It's funny, as I get older I wish my ancestors had done more to hold on to...... something. Something to pass to me to keep alive. But there is nothing. And it seems America itself is turning its back on a distinct American identity (in part due to quite reasonable issues with our history). And all that's replacing it is anger and unhappiness. I used to be quite individualist. But now I kind of see it as a dead end, for most people. I don't have a strong feeling on whatever's going on in the middle east or the real Channuka story (I'm not jewish). But I have to say I politely dissent from the authors POV.
I hear what you’re saying. To be clear I’m not against traditions, Christmas is a tradition. What I’m against are bad traditions and the idea of maintaining separateness for separateness’s sake.
I am not a multiculturalist, I believe in the great American Melting Pot. That means we should adopt the best traits from all cultures and drop the worst. You are right people are turning their backs on a positive American identity, and I agree that’s terrible.
I linked to this in the essay when I mentioned “melting” in the opening, and then again later when I mentioned Israel Zangwill, but he proposed the beautiful vision of the American Melting Pot that I align with. You might enjoy reading my prior essay about that perspective here: https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/the-forgotten-american-masterpiece
Well, I think where we disagree is your belief that you can identify the "bad traditions" and dispose of them. I'm a Chesterton's Fence guy. The way that applies to what you have written imho, is this: I believe the vast majority of humans (maybe not you but most) are dissatisfied with the material world. It does not, ultimately, make them happy. Whether this is a result of how a god built us or an accidental side effect of 8 gazillion evolutionary adjustments in our species, I will not speculate. For millenia humans have tried to come up with systems of thought and behaivor that compensates for this. There's not a single way. Often these are called "religions" but there are others. The endless rules around French-ness or, maybe even better, Japanese culture for example. In short, for centuries people have engaged in trial and error to find what actions, thoughts, and behaivor makes them happy. And quite often it's like exercise: annoying and cruddy while you're doing it, with no obvious benefits.
But over time they emerge. Maybe your religion requires you to pray at specific times every day. Your family are really strict about this. And it sooooo sucks. It's boring. You have to stop whatever your doing and do it, which screws up your day. And its embarrassing around people who don't do it. And it doesn't seem to help you. But you keep doing it because you are forced to. And then eventually, decades later, some horrible thing happens in your life and you realize those daily prayers are suddenly not a burden, but a refuge that comforts you. And the thing is, if you hadn't been doing it all this time you would not even know what you were missing when you needed it.
We have more access to information now, sure. But I dont think that we are any more knowledgeable about how to find this happiness than a guy in a hunter gatherer band 40,000 years ago was. So we have to go by that century upon century of trial and error because that's all we got.
When I read your essay I got a general attitude of "Pfft. Those old dummies did so much dumb stuff. Let's just pick out the diamonds, duh!" (Please forgive me if I misunderstood.) But I don't think you or I or anyone is smart enough to do that. At least not reliably. So I'm not telling you not to change anything you do. Your change is just another tiny part of the multi-millenia trial and error I mentioned. But I do want to just say, in an extremely friendly way, "Bro, you might be throwing something away that you don't even know the value of yet. So be careful."*
That's all.
*Personally, for the sake of national comity, I'd rather we had a single set of traditions we all did. But we don't. I recognize that my counsel to hold on to your sub groups traditions works at odds with the ideal of a national melting pot set of traditions. I dont have some grand philosophy to reconcile this. Only that we work with what we are given. And, personally, I can't recommend someone forego the practices (aka life solutions) they've been given just to pursue a new set of practices that won't be fully tested until all of us alive now are long dead.
No, I don't think that's exactly right. I am strongly in agreement with you that culture is evolved (see Dawkins' idea of memetics), but that doesn't strip us of responsibility to look at the world rationally and make judgements. I also strongly agree that we need to be careful to look at what we're throwing out and to try to understand why certain cultural practices evolved so that we can maintain what is important in them, and we won't always do so perfectly—there will be trial and error like you say—but if we didn't try to progress by working to understand and iterate, we would still be living with many of the barbaric traditions we had thousands of years ago. And we would have no model to challenge the barbaric traditions that many cultures still practice today, such as FGM.
For a good attempt by an atheist to understand and integrate the value of religious traditions, I would look at the book "Religion for Atheists" by Alain Badiou. I'm sure it's not exactly right about everything, but I think he approaches the topic in the right way by looking at religion with generosity and care.
I think your prayer comparison is apt. I was raised in Orthodox Judaism and one is expected to go to synagogue and pray three-times a today. It's not just "boring," but a major impediment to life. Even if there will be a time someday where prayer might help me, I can say with 100% confidence that it's not worth the regular practice to get there.
In my view, Orthodox Judaism holds on because of many memes within it that promote its self-replication by preventing assimilation. Prohibition of intermarriage, physical separation through circumcision, indoctrination of children, and holidays like Chanukah. It's a "parasitic" meme in that it self-replicates at a cost to hosts, rather than in symbiosis with them. And this separation has brought harm to Jews repeatedly throughout history. I could list many good things in Judaism that I would keep—and Christianity for example has already kept many of those—but on the whole I do not think the evidence shows that it's a good tradition for today's world.
Uhh, no. Nothing to do with consumerism is described anywhere in this comment nor in my article.
Having said that, I’m happy to defend consumerism. Here’s more of the Ayn Rand quote I abridged at the end of the article: “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/christmas.html
Like some of the other commenters, I am an observant Jew who has no plans to abandon celebrating Chanukah. However, I appreciate reading different viewpoints, including contrarian ones, and I appreciated this essay. I agree that Jews who want to assimilate should do so freely. There are too many points in the essay to discuss, some of which I agree with and others I disagree with. The only thing I will mention here is that it's very difficult to predict what will happen to Israeli demography and attitudes based on such short timeframes. If we were to have done this only a few short decades ago, we would have made very different predictions. I am not pleased with the current government, but I also don't think it's a given things are only going to continue in this extreme direction.
