Posted on 12/06/2004 6:28:52 PM PST by Zionist Conspirator
The Hanukkah story could be the script for Mel Gibson's next biblical epic. Will it cause the religious tensions 'Passion' did?
Anyone who took offense at Mel Gibson’s "The Passion of the Christ", with its depiction of Jewish leaders condemning Jesus, should get ready soon to be offended all over again. Gibson, it is reported, has his heart set on doing a movie version of the story commemorated by Hanukkah. His text will be the novel "My Glorious Brothers" by Howard Fast. Ironically, this book is a sentimental favorite with the older-generation Jewish audience that also tends to be the main financial supporter of Gibson’s primary antagonist, the Anti-Defamation League, which led the drive to condemn "The Passion" as anti-Semitic. The Fast novel tells the story of Jewish heroes, circa 167 B.C.E., who defeat Greek oppressors of the Jewish people, retake the Jerusalem Temple, and relight the great menorah.
So what’s so offensive? If this sounds, on the contrary, like a mollifying gesture to ADL national director Abraham Foxman, you might want to look a little more closely at what Hanukkah is actually about.
Many Jews grew up thinking of Hanukkah (which in 2004 falls on December 8-15) as an innocuous children’s festival. Actually the Maccabean revolt was deadly serious business, and it recalls one of the great tensions in our own modern American society: the conflict was between what today one might call religious fundamentalists and the secular elite.
Here’s what happened. Jewish Palestine had fallen into the clutches of the Greek kingdom of the Seleucids, with their tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes, headquartered in Syria. While the Greeks were not anti-Jewish per se, they had little patience with the perceived particularism and parochialism of Judaism. (I say "perceived" because Judaism’s vision, when properly understood, is in fact highly universal.) The Greek vision was one of mutual theological acceptance. They were relativists, in the sense we know today, believing that not only the God of Israel but all the gods should be worshipped at the Jerusalem Temple--and believing that dissenters from their “tolerance” deserved to be suppressed.
Religiously committed Jews, however, were less troubled by the Greek Syrians themselves than by Jewish “Hellenists” in Palestine, and in the holy city itself, who had thrown in their lot with the Greeks. This was a way of social climbing. By embracing Greek culture, with its aggressive relativism, ambitious Jewish elites hoped to improve their own social standing in Greek eyes. They embraced Greek customs that religious Jews found disturbing – exercising naked in the gymnasium, with an emphasis on discus-throwing in the nude, or (far worse) effacing their circumcisions through a surgical operation involving cutting a flap a skin around the penis and letting it hang by weights. In his standard history of the period, "Alexander to Actium," Professor Peter Green calls this “select club of progressive Hellenizers” a “specially favored cosmopolitan class dedicated to social and political self-advancement,” seeking “sociological privilege and status.”
It all starts to sound like a Tom Wolfe novel. The secular elite were so determined to drive their religious fellow countrymen, whom they regarded as socially inferior, from the capital that finally they took the step of outlawing Jewish practice in Jerusalem itself. The Hellenized Jews burned books of the Torah, made circumcision a capital offense, and sacrificed a pig on the Temple altar.
This drove the religiously faithful--the “fundamentalists,” as the Hellenizers would have called them if they had spoken modern American English--to revolt. Pitting Jew against Jew, the resulting civil war was led by the Maccabee brothers, who whupped the forces of “liberal polytheism,” as Green puts it. The conservatives, he continues, “were stronger, and more numerous, and the more passionate in their beliefs: they stood firm in the face of odds, and were prepared to make sacrifices, indeed to die, for what they held most dear.” Shades of the 2004 presidential election? Maybe so. And this conservative victory is what Jews for 2000 years have celebrated at Hanukkah.
The same conflict reflected in the Hanukkah story is still being enacted down to our own time. Though every Jewish festival has its unique relevance to our contemporary lives, Hanukkah’s relevance is especially provocative and especially political.
When the news of Gibson’s interest in Howard Fast’s novel was picked up in the media, Foxman reportedly told Fast’s widow he would “feel more comfortable putting it in the hands of Mr. [Harvey] Weinstein than Mr. Gibson.” The irony is delicious. Weinstein is the Hollywood producer who co-founded Miramax and made X-rated art movies like "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" as well as, more recently, "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Kill Bill: Vol. 2." If Harvey Weinstein and motion pictures had been around in 167 B.C.E., Weinstein would have been the guy making “controversial” films about naked discus-throwing.
How secular liberals, Jewish and otherwise, will respond to the new Gibson effort is an interesting question. "The Passion" proved to be an embarrassment for the ADL and others who predicted that the film’s supposed anti-Semitism would expose America’s Jewish community to medieval-style perils. Of course, no such thing came to pass. All that the protests succeeded in doing was to ensure that many, many more people would see Gibson’s film than would have done so had there (without the ADL’s efforts) been no controversy to begin with.
For the folks who made such an aggressive and pointless fuss about "The Passion," there would seem to be two choices. The first is, once again, to raise a ruckus about how Gibson again casts Jews (in this case the secular liberal Hellenizers) as bad guys, and accomplish nothing positive. The other is to let Gibson alone. Personally, not myself being a big fan of the overlong, gratuitously violent "Passion," I would like to see him get back to the kind of spiritual thriller that caught his imagination when he starred in M. Night Shyamalan’s fabulously gripping "Signs."
Letting Gibson alone would maximize the chances of our avoiding a whole string of heavy-handed, biblically-inspired historical dramas with contemporary relevance. Undoubtedly the controversy sparked by the release of "The Passion" pumped up ticket sales, with many viewers feeling, not without reason, that Gibson had been persecuted just like Jesus was. Without the aura of martyrdom around the new film, perhaps it will be recognized for what "The Passion" actually was--a kind of film that doesn’t put Gibson’s considerable gifts to their best use. This, all around, seems the best strategy.
You're right, and it's strange that he would make that mistake. One of the miracles of Chanukkah is that G-d gave "the many into the hands of the few." This is very important. According to Greek philosophy (which took account only of the physical and the rational) the few cannot defeat the many. The defeat of the many by the few was a supernatural miracle attesting to the existence of HaShem and unseen, spiritual realities.
Those Maccabee brothers and their daddy were a tough bunch.
Hey, see my Chanukkah tag line!
I've no idea, other than convention. "Israel" signifies a people primarily rather than a land. But today's "palestinians" named themselves after the land, not vice versa. Besides, prior to statehood the Jews were called "Palestinians!"
Hey, Jews have farmed too (someone had to raise all those firstfruits and sacrificial animals!).
The great unwashed goys might even enjoy movies about secular vs. religious Jews, and then....oy vey! (slapping head). They'll have a take-an orthodox-Jew-to-lunch, and pogroms for the rest
Just let the Torah Sages handle the business of dealing with the various `arei niddachat. And no appeals to "unity" or "diversity"--after all, the worshippers of the Golden Calf were "good Jews" of a more liberal outlook!
Which means . . . ? (Draw your own conclusions, folks!)
Judah Maccabee would not have looked upon Christianity any more kindly than he looked upon Dionysus-worship.
Hey, if the Nazarenes can claim Moses and David as heroes, then Yehudah HaMaqqevi can be a hero as well! (And the old pre-Vatican II, "anti-Semitic" Catholic Church used to have a feast day for "the Holy Maccabees").
Have you been pinged to this article yet? You're a nice guy.
So this means he looked on the PLO as the "Maccabees" of his day, right?
Downright weird how someone could write a book on the Maccabees and then turn around and support "de masses of de rewolutionary Arab pipples."
Your history is a little confused.
The Jewish tradition is that prophecy ended with the death of Ezra, and the Hebrew Bible was closed soon thereafter. This was about the time of Alexander, well before the time of the Maccabees. This was about 70 years before the Septuagint.
Christianity is a completely different religion and is of course entitled to set its own standards of prophecy and canon.
Could it be that he was a hard-liner who was opposed to de-Stalinization?
Letting Gibson alone would maximize the chances of our avoiding a whole string of heavy-handed, biblically-inspired historical dramas with contemporary relevance.
