After the Hanukkah Miracle: 3 Disasters that Wiped Out the Maccabees and How Israel Can Avoid Them

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For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, says Audre Lorde. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. You know, that about sums up what I'm trying to do, because I want to make genuine change in the world, and I know deeply that there's only one master in this house, because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. After the Hanukkah miracle, the three disasters that wiped out the Maccabees, and how the state of Israel can avoid them today. Well, tune in, sit down, and listen up, because we've got some Hanukkah thoughts today, and they're going to be a little bit challenging. I don't know if I ever told you, but I'm an apocalyptic optimist, which means I really do believe that things will work out all right, but it could get a lot worse before it gets better.

And so I want to lay out for you what these three problems that the Maccabees failed to overcome were, and then we'll get into how they looked in their time and what it looks like in our day. First of all, the problem of power. Power must always be in the service of something, and their failure to grasp that brought the Maccabees down. Second of all, a failure of creative leadership. We'll talk a little bit about more what that looked like in their day, But if leadership looks to the past instead of the future, you know you're in trouble. And number three, the deep, deep challenge of freeing your mind from foreign occupation because you don't want to reproduce the oppression that you freed yourself from.

Okay, so our question really is, how did the Hashmoni, the heroes of the Maccabean story, go from inspired religious leadership to brutal Hellenistic kingdom in less than 100 years? And of course, how can we in the state of Israel today avoid the same fate? So in order to do it right, we have to take a quick review of the key points of the historical context of the Hanukkah story. If you want the full picture, go on back to season one, episode five. But for now, just recall that despite all the songs that we sang growing up about how the Maccabees drove out the Syrian Greeks, this conflict was really an internal cultural struggle. A battle between the Hellenist camp and the anti-Hellenist camp within Am Yisrael.

And the priesthood was at the heart of Hellenism. They wanted to be Greek-speaking Israelites, with a national place of worship, just like everyone else, but looking, speaking, and acting Greek. The anti-Hellenists on the other side were consumed by the particularity that lies at the heart of Israel's identity. They were not interested in a purely ritual service that looked like what everyone else was doing just in a Jewish flavor. They were after a covenantal relationship with God that defines all life. And this cultural struggle descended into civil war, which eventually became wrapped up in the power politics of the regional empires. Hence the whole drove out the Syrian Greeks thing. It's not that it's not true.

It's just not exactly what the story is about. And when the Maccabees emerged victorious, they carried the banner of a purest approach to Am Yisrael, purification of the temple service, forcible circumcision of the children of the Hellenists who remained, and the removal of any trace of foreign rule from their land. It was Simon Hasmonean, one of the brothers of the original revolt, who was the first to set up an independent kingdom. In fact, the first since the destruction of the first temple. As the book of Maccabees says, in the 170th year, that being 141 or 2 before the common era in our calendar, the yoke of the Gentiles was removed from Israel, and the people began to write in their documents and contracts in the first year of Simon the great high priest and commander and leader of the Jews.

I mean, it must have been glorious, but I got news for you. It was basically all downhill from there. Within 40 years, the Hasmoneans were no longer calling themselves commander, now they were kings a title that by right belongs to the house of David, not to the priests and then they began to forcibly convert the Edomites persecute the sages and basically brutalize anyone who opposed them and one could really say that the low point was a civil war that was sparked by Alexander Yanni's public defiance of the Pharisees in the temple courts when he was serving as high priest, if you know the context, he poured out the water, which is meant to be offered on the altar, on his feet. And there was a revolt that was sparked that led to people being imprisoned in the temple courtyards, and ultimately, he impaled hundreds of his enemies.

Basically, to make a long story short, in less than a hundred years, the mighty kingdom founded on religious idealism, cultural renewal, and the absolute belief that sovereignty is the solution to the problems of Am Yisrael, had descended into a power struggle between two aspirants to the throne, a struggle that brought about the intervention of Rome and Judea and the reduction of the independent Hasmonean kingdom to a vassal Roman state which of course ends in the destruction of the temple which they themselves had liberated it's a hard story when you look at it that way I want to consider our question of how such a thing came to be from three different angles from the Torah's perspective from the perspective of history and through a frame taken from today's world of social justice work.

