This is another iteration of a Chanukkah teaching theme of mine, relating to what the era of that festival can teach us about the relation of Jews to the larger world, and the Jewish voice to the larger world. I shared this particular version around Chanukkah 5785 (2024).
Alexandria in Egypt was kind of the New York City of Hellenistic and Roman times.
It was founded by and named for Alexander the Great, who went out from Macedonia on the Balkan Peninsula and conquered the Middle East and North Africa in the late part of the 300s B.C.E. Like New York, Alexandria was for a time a capital city, but even when it wasn’t any longer, it was still one of the very largest cities of the Hellenistic world and a cultural capital. Alexandria had its equivalents of the New York Public Library, most famously, as well as its elite high schools and research institutes, its tony health clubs, its Hayden Planetarium, its Bronx Botanical Gardens, its Yankee Stadium.
And like New York, it had at one time the largest Jewish community outside Eretz Yisrael – and for a time it might have been the largest Jewish community in the world including Jerusalem and the rest of the Land of Israel. So Alexandria in its heyday had its equivalent also of the Jewish Theological Seminary or the Hebrew Union College.
All of this so to speak, not literally, of course. But the sketch I’m trying to draw is that for about 400 years, from Alexander the Great through the destruction of Beit Hamikdash by the Romans, you could tell about the Jewish story by focusing on Alexandria. Chanukkah occurred in the middle of this period – and we can’t really understand what Chanukkah means for us today without thinking about what Alexandria might mean. And this is true both for the Jews who live like us sort of close to New York City, and for the Jews who live where the Chanukkah story took place, in Eretz Yisrael.
One of the great books of Judaism that I do love to tell you about before Chanukkah everyyear was written in Alexandria, possibly around the same time as the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus. It is called the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, and it purports to tell the story of the original translation of the Torah into Greek, which is called the Septuagint.
According to the Letter of Aristeas, the Septuagint was commissioned by the emperor in Alexandria because the Torah was a glaring omission in the collection of the great Library of Alexandria.
The only way to fix this was to procure a first-class Greek version of the Torah, and the only way to do that was for the king to entice a group of sages from Jerusalem to come to Alexandria and do that project. And the only way to do that was to allot a substantial sum of money as a gift to the Temple in Jerusalem and to make sure that the visiting scholars were treated as dignitaries and hosted by the king at a sumptuous banquet prepared according to the laws of kashrut. Then the Jewish delegation would retire to a seaside villa and do their meticulous and miraculous work of rendering the Torah and its every nuance perfectly into Greek.
In the Letter of Aristeas, the most interesting sections include a Jewish attempt to explain kashrut as a philosophy and an ethical practice, in a letter back from Jerusalem responding to questions about what food the scholars will need. And then there are a series of extemporaneous dialogues reported between the king and each of the 70 visiting Jewish scholars about the nature of wisdom and political power and the good life, over a week-long set of dinners once they arrived and before they got to work.
There is absolutely no reason to think that this is actually how the Septuagint originated. It was generated by the Jews of Alexandria themselves for themselves, in the time after Alexander the Great and well before the Maccabees. This tale was written down decades if not a century or more after the fact.
But it’s the tale itself that is important. The Letter of Aristeas is a statement of who we are by some group of Jews in Alexandria at some point during or near the time of the Chanukkah story.
They were saying that we live here, in this New York City of our time, in the center of this world-dominating empire of our time, and we see ourselves as essential to that center and that world. We see ourselves not as opposed to that world, not primarily as beleaguered in that world, even when we are beleaguered — but as the holders of a wisdom that this world needs and that this world values. Of course to do so, we will have to speak in the common language we share with other people, with the majority of the world. We are not like everyone else. But our basic posture is that we have Torah and the world needs Torah. This is the foundation of how we function and interact as Jews in the world.
