Here is yet another version of my take on the takeaway today from the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, a Jewish work from the time of the Maccabees that presents its own view of Jewish position, role, and voice in a “modern” world.
The question I’ve been speaking about the past few weeks leading to Chanukkah is the question of the sage Ben Zoma Eizehu Gibbor? Who is courageous? — and I’ve kind of taken my sweet time getting to the obvious part about Chanukkah itself, which is about standing up courageously as a Jew, for Jews and for Torah. The Maccabim, the Chashmonai’m, chose to act in the face of danger for Jews and for Torah, and that’s at the core whichever of the various versions of the telling of the Chanukkah story you focus on.
I know with you I don’t have to talk about the importance of standing up for us in this way in a majority non-Jewish world. Ben Zoma’s question though is Eizehu Gibbur, what is it like to be that person of courage, how you get to be more like that. What’s inside that. And his own answer, is that a person of courage is kovesh et yitzro. Conquers their inner urge, or overcomes something inside that’s a negative force that has to be overridden. You come to be able to make a choice to overlook danger that’s real or fear that’s inside.
I want to apply that more specifically to the question of standing up for Jews and Torah when we are a minority, and that is an excuse to tell you for the millionth time my favorite story from the period more or less of the Chanukkah story. The story has come to us in Greek as the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, and it’s pure fiction, written by a Jew. The story claims to take place about a hundred years before the Maccabees and about a hundred years after Alexander the Great who conquered Eretz Yisrael and the Middle East, and it has two main settings. A bit of it takes place in Yerushalayim and most of it takes place in Alexandria in Egypt, which was sort of the Oxford or Cambridge of that erea.
This story is about the translation of the Torah into Greek, which was a real thing that happened starting in probably the 3rd century B.C.E. That translation is called the Septuagint and it probably was done by Jews in Egypt. But the Letter of Aristeas says no, that’s not what happened. It’s one side of a fictitious correspondece between two Hellenistic officials, not Jewish themselves.
According to Aristeas, the narrator, what happened is that there was a conversation among officials in Alexandria about the famous library there which had all the important books in the world. Except, there was a book one of them knew about that they didn’t have, because it wasn’t available in Greek, and that was the Torah! So they persuaded the ruler to commission a translation by the scholars in Yerushalayim. In the Letter of Aristeas, the regime sends a request and a substantial gift to the Temple and asks for a team of scholars to come down to Alexandria and do this work. Part of the request is for instructions on how to make sure that the food available for them is kosher! A kosher banquet lasting for days and days, at the royal court.
Once the Sages arrive, before they get to work there is a party and each night the king asks a number of them a series of questions about wisdom and what makes a good ruler and a good life, and the sages answer and they sound kind of like Greek philosophers. Which is also how the letter explains the ideas behind kashrut, things like a split hoof representing the ability to discern one thing from another, or chewing the cud is like chewing over a thought. After the series of kosher banquets the scholars are put up at a nice villa, and they eventually produce the Greek translation of the Torah. Which is then deposited in the library and of course the translators are sent home with great fanfare.
What does this have to do with courage? I mean, it’s a peaceful story. It’s a story of co-existence and not tension at all. The kosher banquet in the royal hall!
So the courage is not in the story so much as in who created this story and why.
There are many theories about who wrote the Letter of Aristeas and I have the sense from scholarship that there’s a convergence toward the idea that it was a Diaspora Jew, an Egyptian Greek-speaking Jew, and probably in the decades or century after the Macabees, maybe ten years maybe a hundred years.
That author was trying to assert some things about the Jews and about Judaism in a place where Jews were the minority. That person was saying we can hold our own with the powerful of this place, and with the big ideas of this culture. We are strong figures here in Alexandria because look, we have this strong history. If we face challenges — and the Jews in Alexandria at that time did — we face them on strong terms as people in that society and as recognized contributors to that culture.
And the author of the Letter of Aristeas was saying: all of this is real for us Jews who live outside of Eretz Yisrael, in full awareness that catastrophes like Antiochus have taken place in the recent past, and despite the wars that continue in and around Judea.
I pick the Letter of Aristeas because it comes from the same general period in history as the Chanukkah story, and to remind us that the challenges of standing proud as a Jewish minority are not new and not modern and not uniquely American.