And in reality, as I said at the beginning, we'll see that these three perspectives really illuminate the reality that there were three separate but related disasters that took down the kingdom. So first things first, what does the Torah have to teach us? Well, the problem of kochi ve'otz mi'adi asali techai lezeh, that my strength and the power of my own hand brought me all this wealth and might, is a well-known issue in the Torah. In fact, it's the primary frame that the Torah offers for how to moderate the problem of power. And really, the Maccabees knew this. And what's our sign that they knew it? That they instituted Hallel, the songs of praises, as the primary service in remembrance of their victory.

Because Hallel is meant to fight the idea that what we've achieved comes through our own power. And it does this by preserving the consciousness that what freedom is, is to be an Ebed Hashem, to be a servant of God. Because when you're a servant of God, all false masters fall away. You're no longer in service of yourself or in service of some dog that's bigger than you. You are in service of the king. The Midrash Shachar Tov actually expresses this beautifully when it teaches us that the first person ever to say halal was actually Pharaoh, when the Jews were leaving Egypt. And this is what he says, he started to cry out and say, in the past you were my servants, but now you're free. Well, that's obvious, but listen to the next one.

Behold, you are in your own reshut, under your own authority. Behold, you are the servants of the Holy One. Meaning, what it means to be under your own authority is to be a servant of God, and vice versa. Because everybody got to serve somebody. Remember, to be an Ebed Hashem, to be a servant of God, is when all false masters fall away. And then he says that we have to praise God that we are his servants. As it says, Hallelujah, hallelujah of De Hashem. Praise him, praise O servants of God. And so the Maccabees tried to hold this problem of power at bay. And you know, the power of the Hasmoneans found its greatest expression in the consolidation of a kingdom of Judea whose extents went unrivaled in history until 1967.

And that initial ideological clarity of Shimon's declaration to the Greeks who complained about the Hasmonean conquest of what they considered to be Greek lands might strike a familiar chord. This is from the first book of Maccabees It not foreign land we have taken nor have we seized the property of others but only our ancestral heritage which for a time had been unjustly held by our enemies Now that we have the opportunity, we are holding on to the heritage of our ancestors. That's power in service of righteousness. But it broke down quite quickly when his inheritors, the Ohanan-Hirkenes and Alexander-Yanai expanded their borders and forcibly converted the Edomites and the Galileans. Because beyond returning what had been lost to the foreign powers, their goals were more political than religious.

And you know the old joke about what you get when you mix politics and religion? Politics. So the ever-present attraction of power for power's sake, power in service of self, was a disaster that undermined the religious legitimacy of the Hasmonean house. And furthermore, if you know a bit of the history, the most famous product of that campaign of forced conversion was Herod. And thus, the most powerful king to rule the kingdom that the Hasmoneans built wasn't even recognized as a Jew by their own descendants. So that's the first disaster, power for power's sake. So the next frame, and the next disaster, is history. And in order to explore what history has to say about why the Maccabeean kingdom failed, I want to look at it through the lens of the thought of the British historian Arnold Toynbee.

You know, there are actually a few kinds of Jews when it comes to Toynbee. Of course, most people have no idea who he was, sadly, since he was one of the great historians of the 20th century. Then there are the Jews that get really uptight because, frankly, Toynbee didn't love us as a people. And then there are those who are willing to hear his wisdom. Because Toynbee teaches a very fundamental lesson about history, and in fact, how societies progress through history. And he points out that often what takes down a culture is the fact that yesterday's solutions become tomorrow's problems. In other words, even progressive leaders get stuck in the paths of their victories, just like that. Now, in order to explore this in a more coherent fashion, I want to offer to you what's called Toynbee's Theory of the Creative Minority.

