Tolstoy was a Maccabee

Dear friends,

On Sunday we will gather to light candles and talk about sources of light. Some of you have shared photos, videos or words on these sources of light in your lives. This Hannukah I find myself lit by an unexpected source.

Last week I found myself reading Leo Tolstoy’s play The Power of Darkness. (Read it Here) I was sucked into this story of hideousness and redemption, based on a true story of a peasant who sinks deeper and deeper into real sinfulness (by real I mean not between him and God in some judgmental version of morality, but between him and others). Never have I read a better illumination of the Talmudic maxim: עבירה גוררת עבירה, one transgression carries the next in tow. Nor have I seen the road to hell be squashed so quickly.

I hadn’t known Tolstoy as a playwright, so I kept going. I found an unfinished play of his, never performed, forbidden in Russia, published posthumously called The Light that Shines in the Darkness. It’s a semi-autobiographical play about a deeply religious wealthy man who hates the church, the state and the army, and wants nothing else but to give up his estate and give it over to its rightful owners, the poor who have actually worked the land his entire life. (read it here)

This led me to his essays, What is Art?, Letters to Mahatma Ghandi, The Kingdom of God is Within You, and others, all of which portray a powerful, compassionate, non-violent vision driven by deep religious conviction, upon which Ghandi and MLK built their struggles. Tolstoy, as it turns out, was a Maccabee: a warrior for the shining light of people being allowed to be who they truly are. Here are some of his words that echo in this season of darkness and light:

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has outgrown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and development of humanity. I believe that such a time has now arrived — not in the sense that it has come in the year 1908, but that the inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on the other the existing order of life which has for centuries occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and troubled mode of life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and built on the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and the solution will evidently not be favorable to the outlived law of violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of men from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in accord with the nature of man.

Looking forward to seeing you at 4pm on Sunday.
Chag sameach and Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha