A kid comes up to her dad and says, “If you don’t believe in God, why do you go to synagogue all the time?” He says, “Oh, people go for all kinds of different reasons. Take my friend Garfinkle. He’s Orthodox. He goes to talk to God. Me, I go to talk to Garfinkle.”
And it’s true, of course. Gone are the days, if they ever existed to begin with, when every member of a religious community was there in the same way, for the same reason, believing the same things, and wanting the same things out of it. We’re all here for different reasons. And that’s not just Unitarian Universalists and Jews. It’s everybody. I remember when I worked as an office manager at a Lutheran Church in Berkeley, CA, I would sometimes do a little side research by asking people if they really believed the claims of the creed that they recited each Sunday – the virgin birth, the resurrection on the third day, the sitting at the right hand of the father – and they all said: “No. Of course not! I just come because…” (fill in the blank). Different answer each time. This was Berkeley, granted, with a gay minister, but still. They weren’t there for some uniform reason.
In this sense, religious communities mirror the wider society. This country is multifaceted, multigenerational, multicultural and there is no single orthodoxy, or normative American culture, as much as certain congress people might want to convince you that there is. And so this makes James’ question that he articulated so beautifully, really poignant: does the concept of “assimilation” even make sense in our world? Is it even intelligible? Because for assimilation or non-assimilation to be meaningful, you have to have a clearly defined minority culture that’s under pressure somehow to adopt the ways of a clearly defined dominant culture. Does either side of that equation even exist any more?
And more to the point, did it ever? As James described, in the 2nd century BCE, Jewish culture and Greek culture were already cross-fertilizing and flowing together to such an extent that the two were eliding. Hellenization, as it’s called, was already part of Jewish life and has been ever since. If Antiochus wanted to eradicate Judaism, he would have done much better to just let this gentle seduction run its course. But instead he had to come in like Rambo, killing mothers with their circumcised babies, smashing things, trying to force people to worship Zeus, and, legend has it, letting pigs run loose in the temple in Jerusalem. This forced a day of reckoning for the Jewish people that otherwise might never have come. It forced them to recognize all they were losing and all that they had lost. It radicalized them, and a group of them fought back.
Most of us, I think, would support the right of a minority group to fight back against a violent oppressor. We believe in religious freedom. The more complicated part is the possibility that James alluded to, that the Maccabees might have also fought against their Hellenized brothers and sisters. If this is true (and we don’t know for sure that it is) the Maccabees would have justified it with the charge that these Hellenized Jews were endangering the future of Judaism just as much as Antiochus and his army. And underlying that charge would have been the charge of false consciousness.
False consciousness is a Marxist theory that people are unable to perceive things as they really are, especially exploitation, oppression, and social relations. The workers don’t rise up against the capitalists because their minds have been shaped by the capitalist system in ways that benefit it and not them. They may not like that they make only $9.07/hour at McDonald’s but they still scrimp and save to buy a flat screen TV.
So the Maccabees’ accusation of false consciousness would probably have gone something like this: “You Hellenized Jews don’t really know what you’re doing. You may think you’re freely choosing, embracing Greek culture because you just happen to like it, when really it’s the worldview of the oppressor that has gotten under your skin, like a Marxist nightmare millennia before Marx. You think you’re empowering yourselves, but that’s part of the insidiousness of the enemy’s strategy: they make you strive for acceptance in their culture, dangling delicious material and social prizes in front of your nose, and you – you become happy co-conspirators in your own annihilation.”
And the Hellenized Jew might have replied: “This isn’t false consciousness. My life and my choices are my own. I could choose to live as a Jew if I wanted to. I’ve adopted Greek culture because it’s good; in fact I think it’s better than Jewish culture. The philosophy, the music, the art, the architecture with those nice white columns, the naked male athletes – I mean, what’s not to like?”
So who’s right and who’s to say? How free is our will? By definition, the victim of false consciousness doesn’t know that they’re a victim of false consciousness. They think they are freely choosing and empowered. And the accuser can’t know what’s really in someone else’s head and heart either. How can you tell the difference between someone who abandons their minority religion because they think they’ve found a better one, and someone who abandons that same religion because the social costs of keeping it are too high? How can you tell the difference between someone who grows an ironic mustache and someone who grows the exact same mustache, but seriously? How can you tell the difference between a third-wave “lipstick feminist” and a woman just wearing lipstick because she assumes that she won’t look good without it? And as the person abandoning the religion or growing the mustache or wearing the lipstick, how can you know for sure why you’re doing it?
During Hanukah, kids traditionally play a game with a dreidle. The dreidle is a spinning top that has four sides, each of which has a Hebrew letter on it. The letters form an acronym for the words, “Nes gadol hayah sham.” A great miracle happened there. Which miracle it’s referring to is not exactly clear. Is it the miracle of the small band of Maccabees defeating the great Greek army? Or is it the miracle of the “ner tamid,” the eternal light that, with only enough oil for one night, burned for eight nights?
I want to suggest a third possibility: that the great miracle occurred when King Antiochus’s brutality precipitated, not the destruction of Judaism, but if you’ll forgive the expression, a come-to-Jesus moment for everyone involved. It forced a momentary crack in the façade of the social worlds, where the light of free will flooded in. For that awful, magical moment, people gained clarity on the question of their own consciousness – false and true. Both the Maccabees and the Hellenized Jews now saw why they were doing what they were doing, why they were choosing what they were choosing. On both sides now, people were claiming their own power, making active decisions instead of passive, default decisions. As a result, Judaism did not die the slow, passive death of assimilation, but neither did it roll back the clock to a frozen, one-dimensional past. The great miracle was the emergence of an authentic diversity.
The silver lining of the oppressive violence of a hegemonic power is that it can actually be energizing to a minority group. It can incite people to rebellion who otherwise would have faded to oblivion. It can create clarity where there was once obfuscation. These days, the growing awareness of police violence against people of color is forcing people to confront the racism that’s endemic to our culture. Yesterday 25,000 New Yorkers marched in protest. The collapse of our ecosystems is forcing people to confront the ways our economy is doing violence to the earth. In September, 300,000 marched in protest.
The clarity forced by historical moments like these can be extraordinarily liberating. They can expose our own false consciousness. They can bring into focus all the ways we assimilate to a culture that does not reflect our highest values. Let’s take advantage of these unique moments to make active choices, not passive choices. Like a spinning dreidle that lands where it’s meant to be, let’s find our authentic place in the pluralism of this land. It’s time to make great miracles happen here.