Yes, God forbid we should assess contemporary culture against time tested values....rme..
100% true. Chanukkah is all about the victory of embattled tradition over the forces of "enlightenment" and "progress," and it is a dirty shame that its heroes have been cast as forerunners of the American Civil Liberties Union. That myth needs to be exploded once and for all.
The Feast of the Holy Maccabees was celebrated on august 1 ("lammas day"). Then the Church got "philo-Semitic" and started subscribing to German Protestant Biblical criticism!
One sad thing here is that so many traditionalist Roman Catholics (with whom I sympathize despite the vast gulf between our beliefs) see the Jews as the "hidden hand" behind everything bad that has happened in the past two millenia, including Copernicanism, Masonry, and the aforementioned German Protestant Biblical criticism.
I can hardly wait.
Let's hope he actually does this. Right now it's just talk.
That makes no sense at all. The Gospel of Mark contains errors regarding Jewish doctrine, dates of holidays and Judean geography which were corrected in Matthew. Why would the author of Mark change things which were correct in Matthew and make them wrong?
Where did he stand on the Israel/Arab conflict?
PS: Spartacus is a cult figure to the far Left as evidenced by the many "Spartacist" leagues and the use of that name by (dare I mention the name???) Adam Weishaupt.
Hey! The Megillah is most definitely in the TaNa"KH and not in any "apocrypha," which is why so many Puritans and rednecks were named Mordecai! You really slipped up there, hl!
There is a scroll of the Maccabees and it is read in some communities like the Megillah on Purim, but it isn't in the TaNa"KH.
One explanation for this is that the battle portrayed by Chanukah is still being fought: The story is not over!
The `Eirev Rav will be the last enemy to be defeated!
Nope. Unfortunately, so far as I know he's just thinking about making the picture at this point.
Gibson, it is reported, has his heart set on doing a movie version of the story commemorated by Hanukkah.
Ya can't miss when you've good material!
The Book of Esther, containing the account of Purim, is part of the Tanach.
Two books that appear in the Old Testament of this bible that are not in the Protestant Old Testament are 1 Machabees and 2 Machabees.
There's that evil Catholicism of Mel rearing it's ugly head again.
I'd go see it.
Encompassing four thousand years, the history of the Jews is a vast epic of such magnificent complexity that perhaps only a master story-teller can render it in all its color and grandeur. Now, in this stirring, deeply moving book, Howard Fast has woven for us not only the history of this people, but the history of a monotheistic concept and a nonviolent ethic.
He begins by recreating for us the harsh, nomadic life of the original children of Israel, the fierce confederation of tribes that once wandered the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula, the Negev, and Jordan. In time the Beni Yisrael would conquer and hold the walled cities of Palestine. They would worship the God of Moses. In time, during the reigns of David and Solomon, the Children of Israel would build an empire -- but curiously enough, their real center of power would be embodied not by king or aristocracy but by the nabi, or prophet, who spoke for mankind in the name of a just God who wept for the sufferings of his Chosen People. When the empire crumbled, the Jews would retain their identity as a people with a unique relationship to their God.
The coming of Christianity brought with it a hatred that would drive the Jews "from place to place, from city to city, from country to country," and the last two thousand years of Jewish history is the story of the Diaspora. Howard Fast writes eloquently of the great cultural achievements of the Sephardic Jews of Spain. He traces the Diaspora through Italy, Greece, and Turkey and then into northern and eastern Europe. His richly detailed account of the great immigration of the Ashkenazi Jews to the United States in the early years of this century and the growth of the teeming, vigorous Jewish community in New York City will be of particular interest. The final chapters of this book are concerned with the Nazi holocaust and its aftermath; the return of the Jew to Palestine and the founding of the State of Israel; and a discussion of the Jew's as yet unresolved role in future history.
Written with a power and passion that does full justice to its subject and handsomely illustrated, this book is an exciting and illuminating reading experience for young and old.
from the dust jacket of the 1968 Dial Press first edition
Wasn't Mark an associate of Peter? I seem to recall reading that.
The story of Purim took place in the generation before Ezra.
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