tricks our eye, in a good way. We see how one small flame can overpower darkness, and how a small group of flames becomes everything you can see. That’s what you see, the light.
And that’s why I believe we start rebelling when it’s dark. For eight days, we concentrate mightily on the candles side by side – first Matityahu, then his sons, then their band of rebels together, then their small army. When we get to the ninth day, we are ready to see those lights and build the line further, without actually having to light the candles. As the real world, with its challenges, becomes more visible in the light, we have this afterglow of our candlelight, our candle line, our rebel strength, still in our retinas.
This is a time when we need to be rebels, especially against bigotry and the big power behind it. May we use these days of Chanukkah, the festival of dedication, to dedicate ourselves, so that we live in the spirit of Matityahu, and his family, and their followers. May we find that strength and wisdom, individually and as a band together. May we be that light that rebels against the darkness, and wins.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach!
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