And it has three pieces. Don't be nervous. Number one, he points out that a society develops into a civilization when it's confronted with a challenge that it successfully meets in such a way to lead it on to further challenges. That's how we all grow. We overcome, and that overcoming itself presents us with new challenges, and thus life is a continual path of growth, and a society becomes a civilization. Number two, that the ideas and methods for meeting these challenges actually will always come from a creative minority. And then those ideas and methods are developed by that creative minority and copied by the majority whom they inspire. That's number two, a creative minority leads the way. Number three is that if that creative minority fails to command the respect of the majority through the brilliance and rightness of their solutions to the problems and challenges of the day, then that minority becomes a dominant minority.

When the creativity runs out, people don't tend to give up power. So let's look at the Hasmoneans. They did a fantastic job overcoming the problems of their day. They regained liberty. They consolidated Am Yisrael around the Torah and the Temple. And they drove the Greek armies out of the land. But as we've seen, they couldn't maintain their role as a creative minority, continuing to inspire the people to follow them into the future. And so the real question in Toynbee's frame is what was the new problem to which the Hasmoneans failed to rise? Well, really, you're going to need to listen to the whole season too for the full answer. But for now, I'll say this. In my eyes, and after the deep study I've done of the Second Temple Period, it appears to me that the primary task of the Second Temple Period for Am Yisrael is the building of a Torah that can survive and thrive in a world in which malchut, which kingship, belongs to the nations.

And if you've been with me since the beginning of the Jewish story, then you know that we've been watching this since the book of Daniel. Recall Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the idol with a head of gold, arms and chests of silver, belly and thighs of brass, and legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay. and I haven't forgotten my promise to some of you to reveal what I believe to be those feet of iron and clay. It'll come in season 3. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, go read the second chapter of Daniel. It'll blow your mind. But anyway, that dream, which was given to the king of Babylon and interpreted by Daniel, is a dream of an idol. And Daniel interpreted it as God's decree that malchut, kingship, in the sense of the power to control the external context of the world, had been taken away from Am Yisrael and given over to the nations.

And that's very important to understand, because at this point, it means that Am Yisrael has to shift its task in the world. You know, it's fascinating that the biblical critics make Daniel out as the Hodahanit, the spearhead of the deconstruction of the Hebrew Bible. And they do that for reasons that live beyond our discussion now, by identifying the time of the book of Daniel, with the Maccabean Revolt. And it's fantastic, because this is one of these places where biblical criticism actually offers us a deeply important insight, because it allows us to read the book of Daniel not just as prophecy about what will come to be, but as a newspaper which combines current events with divinely inspired political analysis.

And when you look closely at Daniel, the writing is on the wall. And it says that a kingdom of flesh and blood no longer has the power or even the right to embody the kingdom of God in the world. The rabbinic era is at hand. That's what's coming in the book of Daniel. And the task of Am Yisrael in the second temple period, before the next destruction, will be to build a Torah that can maintain God's kingship in exile. Kingship in a world in which it will be the nations of the world that create the external context for it to grow. And despite the religious fervor that drove the initial Hasmonean revolt to its success in liberating the temple, they weren't up to the task. That's because the spirit of the Maccabees is rooted in the notion that theology depends on sovereignty over specific geography, and therefore, by definition, could not sustain Israel in exile.

And they failed to see that exile coming. So that meant that the Maccabees were always trying to get back to the original solution to the problem that they'd fought long ago, as were their descendants, as will be certain of their future descendants, as we'll see soon enough. But despite the fact that the Maccabees lacked the creative vision to see the coming challenge, they were at the height of their power, and so the Hasmoneans slipped easily and imperceptibly from a creative minority to a dominant minority, and they found the tools of power available to a ruler in the Hellenistic world ready at hand. And they became much more about maintaining rule than leading their people into the future. And thus the second disaster.

The fight of the dominant minority to maintain the solution of the past rather than to offer creative ideas for the future leads to ever greater oppression of their own society. Disaster number two. And it leaves us with the third frame which was expressed so well by those words from Audre Lorde in that opening quote. the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. You know, if you want to understand this, it's helpful to have another frame from the great Brazilian educator and Marxist thinker, Paulo Freire, who teaches that oppression is evil in that it creates a dual consciousness within the oppressed. It's not just a matter of suffering, the experience of oppression. It's also the dream of freedom.

