Hanukkah and the Red Pill

Happy Hanukkah

(Or Chanukkah, the guttural H does not have an English equivalent)

Naturally, you may have heard that Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday involving lighting candles.  Hanukkah celebrates a miracle that God did about 2300 years ago by having a small amount of olive oil burn in the holy Temple for eight full days.

This occurred as traditional Jews purified and rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem after defeating Greek forces.  The Greeks had defiled the Temple with pagan idols.  The Jews found enough uncontaminated oil for only one night, but God made it last for eight days, time enough to make more oil in a state of ritual purity. 

This miracle was the final culmination of a long and arduous social, cultural, and military struggle.  The true miracle was the victory in that epic war despite overwhelming odds favoring the Greeks.

Greek culture had recently began to dominate the Mediterranean and near East after the conquests of Alexander the Great.  Alexander himself had been friendly to the Jews (see Talmud Yoma Daf 69), but the generals that succeeded him and divided his empire were interested in taxing the Jews and imposing Greek values and religion. 

When the Greeks begun pushing their culture on the Jews of Israel, they started an intense struggle between “modern” Hellenistic values and ancient conventional Jewish practice going back to Moses.  During the reign of Seleucid Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, this tension burst into open war.

Pagan tolerance

The Greeks saw their culture as the most advanced, rational, scientific, and tolerant to ever exist.  Our ancient rabbis explain how idolaters were tolerant: when a Baal believer went to a different area he worshiped the local deity, when followers of various idols got together for a feast they honored all of their deities, often by pouring out wine libations. 

Since they already believed in the existence and power of multiple deities, the Baal worshipers had no moral conflict over engaging in Athena worship when among Athenians.  Compared to the centuries of bloody religious wars in Europe over minor doctrinal differences within Christianity, the ancient pagans were quite tolerant and accepting.

The Greeks felt they were bringing science and modern values to the world, and bringing people together under Greek leadership.  They often fused Greek religion with other pagan cultures, through telling the conquered peoples that their own favorite pagan deity was already in the Greek pantheon under a Greek name. 

This made Hellenistic culture more acceptable to local idolaters.  Greek religion was seen as a modern cosmopolitan update to their old paganism. 

The Jews were the odd man out

However, Jewish monotheistic culture was the polar opposite to Greek idolatry.  The fusion tactic could not work on Jews dedicated to their one God to the exclusion of any others.  Keep in mind this was before any other monotheistic religion had started.  You could not teach Jews that their God was part of the pantheon, since being Jewish by definition rejects any notion of a pantheon of gods.

In Greek eyes, the Jews were irrationally clinging to their old beliefs, despite the Greek culture being more rational, logical, and tolerant.  In addition, the Greeks dominated the known world militarily, and felt this was a blessing from the gods to impose their mores on everyone else.

Judaism has always emphasized the use of intellect, logic, and questioning to find the truth.  Famously, Abraham debates God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18) and Moses argues with God about sparing the Jews after the golden calf (Exodus 32).  This continued into the rabbinic tradition of arguing the fine points of the Law and comparing one subject with others to figure out the truth. 

The Talmud, aka Gemara, uses logic and deliberation to determine which laws are correct.  In a Yeshivah (a Jewish institute of higher learning) today, you hear young men debating, arguing, bringing  and rejecting proofs.  A secular study hall or library is supposed to be silent, a Yeshivah is supposed to be loud, a place of finding truth through clashing ideas and verbal combat. 

The Jewish cultural emphasis on intellect and debate led some Jews under the influence of Greek culture, as they thought the Greek logic was compatible with Judaism.

With the victorious Greeks being in political control and seeking dominate culturally as well, some Jews began attending Greek plays, debates, and gymnasiums (the ancient gym was not just an athletic hub, but also a place for socializing and debauchery).  These Hellenized Jews continued to practice Judaism at home, but were involved in Greek culture in public.

There was social and economical value in associating with the Greeks, who were then ruling over the entire near East.  The Greek king appointed a Hellenized Jew as high priest in Jerusalem, to spread Greek culture and help collect more taxes. 