I don't know what direction the state of Israel will take. I just don't think enough time has passed for anything to be obvious yet.
It's also interesting to me that you use the example of DNA evidence of 200 million living descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to discuss successful assimilation in the same essay in which you mention the Spanish Inquisition. While it's true that antisemitism wasn't racialized like it was in Nazi Germany and therefore allowed people who converted to Christianity to assimilate and provide us the genetic heritage evidence you referenced, it's not exactly the type of assimilation you would advocate for that yielded these 200 million living descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews. I agree with you that Jews who want to assimilate should do so. I'm just not convinced the example is a good example of massive voluntary Jewish assimmilation the way people think about it today.
The Spanish Inquisition was bad to be clear and I don’t advocate for anything like it, but my understanding is that despite the many forced or pressured conversions, many conversions also happened voluntarily. And even amongst the many who were pressured, they came to genuinely appreciate and identify with the Christian faith over time.
“As time passed, the conversos settled into their new religion, becoming just as pious as other Catholics. Their children were baptized at birth and raised as Catholics. But they remained in a cultural netherworld. Although Christian, most conversos still spoke, dressed, and ate like Jews. Many continued to live in Jewish quarters so as to be near family members. The presence of conversos had the effect of Christianizing Spanish Judaism. This in turn led to a steady stream of voluntary conversions to Catholicism.
In 1414 a debate was held in Tortosa between Christian and Jewish leaders. Pope Benedict XIII himself attended. On the Christian side was the papal physician, Jeronimo de Santa Fe, who had recently converted from Judaism. The debate brought about a wave of new voluntary conversions. In Aragon alone, 3,000 Jews received baptism. All of this caused a good deal of tension between those who remained Jewish and those who became Catholic. Spanish rabbis after 1391 had considered conversos to be Jews, since they had been forced into baptism. Yet by 1414, rabbis repeatedly stressed that conversos were indeed true Christians, since they had voluntarily left Judaism.”
Admittedly this is perhaps not the most clear cut example I could have picked. Conversos were persecuted even after conversion, more so at times than actual Jews. But nonetheless, over the long run based on their population numbers, they appear to have been a highly successful group. And the broader principle I wrote of applies to all who find they have Jewish ancestry, which goes far beyond the Iberian context.
I'm sure there were many who converted to Christianity and other religions willingly both before and after the Inquisition and assimilated successfully. The basic premise would have stood even if they had all initially converted by force. That wasn't my point. My point was it was an odd rhetorical tool to use such an impressive number (200M!) to show successful assimilation when there's no doubt that many of their ancestors did convert by force.
Anyway, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I think people who don't want to partake in Judaism just shouldn't. Assimilate away if that's what you choose. The social punishment that often comes with it may be difficult and unfortunate, but it is far from getting killed for eating pork in 99.9% of cases. It is also hard to say that the social punishment is responsible for Judaism's persistence although one can certainly speculate.
I really think the pagan roots of Christmas are universal, at least to those who lived far enough north that winter was a dangerous time of relative death and darkness. Celebrating the darkest, coldest time of the year by bringing family together for drinks and a feast, is a beautiful tradition, and will likely always be pure enough to stand on its own
Agreed! Christmas also does a good job of creating a strong reason for people to participate in pro-social, collective rituals. I've always loved the way Christmas makes it feel like everyone's timelines sync up, especially now when time feels so endless and abstract because of the internet.
I as well have taken various contrarian positions albeit within my orthodox Jewish religious framework but I must say I strongly disagree with your overall point. Though to begin with, I very much agree with your political assesment of what is going on in Israel with the strong shift to the Right, and the dangerous positions many of the people being placed in power hold. I have been living here for a few years and it makes me sick to see the extremists gain control. On your point of Chanukah not having "pure" origins, I feel that you are playing a psuedo-intelectual game where you deconstruct a tradition without explaining or understanding the lived experience of the people that celebrate it. Even in very religious circles Chanukah is not used as a holiday to vent against the secular parts of society or the like, it is used mainly as a culture and family building exercise just like most Holidays. I would argue in the post-modern world it dosent even matter much where our traditions stem from as long as they provide a positive utility for society.
Thank you for your thoughtful response and subscription! Disagreeing with me in this kind way is exactly what I would want to see from an Orthodox Jewish person who I can't convince.
I was raised Orthodox and used to celebrate Chanukah, so I do understand the lived experience as it's mine as well. I understand that the average celebration of Chanukah is not taking time aside to vent about secularism, but even as it's practiced by most families, it still venerates the Maccabees as heroes and doing so keeps the moral legacy of the holiday alive. It also keeps Jews separate by giving them a holiday to celebrate instead of mainstream practice of the surrounding society, although that may not apply in the Israeli context like it does in the American one. As an American, I believe in the "melting pot" model of cultural integration and am not a multiculturalist. I believe in the freedom of everyone to celebrate whatever traditions they would like, but I don't think every tradition is equally good and I encourage those carrying on worse traditions to voluntarily trade them out for better ones. I wrote further about the beauty of the "melting pot," which is the intellectual legacy of Israel Zangwill, in a prior article here: https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/the-forgotten-american-masterpiece
I dont think that venerating the Maccabees as heroes is somehow keeping their supposedly immoral legacy alive, its just not. Obviously as an Orthodox Jew I see a huge problem with the American "melting pot", even though my heartstring are pulled by your utopian vision of a generic American culture without barriers between groups, I am totally pessimistic that such a thing can even exists and if it did, I would be against it happening.
"Kahane believed that any Jew who engages in sexual relations with a person of a different religion should be imprisoned."
For real? Kahane (while married) had an affair with a non-Jewish woman. After he knocked her up, and was two days away from marrying her, he abruptly broke it off. She committed suicide.