He says the oppressed live a dual existence. But the depth of the evil is that because oppression is so narrowing that the only image of freedom which most of the oppressed ever know is that of the oppressor To the slave, only the one who holds the whip is free. And we know this story if you know a bit about history and even politics today. This is why it's so often true that oppressed people who gain their liberty will recreate the systems of oppression within their own societies. Only now they hold the whip. and remember, the Jews are just like everybody else, only more so. And so, to add to this, and to understand how it affected the Maccabean era, we need to add one more piece, and that's what the sages teach us about exile.

Because, you know, in the eyes of our rabbis, each exile has its particular nature. In fact, they read all the four kingdoms of exile that were meant to pass through into one of the opening lines of the Torah itself. There in the second line of the first chapter, it says, The land was void in chaos, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And they list, Tohu, this is the exile of Babylon. Vohu, this is the exile of Persia. Choshech is the exile of Greece. And the Tohom, the deep, is the exile of Rome, which they couldn't see the bottom of. But for now, what's important is they said that the Greeks were associated with darkness because Greece darkened the eyes of Israel. You know, in a sense, we won the battle of Hanukkah, but we lost the war.

Because we won the battle of a liberation, of freeing our land from foreign occupation. But we lost the war of freedom, of what it was to be a free people in that liberated land. and so here's the place where a popular notion out there in the social justice world can actually help us understand the third disaster that took down the Hasmonean kingdom it's called decolonization of the mind Dr. Uruh Hotep says that deculturalization is a primary tool of colonization and he points out that it has three steps when the colonizer wants to take away your culture number one, you're made to feel ashamed of yourself number two, you come to admire and respect the colonial power and number three, you're rewarded with more indoctrination if you successfully complete steps one and two because to control a people's culture is to control their very sense of self-definition and as we see in our story, so much so that if they should ever regain physical freedom they will remain enslaved to the culture of the colonizer Now I realize this is an edgy topic that demands a critical, in-depth discussion, and we will get there in season three.

But for the present conversation, just think about what the Maccabees did as soon as they gained a measure of physical liberty in their land. Here's a quote for you. They organized an army, struck down sinners in their anger and lawless men in their wrath. The survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety, and Matityahu and his friends went about, tore down the altars. They forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys that they found within the borders of Israel. They hunted down the arrogant men and the work prospered in their hands. They rescued the law out of the hands of the Gentiles and kings and they never let the sinner gain the upper hand. Now, leaving aside how those methods may sound to the modern ear, we see from this that the Maccabees were attempting to get back to what they perceived to be their native culture.

Because the fight of Hanukkah, as we pointed out, was originally a cultural battle. This wasn't just a fight for physical liberty. It was a struggle to decolonize the Jewish mind from the Greek occupier. And the Maccabees at first pursued it with ruthless intent. But what they produced was actually a Hellenistic kingdom maintained by religious persecution and devoid of the prophetic inspiration which in my eyes is the greatest sign of native Israelite culture. In other words, they freed their bodies, but they failed to free their minds. Therefore, when they found their liberty, they reproduced their oppressor. Now, do you want the deeper story of how this whole process led to the rise of the rabbinic model of leadership?

Not to mention the birth of Christianity. You're going to have to go back and listen to all of season one. But for now, let's be clear. The third disaster that brought down the Hazmodean kingdom was that they could not imagine what it actually meant to be a free people in their land once again, because by the time they gained their freedom, they had already internalized their oppressor. They tried to dismantle a master's house with the master's tools, and they were left as oppressors of their own people in their land. So, these are the three disasters that followed quickly in the wake of the Hanukkah miracle. The rise of a leadership for whom power was in service of power as an end unto itself, the leadership's insistence on defending its solutions to yesterday's problems instead of offering creative answers to the challenges of tomorrow, and the Maccabees' failure to fight the real fight to free their mind and soul from Greek culture that they had imbibed.

