What came after the Maccabean victory in Judea suggests the risks of religious tradition divorced from reason.
What came after the Maccabean victory in Judea suggests the risks of religious tradition divorced from reason.
S ince the 1970s, when Menachem Schneerson, the chief rabbi of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty, popularized Hanukkah to increase the visibility of the American Jewish community while reminding Jews of their heritage, the holiday has been conceived of in the popular imagination as an analog to Christmas. Most Americans know it as a winter festival of lights where Jews light candles and eat latkes and children get presents. But there’s much more to this celebration, whose origins date to the second-century b.c.
Hanukkah memorializes a rebellion by the Maccabees, a group of Jewish zealot insurgents, against the Hellenizing influence of the Seleucid Empire, founded after the death of Alexander the Great, that held suzerainty over Judea. The Maccabees fought ferociously against the Seleucids and their allies, liberating Judea from the yoke of the despotic Antiochus IV. When Jews celebrate Hanukkah, they light a candelabra known as a hanukkiah, a Hanukkah menorah with eight branches and a ninth “leader” candle, to commemorate the miracle of the oil: Legend has it that when the Maccabees recaptured the Temple, which had been defiled, there was only enough pure oil to light the menorah (the lamp kept burning in the holy space) for one day, but it lasted for eight.
The Maccabean revolt marked the first time that ancient Greek and Hebraic societies came to blows. So what can we learn from this clash of civilizations between “Athens” and “Jerusalem,” which Russell Kirk identifies in The Roots of American Order as two of the West’s main primogenitors?
American conservatives have long championed the advancement of liberty and reason — classical principles of the Enlightenment — in concert with virtue and tradition. These values can often seem dichotomous and in need of balancing. Does the triumph of the morally inclined Hebrews over the philosophically oriented Hellenizers instruct conservatism in the hierarchization of tradition over reason when such a conflict arises?
Some on the so-called New Right seem to think so. Yoram Hazony, for example, believes that Enlightenment rationalism, with its roots in classicism, “is a sand trap for your mind.” In his view, the Judeo-Christian tradition has much more to offer because, unlike hubristic rationalism, the Bible depicts reason as fallible, “capable only of local knowledge, and generally unreliable,” the latter being a view he believes is far more grounded in the realities of human existence.
Religion does indeed have much to offer society, and the Hanukkah narrative is a testament to this fact. But Jewish history following this episode is instructive, too. What happened to the Maccabees a few generations after their victory demonstrates that religion divorced from reason has risks of its own.
After defeating their Seleucid subjugators, the Maccabees’ descendants established the Hasmonean dynasty, a decadent kingdom whose weakness emerged precisely from its abandonment of rationalism and its merging of religion with the state. The Hasmoneans illegitimately merged the priesthood and the kingship, erasing the customary division between religious and political authority in Judea, and practiced forced conversion in defiance of Jewish law. Eventually, Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II, the warring brothers battling for dominance in the Hasmonean Civil War, beseeched Rome for intervention in the conflict, inviting a form of the same Hellenizing influence into the land that their Maccabean forebearers took up arms against. After the war, Judea became a Roman vassal kingdom, erasing Jewish sovereignty — a loss with profoundly grievous consequences for the Jewish people over the next 2,000 years.
What lessons can be gleaned from the Hanukkah story and its aftermath? Hazony claims that fusionist conservatives, those who still try to advance a balance of reason and tradition, are engaged in an exercise in futility. He asserts that they are incapable of conserving anything because they place too high a premium on reason and that only his preferred form of biblical traditionalism can preserve Kirk’s “permanent things” in the face of “woke neo-Marxism.” But the Hasmoneans represent a sort of inversion. They did conserve a form of their religious tradition, but one that, by being divorced from reason, produced its own decadence and degradation of tradition. Perhaps this tragic history offers us a cautionary tale. When tradition eschews reason entirely, it is doomed to fall victim to the same forces it intends to repel.