I read this article a couple of months ago and really enjoyed this very unique contrarian take I hadn’t heard anywhere else! Now I’m ready to write a response. There are things in this article I agree with and disagree with. I will start with the areas I agree with Jake on. First off, the atrocities the Maccabees committed against Hellenistic Jews (which they saw as not practicing Judaism “the right way.”) were horrendous and sickening. I was not aware of these atrocities. I learned a lot of history in this article I frankly was not familiar with before. Jews who celebrate Christmas instead of Hanukkah such as Jake should NOT be stigmatized for doing so! There is no “right way” as it were, to be Jewish. Each individual Jew should be able to decide for him or herself what traditions they will follow, holidays they will celebrate, how or if at all they will practice the Jewish religion, etc. Lastly, I see the clear parallel you made between the fanaticism and purist attitudes of the Maccabees and the current far-right in Israel. The things they said and did I was unaware of but not surprised by. Itamar Ben-Gvir having a picture of Cave of Patriarchs shooter Baruch Goldstein in his home is pretty on brand for him. Meir Kahane was a monster and I’m glad he’s no longer around to pollute the world with his hatred. These people really are no different than the Islamists in the Palestinian Territories. Bezalel Smotrich recently reinforced your point by saying starving two million Gazans “May be justified.” In a remark rightly roundly condemned by the international community.
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts Noah! I really appreciate your perspective on this. I love your point about allowing Jews to navigate what traditions they personally feel right engaging with versus blind repetition.
I know there's a lot of value in tradition and will be the first to warn against also blindly throwing all traditions out simply because they're traditions. But you do a great job of describing the healthy middle ground between both these sides, which is a more conscious, individualized assessment of traditions. I've always thought that was a powerful way for people to still connect with and engage with their background/traditions while not becoming foot soldiers for a collective at the expense of their growth and often the progress of their society!
And yes, I appreciate that you also see the parallels between the fanaticism of the past and the present in certain sects. If more people could see this, maybe the conversation could be more driven by moderate voices instead.
Traditions are important for families. History is often subjectively rewritten. At least 25% of Americans don’t put up Christmas trees. This author is uncomfortable about his ancestry. I’m unsubscribing.
The entire point of this publication is to highlight rational but unpopular viewpoints—not to cosplay as an outcast because sometimes some people disagree with you.
Perhaps you're not a good fit for a publication called "the black sheep" if your first reaction to a true black sheep is dismissal and avoidance. This is the same reaction that encourages suppression, inauthenticity, and hollow conformity instead of understanding and civil disagreement.
The last thing I want are subscribers to this publication who perpetuate the same devaluation of unpopular perspectives that our true black sheep authors and subscribers have dealt with most of their lives.
What a tedious post, man. I’m a secular Jew and I celebrate Hanukkah for the food, because latkes and donuts and lighting candles are awesome. What is wrong with you exactly? You don’t want to be a religious Jew, don’t be. Who is forcing you? You want to be Christian? Knock yourself out. But seriously, this level of getting worked up over a holiday most people, even non-Jews, enjoy is something to discuss with your therapist. This post is dumb.
"I celebrate a holiday I don't believe in because of food" is not the more reasonable perspective.
You're putting on the front of being cool, but you're clearly worked up yourself over this essay. Why does the proposition that people shouldn't celebrate holidays whose core values they don't hold upset you enough to resort to the lowest form of argumentation, ad hominem attacks?
By the way, last line of the essay literally says you can keep eating latkes, just don't do so in celebration of a holiday unless you actually believe in what it memorializes. Irrational and unprincipled individuals affect everyone, unfortunately.
Nearly nobody who celebrates Christmas actually believing in the story of the Trinity and immaculate conception or virgin birth. They do it for the warmth of a family gathering and gift giving. Hanukkah, similarly, isn’t actually celebrated with the Hasmonean war with the Syrian Greeks on anyone’s mind, nor do most Jews believe in the miracle of the oil tin. It’s done for the fun of being together as a family. It’s also a minor religious holiday, and there are no vacation days associated with it in Israel. It’s only an elevated holiday in the diaspora due to the winter break, and specifically due to Christmas. So, the author is frothing at the mouth with hostility to Judaism to a bizarre degree. The dude can pick and choose to be religious or not, but this article is weird, and reeks of his personal axe to grind. I guess that writing at length about how Jews were intolerant two thousand years ago makes him feel better, but the guy can use therapy instead. No kingdoms nor religions at the time were remarkably different nor less combative with their neighbors, especially while occupied. In short, he can give his anger toward Judaism a rest. Jews don’t take Hanukkah that seriously and neither should he.
How many times in history Jews tried to assimilate and been killed! This writer never lived through true antisemitism...
Jews from Germany, Jews from Russia, Jews from the East - tried to prove over and over that they are not Jews ( but who they are then? ) So take Islam and live in piece as second world citizens - that what this author is suggesting?
I already have two paragraphs in the essay itself addressing this exact point:
“Jewish assimilation into surrounding cultures has a long history. The Hellenistic Jews of Hasmonean Judea may have been slaughtered, but the same instinct that arose in them to pursue their own happiness over their group membership has arisen again and again. This instinct is written about in an almost exclusively negative manner by Jewish writers, who have described it as a ‘silent holocaust.’ I remember being taught as a teenager in Jewish school that German Jews believed they had integrated into Germany in the early 20th century, but the Nazi’s racialist policies and the Holocaust proved that assimilation was and always would be a failure. They were always seen as Jews, and we would always be seen as Jews too.
This was a selective telling of history, little different from the Hasmonean’s biased texts documenting their own time’s assimilationists. If you need proof that Jewish assimilation has a successful track record, just look at all the people who take DNA tests and discover their Jewish ancestry. Now ask yourself who exactly that Jewish ancestor was and what they did. It’s estimated that there are 200 million living descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews alone, including almost 25% of all Latinos and Hispanics. Compare that to the estimated 16.2 million people still identifying as Jews today.”
