Mel and the Maccabees

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.

Do you happen to know when the film production begins?

Probably never ... According to the Express Times

* * * * *

Soon after his film "The Passion of the Christ" was released, Mel Gibson appeared on conservative talk show host Sean Hannity's radio show. When asked what he would do after the massive success of his film, Gibson said he was thinking about making a movie about the story behind the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah -- which begins at sunset Tuesday.

His Hanukkah movie would be loaded with action, Gibson said.

"The Maccabees' family stood up and made war," Gibson said, as reported by the BBC. "They stuck by their guns and they came out winning. It's like a Western."

What Gibson was talking about is the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which celebrates the Jewish rebellion led by the Maccabees over the Greek King Antiochus IV in 165 B.C.

The reaction to his proposed film from some Jewish officials -- still stinging from what they said was the anti-Semitism in "The Passion of the Christ" -- wasn't so positive.

"Thanks for trying to make it up to us, but no thanks," Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League told Britain's Sunday Times. "The last thing we need is Jewish history turned into a Western. In his hands, we would probably lose."

Since then, Gibson has reportedly become committed to a more secular film project -- another sequel to the action movie "Mad Max." However, if he does eventually make his Hanukkah movie, it may be an attempt to make amends with Jews over the controversy surrounding "The Passion of the Christ."

And it may also reflect a part of Gibson's faith.

The story of Hanukkah is not in the Hebrew Bible but in a section of the Christian Bible that Catholics and Orthodox Christians follow.

As a Catholic, Gibson adheres to a Bible which contains the Book of Maccabees and other books Protestant churches don't accept.

Placed between the New and Old Testaments, there are 15 books accepted by Catholics and 18 books accepted by Orthodox Christians. They include everything from additions to the Book of Daniel to books of prophecy and wisdom.

Protestants do not recognize these books as part of the canon. But sometimes they place them in the Bible and call them the Apocrypha (pronounced uh-pok-ruh-fuh), which means "concealed" or "hidden" in Greek.

Within those books is the Book of Maccabees, which contains the Hanukkah story. And a plot surrounding it that could, in Gibson's hands, be turned into a violent action movie.

The story goes like this:

With the Greeks occupying Jerusalem after the conquest of Alexander the Great, the Jews are persecuted because of their religion. They are forced to eat pork, not allowed to perform circumcisions and cannot worship as Jews.

"Antiochus was trying to have everybody worship the same god and didn't like one group not following what the state wanted," says Rabbi Mark Shrager of Bnai Abraham Synagogue in Wilson Borough.

The Jewish temple in Jerusalem is contaminated with pagan sacrifices. Offerings are made there to the Roman god Zeus. Outraged by the desecration of the temple, a Jew named Matthias kills the first Jew who approaches the altar to make a sacrifice and a royal official who presides over the offering.

Matthias and his sons, forced to flee to the hills, become the leaders of a growing group of rebels. The rebellion turns into a guerilla war with smaller Jewish forces defeating much larger armies.

After Matthias' death, his son Judas Maccabee -- Maccabee means "the hammer" in Hebrew -- takes command of the revolt. Eventually, the Jewish temple is reclaimed, cleansed, and dedicated with joyous worship for eight days. Judas proclaims those eight days of celebration should be celebrated annually.

"Usually, festivals were only celebrated if they were in the Hebrew Bible, but it reflected influence from the Greeks where a politician could proclaim a day of worship on his own," Shrager says.

Later, a story was told about a small amount of holy oil discovered at the cleansing of the temple. It was miraculously able to light the Temple lamp for eight days until more oil could be supplied.

The relighting of the Temple candelabras led to the tradition of Jews lighting a special Hanukkah menorah in their homes. They add one light during each night of the festival.

"The part about the menorah is from a later source because the rabbis didn't look too kindly on Maccabees in some ways," Shrager says. "They didn't want to place too much emphasis on the military exploits. They wanted to focus on God's role by showing the miracle of the lighting."

However, Catholics may have seen the Book of Maccabees another way.

The story of Jews being persecuted for their religion may have resonated with Catholics because of the church's emphasis on martyrs and saints persecuted for their Christian beliefs.

"As part of the Hanukkah story in the Book of Maccabees, Jews suffered and were killed because they didn't want to give up their religion, and to some extent that may have played a role in church doctrine," Shrager says.

But Jews often interpret the rebellion in the Book of Maccabees as a fight for something else.

"It shows how important religious pluralism is, and how it's important to have the freedom to worship," Shrager says.

SOURCE

Fyi (I remember him mostly from the Forties)

HOWARD FAST (b. 1914)
Alan Wald, Univ. of Michigan
[from Buhle, Buhle, and Georgakas, eds., ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AMERICAN LEFT, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992).]

A prolific author of historical novels, biographies, popular histories, children's stories, film scripts, plays, detective fiction, science fiction, and "Zen Stories," Fast also wrote "entertainments" under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. In the 1940s, and again in the 1970s and 1980s, he achieved best-seller status with novels explicitly promoting left-wing ideas.
Born the son of a factory worker in New York City, Fast dropped out of high school and published his first novel before he was twenty. Within a few years, he had issued more than half a dozen historical novels about the American Revolutionary War period, including Conceived in Liberty (1939), The Unvanquished (1942), and Citizen Tom Paine (1943). The Last Frontier (1941) was an impressive effort to view the effects of the colonization of the continent from the viewpoint of native peoples.

Fast was sympathetic to the antifascist movement and the Popular Front from the onset of his career. In 1943 he joined the Communist Party. In the years of his membership, his most successful books were Freedom Road (1944), a novel of the Reconstruction era; The American (1946), a fictionalized biography of Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, who pardoned three of the Haymarket anarchists; and Spartacus (1951), a drama of the 71 B.C. slave revolt.

In addition, Fast wrote less successful and more explicitly radical novels such as Clarktown (1947), concerning a Massachusetts strike; Silas Timberman (1954), depicting an academic victim of McCarthyism; and The Story of Lola Gregg (1956), describing the FBI pursuit and capture of a Communist labor activist. Among his Communist nonfiction writings, Literature and Reality (1950) is a vulgar treatise on Marxist criticism, Peekskill, (I.S.A.: A Personal Experience (1951) describes the 1949 attack of anticommunist rioters on a Paul Robeson concert; and The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1953) eulogizes the martyred Italian anarchists.

In 1950 the House Committee on Un-American Activities ordered Fast to provide the names of all those who had contributed to the support of a hospital for Spanish Republicans in Toulouse, France, with which he had been associated during the Spanish Civil War. When he refused, he was thrown in jail for three months. Blacklisted upon his release, he initiated his own publishing company, the Blue Heron Press. In 1952 he ran for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket, and in 1954 he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.

Immediately following his sensational break with and public excoriation of the CP in The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (1957), he moved to Hollywood to begin a new career as a scenarist. Nevertheless, by 1977 his popularity as a novelist was greater than ever when he wrote The Immigrants. The book was turned into a two-part television film and became the first of a pentalogy that was animated by left-liberal themes and traced an American family from the turn of the century through the Vietnam War era.

Go to the American 1950s home page.
Go to Al Filreis's home page.

Document URL: http://www.writing.upenn.edu//~afilreis/50s/fast-bio.html
Last modified: Monday, 02-Aug-2004 09:28:44 EDT

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