As their social power increased, the Greeks began to demand the Jews worship of Zeus.  Then they put idol statutes in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.  This led to a backlash by traditional Jews, and a struggle over the direction of Jewish society.

Rape and War

In response to the growing protests of conventional Jews, the Seleucid Greeks forbade Sabbath observance, Torah study, circumcision, and Rosh Hodesh (the sanctification of the new month in the Jewish lunar calendar).  These commandments are critical since they give Jews control over their own minds, time, and bodies.  The Greeks chose these to show the Jews that they were under Greek control now and could not control their own fate. 

One of the other heinous decrees against the Jews was “jus primae noctis“, the law giving the local Greek governor or Hegemon the legal right to abduct and rape a bride on her wedding night (Gemara Ketuvot 3).  The Greeks wanted to dominate the Jews not just spiritually and culturally, but even in their sexual lives.

An inspiration for armed rebellion was the Greek soldiers kidnapping brides to take to the governor for legalized rape.  When the Greeks told the brothers of the bride that they were not real men, the Jews drew swords and slaughtered the entire platoon. 

Another version (likely both happened) was that the bride herself told her brothers that she had thought they were real men and was disappointed, which was the impetus to act.  We see that at least in classical societies, men would never stand by and allow the sexual exploitation of their daughters and sisters.

Despite all these laws designed to push Jews away from conventional Judaism, the organized war did not begin until one man took a public stand.  In Modiin, a representative of emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes ordered the Jewish priest Mattathias ben Yohanan to offer sacrifices to the Greek gods.  Mattathias refused to do so, and then killed a Hellenized Jew who volunteered to offer the sacrifices.  Mattathias then killed the Greek official too.

When the Greeks came after him, he fled into the wilderness to hide, and was joined by his 12 sons.  They were 13 men against a dominant military and political force that had conquered most of the known world.  They started to fight anyway, knowing they would likely lose their lives.  They called themselves Maccabees. 

The Maccabees began a bloody guerrilla war for religious freedom, and begun to gain support among traditional Jews.  Mattathias proclaimed “whoever is for God come to us” and was joined in arms by many Jews.  

The Greek army was over 10 times the size of the Jewish militia, and had modern military equipment and elephants (ancient tanks).  This was a slow and gory fight, with bloody reprisals by the Greek forces on Jewish civilians.

During this war, the Greeks went on raping Jewish women.  One of the famous stories from this war is Yehudit, the daughter of the high priest, who was taken by the Greeks to be raped by the Hegemon.  She played along and fed him salty cheese so he would get thirsty, then kept giving him wine until he was very drunk.  When he tried to rape her she was able to slay him with his own sword, then display his head to his soldiers and escape.

Eventually, with great difficulty and sacrifice, the Jews won.  The victory was not merely military, but social and cultural, a victory of conventional Jewish tradition over a watered down Hellenized Judaism. 

This was a triumph of people who wanted to maintain their ancient way of life over those who wanted to modernize their culture and make it just another sect under the umbrella of Greek culture. 

Remember, many Jews had fallen under Greek influence and accepted that Hellenism was the bright future for them and their people.   These Jews thought they could be Jewish in private and Greek in public.  The Maccabees destroyed that notion.

The Greeks were not used to their culture being rejected.  The Jewish resistance was not a mere military war, it was a cultural clash.  The Greeks had been very successful in spreading their culture and religion by fusing it with local pagan culture.  Since Jewish culture was not pagan and polytheistic, it could not fuse and survive as Judaism. 

The Jews could not identify their One God as a personality within the Greek pantheon.  The Hanukkah war was life or death for Judaism.  The conventional Jews could not tolerate paganism.  They were intolerant, bigoted, and clung to monotheism even though the polytheistic Hellenistic culture appeared more modern, tolerant and enlightened.

Frame

This struggle was really over who gets to decide what society thinks is respectable, normal, and good.  The Greeks wanted the Jews to start seeing the world through a Hellenistic frame.  The Jews wanted to determine their values the old fashioned way, through the conventional Jewish practice of their fathers as laid out in the Hebrew Bible, the Torah. 