Yes, but I don't think there's value in maintaining a group merely for maintaining a group's sake. I wouldn't agree that the descendants of the neighbors of ancient Judea—the Phoenicians, Arameans, Nabateans, etc.—are necessarily worse off for not being part of those cultural groupings anymore, having instead been integrated into other ones.
We have to ask, at what cost is it not worth it to save one's identity/culture/religion? Not all identities/cultures/religions are equally good, and not all elements of them are equally worth preserving.
I discuss in the article in detail the increasing popularity of theocrats in Israel that would prevent assimilation by force, so you should be able to see that. Given how birthrates are changing demographics in Israel, their influence is likely to increase substantially over the next few decades. And that's not even to mention how strong cultural authoritarianism alone can prevent the free assimilation of Jews. I'd highly recommend watching this great documentary on Netflix about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Us_(2017_film)
As I said before - anybody is free to assimilate, you do not need to destroy a country for this purpose.
Because if you want to assimilate it should not to be a country whose traditions you want to forget.
What you are trying to say seems to me is you will forcefully assimilate those who does not want to.
Leave the country and assimilate anywhere…
I think there is a huge value in existing of Jews, and even if I was born and grew up not religious I have a great respect to those who keep our traditions and philosophy…
Arguing I'm trying to "forcefully" assimilate people after reading a 5,500 word essay entirely about the importance of religious freedom is malicious and absurd. You sound exactly like the awful Maccabees who saw the free practice of Hellenized Jews as in conflict with their own freedom to oppress. I'm arguing for what people should do, not telling them what they must do.
If you're happy about theocrats coming into power, I hope you'll be equally happy when Israel loses all international support and its less religious population suffers for their benefit.
You were using the word assimilation, and it is fine. But it seems to me you are trying to say what people must do… religious freedom does not mean to dictate your moral preferences and bringing help of “international community” in order to dictate and eventually destroy the country. International community never supported Israel to begin with, and definitely with the help of assimilated Jews on the first place never tried to bring peace to this land.
Now I will get into areas where I disagree with Jake. At the beginning of the article you write that Hanukkah was created to segregate American Jews from the rest of American population for the sake of being different. I would disagree with this point. I think it was rather that when American Jewish leaders saw American Jews celebrating Christmas they feared they would lose touch with their roots. I don’t think American Jewish leaders pushed Hanukkah just to separate Jews from Gentile society but rather to remind the American Jewish community who they are and where they come from. I would also disagree with your views on the Maccabees. To be sure, the atrocities they committed against Hellenistic Jews were shocking and revolting. But their brutality as shocking as it is to modern people, was the norm in their time. Just look at famous historical figures from the ancient world like Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Ramses the Great II, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, etc. While the Maccabees were certainly very flawed individuals they nonetheless, defeated the Greeks and won autonomy for Judea within the Hellenistic Greek Empire. Like our nation’s founding fathers, they were flawed human beings who nonetheless did great things. Instead of not celebrating Hanukkah, I would advocate for Jewish children to be taught a FULLER account of who the Maccabees were, warts and all.
I’ll chime in with my thoughts, despite it not being my essay lol. Thanks these thoughtful counterpoints, I hope you’ll find my own interesting!
In regards to the intention of separation, I think parsing the difference between “keeping in touch with your roots” and maintaining a distinct, differentiated identity from others is a lot more similar than different. You see the same sweet-sounding rhetoric applied to Black History Month and even the invention of Kwanzaa, but at the core, the goal is the same as the outcome: maintaining clear distinctions between in-group and out-group. This is directly at odds with the American ideal, where our collective identities become less important than our individual character and our ability to cooperate. A little too much “getting in touch with your roots” is also what leads to ideologies like black and white nationalism, by which maintaining identity becomes all important.
It’s my belief that collective identities aren’t important enough to warrant intentional reaffirming vs free engagement with them and naturally, the loss of elements that aren’t useful to people anymore. Attempting to reinforce them serves the group at the expense of the individual’s flourishing. That was exactly my experience in leftist spaces that encouraged me to see myself primarily by group identities vs as an individual.
And in regards to the Maccabees, I think the point Jake was making wasn’t that we should hold past figures to the standards of today (as both of us disagree with that for the reasons you correctly apply to the Founding Fathers), but that we also shouldn’t celebrate their failures. It’s one thing to recognize the specific good acts taken by the Maccabees, it’s another thing to celebrate the specific acts of brutality—as exemplified in the essay by the quotes from Avi Moaz and Josh Hammer—which would be more akin to embracing the failures of the Founders (slavery, limitation of rights to women, etc). None of the historical figures you mentioned (Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Ramses the Great II, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar) are celebrated today for their brutality.
I agree with you that at least offering a more historically accurate and neutral overview of the Maccabees would be an improvement; then people would have a better chance to develop their own views.
At the end of the day, collective identities have sown so much division and bloodshed throughout history. As an individualist and humanist, I think that whenever we can reassess our collective affiliations and improve them (often by letting go of the more divisive aspects), we allow for growth and unity. It’s one of the more beautiful achievements the US has strived for!
It's funny, as I get older I wish my ancestors had done more to hold on to...... something. Something to pass to me to keep alive. But there is nothing. And it seems America itself is turning its back on a distinct American identity (in part due to quite reasonable issues with our history). And all that's replacing it is anger and unhappiness. I used to be quite individualist. But now I kind of see it as a dead end, for most people. I don't have a strong feeling on whatever's going on in the middle east or the real Channuka story (I'm not jewish). But I have to say I politely dissent from the authors POV.
I hear what you’re saying. To be clear I’m not against traditions, Christmas is a tradition. What I’m against are bad traditions and the idea of maintaining separateness for separateness’s sake.
I am not a multiculturalist, I believe in the great American Melting Pot. That means we should adopt the best traits from all cultures and drop the worst. You are right people are turning their backs on a positive American identity, and I agree that’s terrible.
I linked to this in the essay when I mentioned “melting” in the opening, and then again later when I mentioned Israel Zangwill, but he proposed the beautiful vision of the American Melting Pot that I align with. You might enjoy reading my prior essay about that perspective here: https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/the-forgotten-american-masterpiece
Well, I think where we disagree is your belief that you can identify the "bad traditions" and dispose of them. I'm a Chesterton's Fence guy. The way that applies to what you have written imho, is this: I believe the vast majority of humans (maybe not you but most) are dissatisfied with the material world. It does not, ultimately, make them happy. Whether this is a result of how a god built us or an accidental side effect of 8 gazillion evolutionary adjustments in our species, I will not speculate. For millenia humans have tried to come up with systems of thought and behaivor that compensates for this. There's not a single way. Often these are called "religions" but there are others. The endless rules around French-ness or, maybe even better, Japanese culture for example. In short, for centuries people have engaged in trial and error to find what actions, thoughts, and behaivor makes them happy. And quite often it's like exercise: annoying and cruddy while you're doing it, with no obvious benefits.
But over time they emerge. Maybe your religion requires you to pray at specific times every day. Your family are really strict about this. And it sooooo sucks. It's boring. You have to stop whatever your doing and do it, which screws up your day. And its embarrassing around people who don't do it. And it doesn't seem to help you. But you keep doing it because you are forced to. And then eventually, decades later, some horrible thing happens in your life and you realize those daily prayers are suddenly not a burden, but a refuge that comforts you. And the thing is, if you hadn't been doing it all this time you would not even know what you were missing when you needed it.
We have more access to information now, sure. But I dont think that we are any more knowledgeable about how to find this happiness than a guy in a hunter gatherer band 40,000 years ago was. So we have to go by that century upon century of trial and error because that's all we got.
When I read your essay I got a general attitude of "Pfft. Those old dummies did so much dumb stuff. Let's just pick out the diamonds, duh!" (Please forgive me if I misunderstood.) But I don't think you or I or anyone is smart enough to do that. At least not reliably. So I'm not telling you not to change anything you do. Your change is just another tiny part of the multi-millenia trial and error I mentioned. But I do want to just say, in an extremely friendly way, "Bro, you might be throwing something away that you don't even know the value of yet. So be careful."*
That's all.
*Personally, for the sake of national comity, I'd rather we had a single set of traditions we all did. But we don't. I recognize that my counsel to hold on to your sub groups traditions works at odds with the ideal of a national melting pot set of traditions. I dont have some grand philosophy to reconcile this. Only that we work with what we are given. And, personally, I can't recommend someone forego the practices (aka life solutions) they've been given just to pursue a new set of practices that won't be fully tested until all of us alive now are long dead.
No, I don't think that's exactly right. I am strongly in agreement with you that culture is evolved (see Dawkins' idea of memetics), but that doesn't strip us of responsibility to look at the world rationally and make judgements. I also strongly agree that we need to be careful to look at what we're throwing out and to try to understand why certain cultural practices evolved so that we can maintain what is important in them, and we won't always do so perfectly—there will be trial and error like you say—but if we didn't try to progress by working to understand and iterate, we would still be living with many of the barbaric traditions we had thousands of years ago. And we would have no model to challenge the barbaric traditions that many cultures still practice today, such as FGM.
For a good attempt by an atheist to understand and integrate the value of religious traditions, I would look at the book "Religion for Atheists" by Alain Badiou. I'm sure it's not exactly right about everything, but I think he approaches the topic in the right way by looking at religion with generosity and care.
I think your prayer comparison is apt. I was raised in Orthodox Judaism and one is expected to go to synagogue and pray three-times a today. It's not just "boring," but a major impediment to life. Even if there will be a time someday where prayer might help me, I can say with 100% confidence that it's not worth the regular practice to get there.
In my view, Orthodox Judaism holds on because of many memes within it that promote its self-replication by preventing assimilation. Prohibition of intermarriage, physical separation through circumcision, indoctrination of children, and holidays like Chanukah. It's a "parasitic" meme in that it self-replicates at a cost to hosts, rather than in symbiosis with them. And this separation has brought harm to Jews repeatedly throughout history. I could list many good things in Judaism that I would keep—and Christianity for example has already kept many of those—but on the whole I do not think the evidence shows that it's a good tradition for today's world.
Fair enough. I respectfully dissent.
Uhh, no. Nothing to do with consumerism is described anywhere in this comment nor in my article.
Having said that, I’m happy to defend consumerism. Here’s more of the Ayn Rand quote I abridged at the end of the article: “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/christmas.html
Like some of the other commenters, I am an observant Jew who has no plans to abandon celebrating Chanukah. However, I appreciate reading different viewpoints, including contrarian ones, and I appreciated this essay. I agree that Jews who want to assimilate should do so freely. There are too many points in the essay to discuss, some of which I agree with and others I disagree with. The only thing I will mention here is that it's very difficult to predict what will happen to Israeli demography and attitudes based on such short timeframes. If we were to have done this only a few short decades ago, we would have made very different predictions. I am not pleased with the current government, but I also don't think it's a given things are only going to continue in this extreme direction.
I hope you are right! I certainly think the next election will go better, but I worry about the long run.
I don't know what direction the state of Israel will take. I just don't think enough time has passed for anything to be obvious yet.