Eizehu gibbor? What’s it like to be a courageous representative for us, in a place like this? Well it’s overcoming certain negative urges we have.
One is to let our history make us fundamentally fearful of the place we’re in, to the point that we can’t see what’s good. The author of the Letter of Aristeas was saying we have some great history here, and it’s not just our history but it’s tied up in what’s good for all the people here. We now do carry the trauma of the Shoah, and the wars and terror of the State of Israel, and we have to work at not letting those be blinders on what’s good. How many allies we have, who come to us not just at bad times as they did after Tree of Life before we even asked, but who sometimes come to us before we even realize about some anti-Semitic happening like the graffiti a few months ago up in Laconia, which I learned about from ministers and Facebook!
Another negative urge we have is to make the response to anti-Semitism the defining aspect of our Judaism. That’s not a charge I am levelling at anyone here in our community and here at this service. But really through a lot of the ‘70s through the ‘90s especially, anti-anti-Semitism was the dominant religion of a lot of American Jewish leaders. It was and is a spirituality of anger and fighting not balanced by joy, only by occasionally gloating, and it did tremendous damage. The author of the Letter of Aristeas said the reason we can stand up here is because of Torah, which we have and others admire about us, and others want.
And I believe and I have said that the very biggest gevurah or power or courage we have as Jews is to be Jews, and to be Jews as fully as we can. We get the inner power to stand up when we need to, as a minority, when we love each other in our shtetl here, when we love other Jews far away, and when we love Torah and live it. Each of us may have a different mitzvah and a different perspective, but we cannot stand up well if our heart is not in Torah, if we hate the hate but do not love ourselves as Jews. It’s where we get our motivation and our strength and endurance, and it’s where we reflect out the light that makes others take notice.
I was talking the other day to Laura Landerman, a member of our Jewish community who is from Pittsburgh, and I asked her how it was that during the shiva for the Jews murdered at Tree of Life, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had above its mast-head in Hebrew the words Yitgadal v’Yitkadash Sh’may Rabba. Obviously everyone deserves as a matter of right to be protected against hate and dscrimination no matter what. But this was love, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much was because of the stories of Jewish community, and the stories of chesed about Jews at that time, and about the involvement of Jews in the wider work of making a more just and compassionate community there.
We can stand up in anger and ask people to stop overlooking us, to take action against anti-Semitism. We can show up only when that happens to us and we will generally be heard. And I don’t say it doesn’t take courage to do that. But to believe in who we are, to take seriously the treasure of our Torah and tradition, that will make the work lighter, the courage more exciting, and the response back more loving.
And right now that courage to stand up for ourselves as the Jews we are, it’s not just about non-Jews, it’s also about Jews wearing yarmulkes who are about to receive power in Israel who say about Jews like us that we are the ones destroying Torah and the Jewish people. Ben Gvir, Smotrich, they should be on our minds as much as Kanye and Kyrie. Maoz, given power even though he said last month that if Jew like us had been there we would have been fighiting against the Maccabees. We should not suffer from an inferiority complex about our Judaism. We have to live our Torah and our chesed with more self-respect, to claim the kippah for a Judaism that is serious and egalitarian, that shows up at the shiva or the soup kitchen.
What does it take to be courageous as a Jew today, as live as a minority in our country and our world? Eizehu gibbor? It’s reminding ourselves that the basic story is not our disadvantage, but our core. It is challenging ourselves to be proud of the Judaism we live, and to ask honestly when we need to deepen our Jewish lives. Our courage isn’t just something we summon at a moment; it’s something we are building all the time and not a separate thing from the rest of our Jewish lives.
When things happen, God forbid, we will stand up, alone if we must and together whenever we need, side by side not just in defense but as a menorah, as a line of light. We think of courage as fighting back. But I know it is also l the chanukkiot in every window, the stories and latkes we bring to schools, and the beatiful pictures of lights and people and sufganyot that will dominate our social media feeds for eight beautiful days. The Maccabees are an inspiration for their fight, and the energy that stretched for more days than they realized they had energy for. But let’s also be inspired by the lost author of the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, who reminds us that our Torah translates into any language, and that even a small candle like us outglows any enemy. And it shines on any place where we are.
Leave a Reply