Now, if you've been listening to Season 2 and the history of Zionism that I've presented, some of the parallels may already be obvious. And if you're a lover of Am Yisrael who was aware of and maybe a bit concerned with our current situation, you might be feeling anxious. So I just want to take the last few minutes here to map out the connection I see between the kingdom of the Maccabees and our own beloved state of Israel, and to offer some thoughts on how the past does not have to dictate the future. I'll start with the most obvious, although it's far from the easiest to engage. And that's this problem of kochi ve'otum yadi, of that my strength and the power of my hand made this might for me. You know, we're a powerful people today.

In fact, as we're going to discuss at length in the coming season, our power is our greatest challenge at this stage in our history for lots of reasons. But the moral rot that sets in as soon as leadership begins to say, as soon as power becomes in service of itself, is already gaining ground in our society. Now, God was never the source of power for the political Zionists. and I'm not going to start blaming our problems on their secularism, because as far as I can tell, this challenge is ecumenical, in that the religious leaders in Knesset are just as vulnerable to it. But I'll explain myself through one example, and that's the example of Israel's arms industry. Originally created in fantastic circumstances, out of real desperation and the recognition that it's not so good when a Jew has to depend on anyone else for their safety.

our arms industry is now one of the most successful in the world and because of the particular type of real politique, the way in which we use power that's always been part of the survival strategy of the State of Israel we specialize in supplying arms to almost anyone regardless of how and on whom they'll be used if you want more information about this painful topic I'm happy to connect you to the righteous Jews Eli Yosef and Rab Abedan Friedman who are struggling to bring this issue to light in our country. Send me an email at or just find me on Facebook or at the new Facebook page Jewish Story Podcast. But for now, let it be a warning. The greatest symptom of a reliance on our own power is when we ignore the moral imperative that Am Yisrael has to represent God in the world.

And we do it in order to gain our political and economic power. But hefkerut erki, ze hefkerut bitroni. When we abandon our values, we're essentially abandoning our security. I'm making a call for leadership here that invests as much in the analysis of the moral equation of our actions as it does in the economic and security factors. And that's going to require more than a little trust in God. That number one Number two what with the creative minority frame of Toynbee you know in my eyes and if you been listening to season two you know it true the birth of Zionism was the last death knell of the rabbinic era. In the sense that for most of the last 2,000 years, since the time of the Hasmoneans, the creative minority that has led Am Yisrael has been the rabbinic class.

And there's much to speak about in terms of how they failed to meet the challenges of modernity. You'll find some of it, like I mentioned, in the second half of season two. And there's more to come as we discuss American Jewry and what lies on the horizon for Am Yisrael in season three. But for now, suffice to say that the people whose leadership centered on a vision of return, of what it meant to be a free people in our land once again, have had more impact on Am Yisrael in the last century than anyone else. That's the Zionists. But the question is, is Zionism still a creative minority? or has it become a dominant one? Does it still inspire the majority to emulate its values and actions or does it cow them into submission through fear and power?

You know, I believe auto-emancipation was the great core revolution of Zionism. This determination to do it ourselves, the seizing of the reins of history so that we're no longer passively receiving it but we're actively engaged in history. and in many ways political Zionism freed Am Yisrael from that enslaving belief that the future is dictated by the past furthermore the political Zionists were pragmatic problem solvers they identified the immediate threat of annihilation in late 19th early 20th century Europe whether it was assimilation or anti-Semitism or both and they worked hard to solve it and with all the warts and bumps thank God there are more than 6 million Hebrew-speaking Jews living in the land of Israel as a result.

But, does Zionist ideology offer solutions for today's problems? More importantly, do the political leaders who espouse Zionism do so in order to inspire and lead to the future, or in order to maintain their power in the present? Because I believe that the biggest challenge we face today as a people in our land is the new moral equation of what it means to have the power we wield, as I mentioned before. Frankly, we could reshape this region. We could challenge the world. But toward what end? Because the survivalist posture is no longer a sufficient aim. That's yesterday's problem. And I see the failure of Zionist leadership in its inability to offer an inspiring vision for the future. I'm going to give you a hint right now.