It's also interesting to me that you use the example of DNA evidence of 200 million living descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to discuss successful assimilation in the same essay in which you mention the Spanish Inquisition. While it's true that antisemitism wasn't racialized like it was in Nazi Germany and therefore allowed people who converted to Christianity to assimilate and provide us the genetic heritage evidence you referenced, it's not exactly the type of assimilation you would advocate for that yielded these 200 million living descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews. I agree with you that Jews who want to assimilate should do so. I'm just not convinced the example is a good example of massive voluntary Jewish assimmilation the way people think about it today.
The Spanish Inquisition was bad to be clear and I don’t advocate for anything like it, but my understanding is that despite the many forced or pressured conversions, many conversions also happened voluntarily. And even amongst the many who were pressured, they came to genuinely appreciate and identify with the Christian faith over time.
Catholic source, so probably some bias not unlike Jewish writers on the topic, but see here: https://crisismagazine.com/vault/the-truth-about-the-spanish-inquisition-2
“As time passed, the conversos settled into their new religion, becoming just as pious as other Catholics. Their children were baptized at birth and raised as Catholics. But they remained in a cultural netherworld. Although Christian, most conversos still spoke, dressed, and ate like Jews. Many continued to live in Jewish quarters so as to be near family members. The presence of conversos had the effect of Christianizing Spanish Judaism. This in turn led to a steady stream of voluntary conversions to Catholicism.
In 1414 a debate was held in Tortosa between Christian and Jewish leaders. Pope Benedict XIII himself attended. On the Christian side was the papal physician, Jeronimo de Santa Fe, who had recently converted from Judaism. The debate brought about a wave of new voluntary conversions. In Aragon alone, 3,000 Jews received baptism. All of this caused a good deal of tension between those who remained Jewish and those who became Catholic. Spanish rabbis after 1391 had considered conversos to be Jews, since they had been forced into baptism. Yet by 1414, rabbis repeatedly stressed that conversos were indeed true Christians, since they had voluntarily left Judaism.”
Admittedly this is perhaps not the most clear cut example I could have picked. Conversos were persecuted even after conversion, more so at times than actual Jews. But nonetheless, over the long run based on their population numbers, they appear to have been a highly successful group. And the broader principle I wrote of applies to all who find they have Jewish ancestry, which goes far beyond the Iberian context.
I'm sure there were many who converted to Christianity and other religions willingly both before and after the Inquisition and assimilated successfully. The basic premise would have stood even if they had all initially converted by force. That wasn't my point. My point was it was an odd rhetorical tool to use such an impressive number (200M!) to show successful assimilation when there's no doubt that many of their ancestors did convert by force.
Anyway, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I think people who don't want to partake in Judaism just shouldn't. Assimilate away if that's what you choose. The social punishment that often comes with it may be difficult and unfortunate, but it is far from getting killed for eating pork in 99.9% of cases. It is also hard to say that the social punishment is responsible for Judaism's persistence although one can certainly speculate.
I really think the pagan roots of Christmas are universal, at least to those who lived far enough north that winter was a dangerous time of relative death and darkness. Celebrating the darkest, coldest time of the year by bringing family together for drinks and a feast, is a beautiful tradition, and will likely always be pure enough to stand on its own
Agreed! Christmas also does a good job of creating a strong reason for people to participate in pro-social, collective rituals. I've always loved the way Christmas makes it feel like everyone's timelines sync up, especially now when time feels so endless and abstract because of the internet.
I as well have taken various contrarian positions albeit within my orthodox Jewish religious framework but I must say I strongly disagree with your overall point. Though to begin with, I very much agree with your political assesment of what is going on in Israel with the strong shift to the Right, and the dangerous positions many of the people being placed in power hold. I have been living here for a few years and it makes me sick to see the extremists gain control. On your point of Chanukah not having "pure" origins, I feel that you are playing a psuedo-intelectual game where you deconstruct a tradition without explaining or understanding the lived experience of the people that celebrate it. Even in very religious circles Chanukah is not used as a holiday to vent against the secular parts of society or the like, it is used mainly as a culture and family building exercise just like most Holidays. I would argue in the post-modern world it dosent even matter much where our traditions stem from as long as they provide a positive utility for society.
Merry Christmas and a Freilichen Chanukah!
Would like to add that I very much enjoy reading and listening to contrarian takes, keep it up.
Thank you for your thoughtful response and subscription! Disagreeing with me in this kind way is exactly what I would want to see from an Orthodox Jewish person who I can't convince.
I was raised Orthodox and used to celebrate Chanukah, so I do understand the lived experience as it's mine as well. I understand that the average celebration of Chanukah is not taking time aside to vent about secularism, but even as it's practiced by most families, it still venerates the Maccabees as heroes and doing so keeps the moral legacy of the holiday alive. It also keeps Jews separate by giving them a holiday to celebrate instead of mainstream practice of the surrounding society, although that may not apply in the Israeli context like it does in the American one. As an American, I believe in the "melting pot" model of cultural integration and am not a multiculturalist. I believe in the freedom of everyone to celebrate whatever traditions they would like, but I don't think every tradition is equally good and I encourage those carrying on worse traditions to voluntarily trade them out for better ones. I wrote further about the beauty of the "melting pot," which is the intellectual legacy of Israel Zangwill, in a prior article here: https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/the-forgotten-american-masterpiece
I dont think that venerating the Maccabees as heroes is somehow keeping their supposedly immoral legacy alive, its just not. Obviously as an Orthodox Jew I see a huge problem with the American "melting pot", even though my heartstring are pulled by your utopian vision of a generic American culture without barriers between groups, I am totally pessimistic that such a thing can even exists and if it did, I would be against it happening.
"Kahane believed that any Jew who engages in sexual relations with a person of a different religion should be imprisoned."
For real? Kahane (while married) had an affair with a non-Jewish woman. After he knocked her up, and was two days away from marrying her, he abruptly broke it off. She committed suicide.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/06/weekinreview/remembering-kahane-and-the-woman-on-the-bridge.html?src=pm
Wow! Even worse than I thought.
