A lion Has Roared
The interview I conducted last year with Norman Lear and his daughter Maggie in honor of his reception of the Kumah; Rise Up Award for a life in the intersection of faith, art and politics.
Dear friends,
Norman Lear passed away this week after 101 years of working to bring light and love to this world. I had the good fortune to know Norman and have occasional conversations with him, often expanding on the first thing he ever told me: “We have to take religion back in this country.” The last time we spoke he was trying to remember an old Yiddish lullaby he used to hear as a child. It felt as though he was stretching back in time to a point in his life when religion represented goodness and love, before it was taken away from him, from us, before it soured.
His death reminded me of the greater context in which this war is taking place. It is part and parcel of the battle over the soul of Jewishness, the spirit of faith, the underlying demands, purpose and meaning of this word human beings use sometimes, God.
On the first night of Hanukkah yesterday there were two events that portray opposing attitudes toward this question. In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Maccabees March was an ultra-nationalist display of religious superiority and hate. Religious Jews likened themselves to the freedom fighters of old as they took over the Muslim quarter in that delightful way of theirs.
When evening landed on New York a different type of Jewish gathering took place in Columbus Circle, where a few Jewish organizations partnered with Arab and Muslim friends to light candles for a ceasefire. They stressed solidarity and friendship that extends beyond the tribes. They asked people to display “ceasefire now” signs on their windows in the way that a Hannukkah Menorah is displayed on the window. In doing that, they likened themselves not to the Maccabees, but to the rabbis who molded Hanukkah into what it is today. Those rabbis, who lived a generation or two after the Maccabees made a conscious choice to change the focus of the holiday from military victory to light and miracles.
One of the reasons the rabbis chose to do that was because the Maccabees really were not all that different from the religious fundamentalists in our world today. The Book of Maccabees describes them at war with the moderate Jews, and with any expression of solidarity with the people of the world at large, even before the cruel Greek ruler, Antiochus came into the picture.
One fun activity is to take the Hanukkah story and suggest who in that story is the equivalent in today’s conflict. We could say that Netanyahu is Antiochus, the evil ruler who won’t allow the locals self-expression. That would put Hamas as the Maccabees, which despite the similarities doesn’t land right. We could say that Sinwar is Antiochus, refusing the Jews their right to exist as free people and the IDF are the Maccabees. But the power dynamic there seems way off.
Instead, I’d offer the following: The Jews in the story are those who are not free. Taken hostage by the forces of division and extremism, the moderate majority are being forced to act in ways that are antithetical to who they are. Hamas and the Israeli extreme right have swept over the land with their ideology of separation, which has led us to this point. The entire world seems teetering on the verge of being engulfed in this self-centered world view.
I believe the miracle will come. I believe the forces of dark division will be uprooted, or weakened enough that we will be able to rededicate our broken temple, to again live authentically within our vision of a shared humanity. But we will have to speak our vision loud and clear in order to succeed.
The prophet Amos, whose poetry we find in this week’s Haftarah, was one of the greatest voices of a religion of care and human decency above all else. He ends his song with these words:
אַרְיֵ֥ה שָׁאָ֖ג מִ֣י לֹ֣א יִירָ֑א אֲדֹנָ֤י יֱהֹוִה֙ דִּבֶּ֔ר מִ֖י לֹ֥א יִנָּבֵֽא׃
A lion has roared,
Who can but fear?
Adonai My GOD has spoken,
Who can but speak out?
We have heard the roar of the lion. We are feeling the tremors. We see clearly how much we despise living in a world of division. This Hanukkah let us reach back to the most basic meaning of the Hebrew word Hanukkah: dedication. Let us dedicate ourselves to the fight for our freedom from religious zealotry in all its forms. And let us answer the divine command: to speak into existence a world of friendship. May we live to see the dedication of the temple of our shared humanity in the holy city of Jerusalem.
I hope you can join us for Andalusian Lights, our Arab-Jewish concert for Hanukkah this evening. And I hope you can take a few minutes to listen to Norman Lear in the interview above share stories of fighting antisemitism in WWII, and laying out a vision of a faith world we can all get behind and uphold.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha