It’s the week before Chanukah, and despite the revolutionary zeal … we
don’t make a big deal about the Hasmoneans.
The Maccabean revolt, with Matityahu’s willingness to die rather than
be forced to bow down to an idol, and Eliezer’s suicide attack on the mighty
Seleucid armies don’t get much attention, even at this time of year. Rather, we
tell a story about a fragile flame.
Historians, and we have a terrific historian joining us for our on-line
salon on Wednesday will point out that the Hasmonean dynasty was a bit of a
disaster, in the end.
All the zealotry didn’t work out, for our people.
Perhaps there was a sign that that would be the case earlier, much
earlier, in this week’s parasha.
The parasha opens with Jacob splitting his family in two before going
to meet his feared brother, on the basis that if one lot gets wiped out, there
will still be something left. That doesn’t sound too confident to me, I mean,
whatever happened to, “united we stand, divided we fall”?
Jacob even feels the need to remind God that the whole decision to go
back and face the music was God’s idea,
יְ-ה-וָה הָאֹמֵר אֵלַי, שׁוּב לְאַרְצְךָ
וּלְמוֹלַדְתְּךְָ.
It was You, God, who told me, return to your land, the place of your
birth!
Jacob doesn’t find this, being a patriarch thing, easy.
He’s duped, his attempts to have children with his various wives and
concubines seem clumsy at best.
On the night before he meets Esau, of course, there is the wrestling
with the angel, but just before the Torah says he sends everyone else forwards
and heads back to be alone.
I can’t help reading the verse and wondering if, if he’s just having
second thoughts about the whole thing. And he’s gonna run. Just like he ran
before.
I once learnt this passage with a psychologist – they suggested that
perhaps there was no angel, just a man wrestling with his own conscience. I like
that. A man struggling to find the confidence to face a future that seems uncertain
at best.
Jacob’s faith is not the faith of Abraham, so absolute he’ll offer up
his own child.
It’s not the faith of Isaac, who could lie there on the altar and watch
the blade come
towards his throat.
It’s the faith of a man who fears in the dark, who struggles to trust.
Maybe that’s the best way of understanding his renaming as Israel – it’s
not that Jacob wrestles God, but he wrestles to find faith in God and mankind.
He makes it, he refuses to yield to the fear, but the feeling that
comes through these remarkable verses is that it was close.
It’s not a given, that in dark faith will prove to solid and assuring.
The dark, the dark.
I'm feeling Jacob, a lot this year because I'm spending a lot of time,
awake at night and feeling vulnerable. As some of you know, I suffer from a
neurological condition, which can leave me suffering from up to five to 10
migraines a day. And they tend to come in the dark. And I hope you aren’t going
to come up after this service and asked me if I've tried evening primrose oil
or intermittent fasting or any of the rest of it, because I have and besides that's
not the point of this sermon.
The point of this sermon is that I know what it's like to be awake in
the middle of the night feeling vulnerable.
In the darkness, it's very easy to feel vulnerable. That's what it is
to be a descendent of Jacob, better known as Israel. We are inheritors of a vulnerability
who, despite our raw moments, refuse to yield to despair.
And, I think, it’s worth understanding that we don't call ourselves the
Hasmoneans, we call our
The rabbis were actually very unsure about whether or not, Hanukkah
deserved to be a valedictory occasion at all, with its fierce certainty.
The faith of the Hasmoneans feels unlike the kind of faith I believe in,
a faith that is fragile and determined despite everything, rather than a faith
that powers through obstacles in its certitude.
I found a remarkable Midrash on this verse, where Jacob returns to be
alone, on the other of the river. In Tanhuma Yelamdeinu the verse, ‘Vayivater Yaacov
Levado’ is matched to a verse from Moses’ last great song, way off at the end
of Deuteronomy - Adonai Badad Yancheinu. Our narrative comes hard baked
with an aloneness that isn’t just a function of who we are in the room with,
but instead an aloneness of feeling that we can do this.
It’s fragile.
Fragile like the flame.
Not certain like the Hasmoneans.
Dark times, we live in.
Times that call for the sort of faith that refuses to buckle despite
the sense of alonement,
The sort of faith that expects not certain victory, but instead, a call
on our every resource as we refuse to yield.
May that be the faith we find,
For, just like the Chanukah miracle, that flickering, small vial of
hope, is and has always been enough,
Shabbat Shalom
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