"made themselves uncircumcised"
Could anyone please explain this one? Seriously!
Yep! Here you go: https://www.cirp.org/library/restoration/hall1/
Thanks.
People are weird.
😂
I read this article a couple of months ago and really enjoyed this very unique contrarian take I hadn’t heard anywhere else! Now I’m ready to write a response. There are things in this article I agree with and disagree with. I will start with the areas I agree with Jake on. First off, the atrocities the Maccabees committed against Hellenistic Jews (which they saw as not practicing Judaism “the right way.”) were horrendous and sickening. I was not aware of these atrocities. I learned a lot of history in this article I frankly was not familiar with before. Jews who celebrate Christmas instead of Hanukkah such as Jake should NOT be stigmatized for doing so! There is no “right way” as it were, to be Jewish. Each individual Jew should be able to decide for him or herself what traditions they will follow, holidays they will celebrate, how or if at all they will practice the Jewish religion, etc. Lastly, I see the clear parallel you made between the fanaticism and purist attitudes of the Maccabees and the current far-right in Israel. The things they said and did I was unaware of but not surprised by. Itamar Ben-Gvir having a picture of Cave of Patriarchs shooter Baruch Goldstein in his home is pretty on brand for him. Meir Kahane was a monster and I’m glad he’s no longer around to pollute the world with his hatred. These people really are no different than the Islamists in the Palestinian Territories. Bezalel Smotrich recently reinforced your point by saying starving two million Gazans “May be justified.” In a remark rightly roundly condemned by the international community.
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts Noah! I really appreciate your perspective on this. I love your point about allowing Jews to navigate what traditions they personally feel right engaging with versus blind repetition.
I know there's a lot of value in tradition and will be the first to warn against also blindly throwing all traditions out simply because they're traditions. But you do a great job of describing the healthy middle ground between both these sides, which is a more conscious, individualized assessment of traditions. I've always thought that was a powerful way for people to still connect with and engage with their background/traditions while not becoming foot soldiers for a collective at the expense of their growth and often the progress of their society!
And yes, I appreciate that you also see the parallels between the fanaticism of the past and the present in certain sects. If more people could see this, maybe the conversation could be more driven by moderate voices instead.
Traditions are important for families. History is often subjectively rewritten. At least 25% of Americans don’t put up Christmas trees. This author is uncomfortable about his ancestry. I’m unsubscribing.
The entire point of this publication is to highlight rational but unpopular viewpoints—not to cosplay as an outcast because sometimes some people disagree with you.
Perhaps you're not a good fit for a publication called "the black sheep" if your first reaction to a true black sheep is dismissal and avoidance. This is the same reaction that encourages suppression, inauthenticity, and hollow conformity instead of understanding and civil disagreement.
The last thing I want are subscribers to this publication who perpetuate the same devaluation of unpopular perspectives that our true black sheep authors and subscribers have dealt with most of their lives.
What a tedious post, man. I’m a secular Jew and I celebrate Hanukkah for the food, because latkes and donuts and lighting candles are awesome. What is wrong with you exactly? You don’t want to be a religious Jew, don’t be. Who is forcing you? You want to be Christian? Knock yourself out. But seriously, this level of getting worked up over a holiday most people, even non-Jews, enjoy is something to discuss with your therapist. This post is dumb.
"I celebrate a holiday I don't believe in because of food" is not the more reasonable perspective.
You're putting on the front of being cool, but you're clearly worked up yourself over this essay. Why does the proposition that people shouldn't celebrate holidays whose core values they don't hold upset you enough to resort to the lowest form of argumentation, ad hominem attacks?
By the way, last line of the essay literally says you can keep eating latkes, just don't do so in celebration of a holiday unless you actually believe in what it memorializes. Irrational and unprincipled individuals affect everyone, unfortunately.
Nearly nobody who celebrates Christmas actually believing in the story of the Trinity and immaculate conception or virgin birth. They do it for the warmth of a family gathering and gift giving. Hanukkah, similarly, isn’t actually celebrated with the Hasmonean war with the Syrian Greeks on anyone’s mind, nor do most Jews believe in the miracle of the oil tin. It’s done for the fun of being together as a family. It’s also a minor religious holiday, and there are no vacation days associated with it in Israel. It’s only an elevated holiday in the diaspora due to the winter break, and specifically due to Christmas. So, the author is frothing at the mouth with hostility to Judaism to a bizarre degree. The dude can pick and choose to be religious or not, but this article is weird, and reeks of his personal axe to grind. I guess that writing at length about how Jews were intolerant two thousand years ago makes him feel better, but the guy can use therapy instead. No kingdoms nor religions at the time were remarkably different nor less combative with their neighbors, especially while occupied. In short, he can give his anger toward Judaism a rest. Jews don’t take Hanukkah that seriously and neither should he.
How many times in history Jews tried to assimilate and been killed! This writer never lived through true antisemitism...
Jews from Germany, Jews from Russia, Jews from the East - tried to prove over and over that they are not Jews ( but who they are then? ) So take Islam and live in piece as second world citizens - that what this author is suggesting?
I already have two paragraphs in the essay itself addressing this exact point:
“Jewish assimilation into surrounding cultures has a long history. The Hellenistic Jews of Hasmonean Judea may have been slaughtered, but the same instinct that arose in them to pursue their own happiness over their group membership has arisen again and again. This instinct is written about in an almost exclusively negative manner by Jewish writers, who have described it as a ‘silent holocaust.’ I remember being taught as a teenager in Jewish school that German Jews believed they had integrated into Germany in the early 20th century, but the Nazi’s racialist policies and the Holocaust proved that assimilation was and always would be a failure. They were always seen as Jews, and we would always be seen as Jews too.
