Globilization and the Maccabees

Rabbi's Notes - January 2001

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

Sometimes you don't see a great analogy until it jumps out and bites you. So here's the Hanukkah column I should have written for last month, except that this blazingly obvious connection didn't strike me until a whole bunch of clues had lined up. Which were: the end of November marked the one-year anniversary of the uprising in Seattle in protest of the World Trade Organizations meeting; Joel Grishaver, in his brilliant "one one foot" account of all of Jewish intellectual history, which echoed Ira Rosenberg's earlier tour de force, talked about how technological innovations in shipping allowed local Judean products, like olive oil, to find world markets, which in turn (with a few intermediary steps) led to the creation of the Talmud; Late Nite Liz invited me to read Hanukkah stories on her Saturday AM kids' radio show, which prompted me to comb through my mother's extensive children's holiday library, which in turn made me wish that I could find a certain kind of Hanukkah story, which caused me to mention this to Sharon Shapiro, who told me about a story called something like "The Boy Who Said No," which I couldn't get my hands on, which moved me to try to write my own, about a funny little storekeeper in a funny little neighborhood, with all kinds of idiosyncratic products, getting closed down by the Global Order of Everything. Which caused me to connect certain dots.

As you know, Hanukkah is the celebration of the Maccabean revolt, which was in fact a civil war between two Jewish factions (only late in the conflict did the Syrian monarch intervene, albeit drastically.) One faction was "hellenized," meaning that they engaged with the social and political institutions of the empire of Alexander the Greek. The other faction upheld traditional Jewish laws and values as they understood them. While the rabbinic tradition comes down squarely on the side of the traditional folk, so that we celebrate the Maccabees' victory over the hellenizing Jews, the truth is that, if an analogous conflict were happening today, many of us would probably be pretty ambivalent at best. So Hanukkah always presents a problem: were the Maccabees in fact heroes, or were they the taliban of their time? Should we be cheering or mourning their victory? I'm sure I've quoted to you at some time or another the startling analogy I heard years ago from Rabbi Jim Ponet, who said that that Maccabean revolt was like a busload of black coated fundamentalists with machine guns laying siege on Hebrew Union College (the Reform seminary where I was studying to become a rabbi.)

By contrast, Hellenism was, as Joel Grishaver explained so clearly, a liberal value system. The emperor didn't seek for all the little nationalities he conquered to believe or behave as he did. He didn't want to wipe out their gods or close their temples. "Even the Greeks reverenced the local deities at every place and honored them with sacrifices and offerings, and the Hellenized Orientals all the more so. The Hellenization of the gods of the East nowhere caused a change in the local cultic customs. The God of Israel was neither identified with any other divinity nor did he receive a Greek name..." (Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilizaton and the Jews) The empire only wanted access to the markets of the nationalities they conquered, and it brought with its conquest the polis, the gymnasium the theater and more. This, one might well think, should have been beneficial to the various farflung localities -- the hellenists brought economic and social opportunity to these little backwaters. Of course it was profitable to the emperor, but it raised all boats at the same time.

Hello -- does this sound familiar? Hellenism was ancient globalization. And the issues faced by the Jews of second century BCE Judea were not at all dissimilar to those raised in Seattle last year, or of little communities like ours facing off against Wal-Mart and MacDonalds. Ancient hellenism and contemporary globalization both pit the small and the local against the forces of Bigger and More from further away. Corey Fischer of A Travelling Jewish Theatre tells a story I love: an anthropologist brings television to a remote tribe that had never seen it before. For weeks the tribespeople sit transfixed before the tube. Their tribal storyteller sits idle. Then one day they turn the TV off and call their storyteller back into action. "Why?" asks the anthropologist in amazement, "after all the television has so many channels, so many stories!" "Yes," says the tribal leader. "But our storyteller knows US." That's a Hanukkah story if there ever was one, about the value of the particular, the local, the idiosyncratic, against global modernization.