If you want to know why so many young American Jews are drifting away from Israel, One major reason is that the nostalgia of the return has faded. They no longer feel that fear of survival, and therefore it's no longer enough to focus on the miracle of our survival and the rebirth in order to inspire today's Jews. Whether here in the land of Israel or there, frankly, what everybody wants to know is what's coming next. Not only that, but people have a growing sense that when our leaders use the miracle of the past as an excuse to avoid looking the present fully in the face, well, then it stinks of manipulation. And I personally would hate to see Zionism degenerate into a worship of yesterday's solutions in a fight against anyone who would dare to question the sanctity of what we've achieved.

But in order to continue on as a creative minority, one that truly leads through vision and inspiration and can offer new solutions to the coming challenges, we have to overcome that third disaster that brought down the Maccabees. We have to figure out how to truly be Am Ba'artso, a people in its land. What does it mean to be Am Yisrael in Eretz Yisrael? But before I move on to the third, that was the second. The second is the slide from the creative minority to the dominant minority and a posture of defending the past instead of leading it to the future. So here's the third piece. It's no small task to figure out what it means to be a people in our land. And truth is, my plan for Season 3 is to actively engage in the decolonization of the Jewish mind.

Not just talk about it, but to do it. Because I don't want to live in a country where Black Friday is more important than Friday night. Nor do I believe that type of country will have the merit to overcome the very real challenges that we face today. So right now, I'm not going to attempt a full deconstruction of all the layers of cultural consciousness we've internalized through exile and show you how they're playing themselves out even now in the state of Israel. But I want to leave you instead with a bit of vision and a couple of tasks. The first task is to remember. Because in so many ways, these three disasters, the worship of power for power's sake, the slide from creative to dominant minority, and the failure to decolonize the mind are all about forgetting who we are.

And you know, the uprooting of the past, which is such a core element of Zionist thought, leaves us so vulnerable to playing out the oppressor within. So we have to remember our story. You've got to know it. And that's why I'm telling you the Jewish story. If you haven't done it yet, go back to the beginning. It takes some time, but it's worth the effort. That's the first task. The second task is connected to the root mission that underlies our story. And it's best expressed in the words of the prophet Isaiah. You can look it up, chapter 42, line 6. I, God, have called you in righteousness and I hold your hand. We're not alone. Remember, we're not alone. And I have created you, I have placed you as a covenant people.

as a light of nations. Our mission, says Isaiah, says God, is to illuminate the whole world with God's light. But notice what the prophet combines at the end of his line. I have made you a covenant people, a light of nations. Meaning, our second task is to recommit to the covenant, not just to God, but to one another, to be one people. And this is the real task. It's not enough just to remember our story. Because the great tragedy of exile that we need to overcome right now in order to fulfill that divine mission of sharing light is to learn to speak to one another once again. To become truly one people, but without demanding that you become like me or I become like you. To enter into a full conversation, which is, of course, the core of a covenant.

So, this Hanukkah, these are your tasks and this is your mission. Know your story. Reach out and speak to the parts of our people from which you feel distant in order to stitch us back together through your conversation. And last but certainly not least, spread God's light in the world wherever you are. Now, before I sign off, I want to invite you to be part of that process because this is the beginning of Season 3. It's a launch to try to take the Jewish story to a whole new horizon. In order to do that, number one, I want you to check out the new website. That's www.jewishstory.co.com.co. You can check it out. You'll find links. You'll find all kinds of stuff there. You can find the Facebook page. that's Jewish Story Podcast at Facebook.

You can also if you want to help me make history there on the website in the upper right hand corner you'll find Be a Patron button. You can click on through to make a little bit of per podcast support. And by the way even if you've checked out Patreon before do it again. I put down a bunch of new incentives that might get you excited about how you want to help. And before I sign up for real I do want to thank a few people. I want to thank all those folks who already give their hard earned money to help make this happen, you can join them. I want to thank the Land of Israel Network, that's thelandofisrael.com, for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many amazing people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, P-A-R-D-E-S, dot org, dot I-L, for building an educational institution that gives me the merit to teach so many wonderful Jews.

And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Thank you.