This was a selective telling of history, little different from the Hasmonean’s biased texts documenting their own time’s assimilationists. If you need proof that Jewish assimilation has a successful track record, just look at all the people who take DNA tests and discover their Jewish ancestry. Now ask yourself who exactly that Jewish ancestor was and what they did. It’s estimated that there are 200 million living descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews alone, including almost 25% of all Latinos and Hispanics. Compare that to the estimated 16.2 million people still identifying as Jews today.”
I do not see how anybody can prevent one from assimilation…
I think the problem arise when people want to save their identity, culture, religion…
But if people assimilate as a nation then they loose their own country - nothing holds them together…
As you obviously love history you know very well how many other nations just disappeared in ages,
And even if land holds the name that is completely different nation…
Yes, but I don't think there's value in maintaining a group merely for maintaining a group's sake. I wouldn't agree that the descendants of the neighbors of ancient Judea—the Phoenicians, Arameans, Nabateans, etc.—are necessarily worse off for not being part of those cultural groupings anymore, having instead been integrated into other ones.
We have to ask, at what cost is it not worth it to save one's identity/culture/religion? Not all identities/cultures/religions are equally good, and not all elements of them are equally worth preserving.
I discuss in the article in detail the increasing popularity of theocrats in Israel that would prevent assimilation by force, so you should be able to see that. Given how birthrates are changing demographics in Israel, their influence is likely to increase substantially over the next few decades. And that's not even to mention how strong cultural authoritarianism alone can prevent the free assimilation of Jews. I'd highly recommend watching this great documentary on Netflix about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Us_(2017_film)
As I said before - anybody is free to assimilate, you do not need to destroy a country for this purpose.
Because if you want to assimilate it should not to be a country whose traditions you want to forget.
What you are trying to say seems to me is you will forcefully assimilate those who does not want to.
Leave the country and assimilate anywhere…
I think there is a huge value in existing of Jews, and even if I was born and grew up not religious I have a great respect to those who keep our traditions and philosophy…
I am very glad about the current demographic…
Arguing I'm trying to "forcefully" assimilate people after reading a 5,500 word essay entirely about the importance of religious freedom is malicious and absurd. You sound exactly like the awful Maccabees who saw the free practice of Hellenized Jews as in conflict with their own freedom to oppress. I'm arguing for what people should do, not telling them what they must do.
If you're happy about theocrats coming into power, I hope you'll be equally happy when Israel loses all international support and its less religious population suffers for their benefit.
You were using the word assimilation, and it is fine. But it seems to me you are trying to say what people must do… religious freedom does not mean to dictate your moral preferences and bringing help of “international community” in order to dictate and eventually destroy the country. International community never supported Israel to begin with, and definitely with the help of assimilated Jews on the first place never tried to bring peace to this land.
Now I will get into areas where I disagree with Jake. At the beginning of the article you write that Hanukkah was created to segregate American Jews from the rest of American population for the sake of being different. I would disagree with this point. I think it was rather that when American Jewish leaders saw American Jews celebrating Christmas they feared they would lose touch with their roots. I don’t think American Jewish leaders pushed Hanukkah just to separate Jews from Gentile society but rather to remind the American Jewish community who they are and where they come from. I would also disagree with your views on the Maccabees. To be sure, the atrocities they committed against Hellenistic Jews were shocking and revolting. But their brutality as shocking as it is to modern people, was the norm in their time. Just look at famous historical figures from the ancient world like Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Ramses the Great II, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, etc. While the Maccabees were certainly very flawed individuals they nonetheless, defeated the Greeks and won autonomy for Judea within the Hellenistic Greek Empire. Like our nation’s founding fathers, they were flawed human beings who nonetheless did great things. Instead of not celebrating Hanukkah, I would advocate for Jewish children to be taught a FULLER account of who the Maccabees were, warts and all.
I’ll chime in with my thoughts, despite it not being my essay lol. Thanks these thoughtful counterpoints, I hope you’ll find my own interesting!
In regards to the intention of separation, I think parsing the difference between “keeping in touch with your roots” and maintaining a distinct, differentiated identity from others is a lot more similar than different. You see the same sweet-sounding rhetoric applied to Black History Month and even the invention of Kwanzaa, but at the core, the goal is the same as the outcome: maintaining clear distinctions between in-group and out-group. This is directly at odds with the American ideal, where our collective identities become less important than our individual character and our ability to cooperate. A little too much “getting in touch with your roots” is also what leads to ideologies like black and white nationalism, by which maintaining identity becomes all important.
It’s my belief that collective identities aren’t important enough to warrant intentional reaffirming vs free engagement with them and naturally, the loss of elements that aren’t useful to people anymore. Attempting to reinforce them serves the group at the expense of the individual’s flourishing. That was exactly my experience in leftist spaces that encouraged me to see myself primarily by group identities vs as an individual.
And in regards to the Maccabees, I think the point Jake was making wasn’t that we should hold past figures to the standards of today (as both of us disagree with that for the reasons you correctly apply to the Founding Fathers), but that we also shouldn’t celebrate their failures. It’s one thing to recognize the specific good acts taken by the Maccabees, it’s another thing to celebrate the specific acts of brutality—as exemplified in the essay by the quotes from Avi Moaz and Josh Hammer—which would be more akin to embracing the failures of the Founders (slavery, limitation of rights to women, etc). None of the historical figures you mentioned (Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Ramses the Great II, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar) are celebrated today for their brutality.
I agree with you that at least offering a more historically accurate and neutral overview of the Maccabees would be an improvement; then people would have a better chance to develop their own views.
At the end of the day, collective identities have sown so much division and bloodshed throughout history. As an individualist and humanist, I think that whenever we can reassess our collective affiliations and improve them (often by letting go of the more divisive aspects), we allow for growth and unity. It’s one of the more beautiful achievements the US has strived for!