The Greeks demanded that Jews to look at themselves through logical Greek eyes, rejecting faith for Greek philosophy. This is why they targeted the Sabbath, Rosh Hodesh, Torah learning, and circumcision.  These practices were illogical and set Jews apart from Greeks in areas of mind, body, and sense of control over time.  The Hellenists wanted the Jews to see their minds, bodies, and time through Greek eyes and become part of the Greek narrative.

This is a powerful, crucial concept.  If you let someone else provide you the lens through which you examine your life, you give up your freedom to them.  The Hanukkah struggle was really over who would define the framework of life for the Jews.

We call this idea Frame, as in the framework through which a person views the world and their role in it, or the basic assumptions that we live by and don’t think to question.

We can use frame to describe an element of romantic relationships, and we used this concept to explain the sexual temptation of Joseph in Egypt, see Hard to get is not new in Brothers and Power, Kings and Harlots.  

This concept applies not just to interpersonal relationships, but to your life as a whole, and how you view yourself in the world.  From Rollo’s classic essay on Frame:

In psych terms, frame is an often subconscious, mutually acknowledged personal narrative under which auspices people will be influenced. One’s capacity for personal decisions, choices for well-being, emotional investments, religious beliefs and political persuasions (amongst many others) are all influenced and biased by the psychological narrative ‘framework’ under which we are most apt to accept as normalcy.

The Greeks came in with tremendous military, political, social, and financial power which helped them to push their culture on others.  They saw themselves as bringing a modern, enlightened, universal culture to backwards primitive peoples.  Greek logic and Hellenistic high culture was, in their view, the inevitable future way of life for everyone. 

The Greeks had already established a dominant frame over most of the Mediterranean and near East.  Most people in the ancient world were beginning to understand their lives through Greek eyes.

The Jews had only their faith and commitment to tradition, a frame built on ancient observance and adherence to the Bible.  A few loyal Jews, the Maccabees, were able to fight off the Greek imposition of a new cultural framework onto the Jewish people.

They found the strength to do so because they sensed that to give up their ancient frame of conventional Judaism would mean losing their ability to define their life as religious people.  It would be a loss of control on the ability to define their lives and live them on their own terms.

This a reoccurring theme in our long history: an outside group or a sect of Jews with a goal of modernizing or reforming Judaism tries to convince Jews to change how we see ourselves in order to gain power.  The proposed changes were often small and incremental, but the desired result was to make Jews no longer see our ancient conventional Jewish practice as valid.

If they could get Jews to start looking at Judaism through a “tolerant” or “logical” or “modern” framework, this would detach then from their religious traditions.  In fact, our sages teach in our Passover Haggadah that in every generation there are those who try to subvert traditional Judaism in some way.

What frame are you in?

In modern secular American culture, the framework through which most people understand the world and their relationships is a feminist framework.  We are taught to put women first.

This is the result of many generations of efforts to change key social and cultural values in American life to fit the feminist perspective and empower women.  Children are exposed to female primary values at a very young age, through books, movies, and especially in public schools.  Boys are educated like sub standard girls, and medicated if they act “wild” (as boys naturally should be). 

In the media, movies celebrate female heroines (who behave like men), while women who choose to value family are looked down upon or ridiculed.  Young women are told them men should be at their beck and call, that they shouldn’t lift a finger to please a man.  Young men are trained to serve women and put their interests first.

This narrative is so commonplace and has been going on for so long that we take it for granted.  The feminist view of life is the default frame in present day America, and most Americans live within this frame without ever realizing it. 

Part of the reason this happened is that American culture was not inherently opposed to feminism.  Feminism was (originally) about equality, or so they said.  And America is all about equality.

So in America it was very easy to accept feminist ideas into mainstream dialogue and make feminism a favored political and social cause.  The female empowerment narrative grew and was misunderstood as part of an inevitable movement for equality, like the Civil Rights movement.  The women pushing their agenda saw it as modern, enlightened, progressive, and destined to dominate over and destroy the traditional social order.