Coming home from the protests in Seattle last year I felt like it was 1963 all over again, the very beginning of a new social movement that we could barely put into words. But we could feel the winds shifting, the times a'changing. And at each big summit of the kingpins of globalization this past year, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, there have been huge protest gatherings. Here at home Ralph Nader's presidential campaign was part of this movement, as is the growth of the Alliance for Democracy. Could we be on the verge of a new Maccabean Revolt? And if we are, on which side might each of us place ourselves?

When I went to Seattle last year, I found it hard to explain to my friends and family exactly what (not 'why' but 'what') I was protesting. Certainly there are some brutal extremes to global capitalism: sweatshops and slaughter of species. These deserve protest wherever they occur. But my gut motivation was more subtle. It had to do with a sense that multinational business has been slowly encroaching on the freedom of our own community to be itself. Even as I write this, I find it a hard adversary to describe. Multinational capitalism, like hellenism, is a slippery force. It is not like a violent right-wing dictatorship, which you can point to clearly and oppose wholeheartedly, though it can be an ally of violent usurpers of power. No, it appears benign in many of its guises and probably actually is for some people in some places. I personally benefit every day from the internet, from the availability of non-local products, from corporate medical research. At the same time I see our little community hospital holding on for dear life against a tide of corporate medicine. I see bookstores closing in Mendocino and Fort Bragg. I find out that the Big River watershed, where I love to hike and bike and kayak, is owned by some multinational asset holding corporation in South Africa that couldn't care less about our forest if they could even find it on a map. I sense the encroaching homogenization of global capitalism and its fundamental disinterest in my welfare or anyone else's. I feel control over the wellbeing of our community slipping to more and more remote reaches. That makes me a Maccabee, if a confused and slightly ambivalent one.

Ira has taught on several occasions that the whole matter of hellenization is one of the fundamental issues of Jewish history -- and that is has, over the millennia, been in large measure a progressive force. Hellenistic culture was, of course, the culture of Plato and Aristotle, whose philosophies (returned to us via Muslim clerics centuries after the Maccabees "purified" Jewish culture) became the backbone of Maimonides' teachings and much more. Even more, it was the culture of liberalism, of tolerance, of art -- in contrast, one might even say, to the noble but definitely parochial culture of traditional Judaism. Likewise in some senses, multinational capitalism is "neo-liberal." It lets the market determine culture and commerce. It brings whatever cultural byproducts of any society to anyone in the world who will buy them. It makes much that is modern available in premodern places. And of course all of us who wear clothes from Bali and drink tea from India, not to even mention tossing our teabags in cheap pastic containers made in China on their way to the compost, enjoy the benefits of multinationalism. Even as we can less and less buy clothing or beverages or containers made in our own community with our local materials by workers who can afford to live here and participate in our lovely, indigenous, tribal, local culture.

I think that somewhere in the presidential campaign Al Gore tried to say something about analogies. I didn't get it, but I do know that analogies are imperfect things. They probably raise better questions than they do answers. So I offer the analogy of Hanukkah and Seattle, the Maccabees and the Ruckus Society, Hellenism and multinational capitalism, to chew on between this Hanukkah and the next. Not a perfect analogy, but maybe an interesting one.

And hey, as long as I'm at it, why not go a step further? One might even say that Antiochus stepping in to this little intra-tribal struggle and acting so drastically -- closing the Temple, banning circumcision -- was actually a great favor to the Maccabean movement, because it made issues that may have seemed vague and confusing suddenly crystal clear. So maybe we are lucky with our new president (actually as I write, on December 12, I haven't yet heard the final outcome of this debacle, if indeed there will ever be one. But I'm guessing that, whatever happens, Antiochus may well win...) being such a staunch ally of the contemporary hellenists. Maybe he will take a drastic stand that will shock us out of our ambivalences into definitive action. Let's see what happens...

Copyright 2000 Rabbi Margaret Holub

(home) (calendar) (info) (articles) (sponsors) (links) (bios) (reviews) (travel) (recipes) (projects) (photos) (art)