And when the representatives of the world, the powers of the world even, address questions to us — we have answers, and those answers are impressive. Sometimes they are translations of things we have always said. And sometimes they are our current synthesis of our Torah wisdom with the ideas and insights of others, applied to the new challenges of the day including the ones facing us, the Jews of the Hellenistic world. We are not afraid of any of the questions that the representatives and powers of the world pose to us – not when they send them in letters to Jerusalem, and not when we are on their turf in Alexandria.
This is an incredibly important posture to learn from. It was not just a relic of a peaceful time – this posture was dramatized in the Letter by a Jew steeped in Alexandria with a strong tie to the center in Jerusalem, sometime during a long period of wars from Egypt through Judea through Syria, of which the war between Antiochus and the Jews led by the Maccabees was only one.
I am sure that this author or the group they were part of does not represent the only view among Jews at the time, about who we were in the world. The other important books of this same era, also written by Jews and in Greek, include First and Second Maccabees, which are about the Maccabean revolt. From those sources we know about the familiar Chanukkah story, the external struggle against Antiochus and his army — a war of a small minority against an external threat that was both physical and cultural. But also from those sources we know that the Chanukkah events included divides within the Jews – about tradition, about the continuing relevance of Torah, about corrupt Jewish leaders and what to do about them, about power and accumulating it and how to use it strategically and ethically.
Our familiar Chanukkah figures, Yehudah HaMacabee and his father Mattityahu and their family and their band – they had one easy set of decisions to make, which was to view our people as worthwhile and declare why, to identify the outside enemy and commit to fighting them. But then they were in thick of all those other issues, about self-definition and what it means to be a Jewish people, about power and the world. And they had to make them during the years of the war against Antiochus, and when they restored the Beit Hamikdash, and for a century afterward.
Simplifying Chanukkah only into a story of the few against the many, the righteous Jews fighting against the evil Seleucids, cuts us off from a fuller legacy of the Maccabees and that whole era, which we need more than ever.
This week I spent about seven hours in a virtual conference of conversations with Jewish leaders, and I was struck by how we couldn’t talk about ourselves but only about today’s Antiochus, people who despise Israel and are making life hard for Jews, and about Jews who have no compassion or solidarity with Israelis. As if even a moment spent talking about ourselves and who we are and want to be and talking about our strengths would be tantamount to minimizing those other forces, would actually be giving something away to them.
I listened to some of the most talented Jewish educators I know and gifted leaders talk about who wasn’t in the room, who we don’t reach.
Expressing a sense that the Jews of today have a deficit of solidarity, between America and Israel; and that the Jews of America are on the whole shallow and lack any real knowledge of history or Torah relevant to the challenges of our time.
So I want to say, as I did this past Rosh Hashanah – no.
I want us to find, in the story of our people in the era of Chanukkah, a cruse of oil that will last more than we realize. In that time when Jews lived in Israel and outside in a world of imperial culture, Jews of both places linked together; in the middle of a time of war and recurring war — we found a way to say something about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. In Greek even. That we are part of and essential to the world. That we have a Torah and the world needs our Torah. That we are capable of saying something about questions of power and politics and the good life with ourselves and with anyone.
We are not afraid of any of the questions that the representatives and powers of the world pose to us – not when they send them in letters to Jerusalem, and not when we are on their turf in Alexandria.
And I believe there is a role that we the Jews of the United States can even offer our people in Israel. And it’s the role that the author or authors of the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates may have been playing, if indeed they wrote their tale around the time of the war with Antiochus. Maybe when their siblings were closer to the tyrant and the midst of the war, they were saying: We’re not just over here watching. We can help you see who we all are, the Jews of this world. Let us hold onto what looks more tenuous to you. Let us use the peacefulness of our daily lives to keep telling the story of a Jewish people who aren’t only fighting back but who set the terms, who are partners building this world, who are confident of how it will turn out for us.
On this Chanukkah, let us make much more room to talk about what makes us strong and resilient. Our love for each other, Jews in the room and across the world. Our mitzvot, our wisdom. The modern Book of Maccabees is being written for sure this year, and this Chanukkah, everyone can see that. We are also like the Jewish community of Alexandria, and we have been writing our Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates. Let’s not forget to publish it as well.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach!
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