The changes continued gradually until today, when by real metrics that matter, women are much more favored than men by society at large.  Most college graduates are women, most suicides are men.  And yet feminists continue to argue that they are the victims of the patriarchy.

The so called wage gap is the result of women choosing different jobs or choosing to work fewer hours than men.  Actual wage discrimination, meaning paying a man and a woman a different amount for the same work, is illegal. In addition, while men in aggregate still earn more money (since they work more hours), women spend more money.

But the narrative is that discrimination against women continues due to the patriarchy, when the reality is that women have it far better than ever before and men are suffering.  There has been no patriarchy in America for generations.  Since feminist ideas control the frame, most people accept this without question.

Accepting a feminist frame has created a massive cultural shift that most people are only ephemerally, at most, aware of.  The culture, through generations of feminist instigation, has moved the goalposts for men. 

New rules

Men often feel like they can’t win in today’s society; they are right, the rules have been changed on them, and the other team is not playing by the same rules anymore.  Even the language has been corrupted to fit the female primary framework. 

For instance, men are indoctrinated that “man up” means to take responsibility for a woman, and often for her mistakes.  As in “man up” and marry that single mother and adopt her kids, or “man up” and marry the woman who is past her prime and has six figures of student loan and credit card debt you will pay for. 

The culture has shifted so far that man up does not mean be a man, it means be responsible to bail out women who made mistakes in life. 

And men do that, because they have been taught and urged to see the world through a feminine primary lens, to make women the center of their life.  They think it makes them respectable, because American secular culture has chosen to redefine respectable for men in order to protect women from their own bad choices.  [See Rollo’s essay The Honor System]

This is a radical shift away from conventional masculinity, which was a man putting himself and his interests first, in order to be valuable as a man.  This often meant, historically, that he became the main provider for a stable family.  The quality woman was the metaphorical icing on the cake that he was baking for himself.  He was not baking the cake to impress and win her, but because he wanted to be an accomplished man.

The changes are so pervasive that I don’t think that the broader secular society can ever revert to anything like the previous (sometimes idealized) state of gender relations.  You can’t change back the clock, even if you wanted to.  In many ways the old culture was imperfect too, but the past is a foreign country that gets idealized by those unable to adapt to the present.

What you can do it try to open the eyes of young men and women* to the dangers of living within the toxic framework that presently dominates our mainstream culture.  Especially for men, let them know that the rules have changed to their detriment, and how they can manage to win under the new rules.  It’s a tough job since most men are deeply invested in the mainstream narrative.
[*Rollo again has an excellent essay on the dangers for women of living in the modern default feminist frame].

We call opening our eyes to this reality “taking the Red Pill” (see Red pills).  I have the benefit of living both among the modern society and also within a religious subculture that maintains a semblance of ancient social values.  This contrast makes the issues more obvious to me. 

Most men struggle to see the reality of what is going on in mainstream culture due to the total dominance of the feminist narrative.  Unplugging men is akin to the ancient Jewish struggle against the pervasive Hellenistic culture.

You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate Hanukkah.  The fight that gave us Hanukkah was a war over frame.  The real issue was through which eyes we are going to look at the world, if we get to define for ourselves what is valuable, respectable, and important. 

Our ancestors fought to reject the notion that they had to accept what the powerful forces in society told them was right.  True freedom is being able to determine for yourself the meaning of your life. 

A few proud Jewish men were willing to lose their lives for the freedom to choose their own frame.  Despite the terrible odds against them, this inspired a vast cultural movement that eventually won the war.  We can learn from them and become examples to other men. 

The ancient Greeks thought their way of life was the inevitable future for humanity, and fought to impose their will on others.  This hubris echoes down to the present day, when radicals are bent on pushing their agenda on the world, on controlling every man and woman by manipulating their life choices.

Hanukkah was a victory of rejecting a frame imposed on you from outside and winning the freedom to choose your own life.  Hanukkah is a Red Pill holiday.