Hanukkah, Peoplehood, and the Limits of Unity
My latest for eJewishPhilanthropy
I published an essay this morning in eJewishPhilanthropy that brings together Genesis, Hanukkah, and some of the hardest questions facing American Jewish life right now: when unity sustains us—and when boundaries protect us.
Because today is the final day of Hanukkah, I’m sharing an excerpt here, with the full piece linked below.
I am a Zionist who has spent years arguing for Jewish peoplehood — insisting that Jews remain one people even when we disagree. I have also argued for boundaries: that not every position is compatible with Judaism or with the survival of the Jewish collective. Increasingly, those boundaries are about anti-Zionism.
People sometimes treat this position as incoherent: How can you argue for Jewish unity while insisting on red lines? I don’t think this is a personal contradiction. I think it names a structural problem in Jewish life right now.
Our arguments about Israel and Zionism are so combustible not because we lack moral commitments, but because we have inherited Jewish stories that make competing demands on us — some warning that internal division is fatal, others insisting that survival sometimes requires drawing hard boundaries…
The puzzle
The Torah portions we read in Genesis around Hanukkah time tell one of the most painful stories in the Hebrew Bible: brothers turning on a brother. Joseph’s siblings hate him, plot to kill him and sell him into slavery.
This past Shabbat we read the Parshat Miketz, in which Joseph, now viceroy of Egypt, encounters his brothers as strangers and is faced with a difficult decision. Can he trust the brothers who once turned against him?…
Genesis tells a hard truth: external threats demand vigilance, but what undoes us is what we do to each other — the bonds we break, the brothers we abandon.
Centuries later, the rabbis seized on this motif after the destruction of the Second Temple and refused to blame Rome alone. They blamed sinat chinam, baseless hatred among Jews.
Josephus records how Jewish factions burned one another’s food supplies while Rome waited; the Romans realized that attacking would unite the Jews, but letting them destroy one another would do Rome’s work for them.
This lesson — that internal division destroys us faster than any external enemy — feels uncomfortably familiar today…
And then comes Hanukkah.
Contrary to what many of us learned about the holiday as children, Hanukkah is not simply a story of Jews fighting the Seleucid Greeks. It is also a story of Jews fighting Jews.
In the second century BCE, the Maccabees didn’t only battle Antiochus IV and his empire — they also fought Hellenized Jews who had allied with that empire, Jews who embraced Greek culture and collaborated with a regime that banned Jewish ancestral practice.
The conflict mixed theology and politics. When the Maccabees fought the Greeks and Hellenized Jews, they were fighting both to preserve ancestral Jewish practice and to preserve Jewish safety and sovereignty from an empire bent on imperial rule and oppression.
It wasn’t a pretty conflict: the Maccabees fought a brutal civil war alongside their war against the empire. And the Maccabees won. We light candles for eight nights to celebrate their victory — a victory that included defeating fellow Jews.
So which is it? Is internal Jewish conflict always catastrophic, or is it sometimes necessary? Do we learn from Genesis and the Second Temple to avoid it at all costs, or from Hanukkah that some conflicts must be fought?
A framework
Not all conflicts between Jews are the same, and the wisdom lies in knowing which is which.
Our tradition helps us identify three kinds of intra-Jewish conflict — not as a formula, but as a framework that demands judgment rather than certainty.
Category #1: Internal differences. These are disagreements inside the family that can be catastrophically mismanaged. Joseph’s arrogance, his dreams and his fancy coat made him insufferable to his brothers. Maybe their feelings were justified; but he was still family. This was a conflict about sibling rivalry, not about loyalty or Jewish survival.
Many of our contemporary arguments fall here in the form of disagreements, such as between denominations or over Israel policy.
Category #2: Disputes over method. Here we share the same goals and face the same enemies, but we’re tearing each other apart over strategy. This is the Second Temple disaster: Jews killing each other over how to fight Rome while Rome waited outside. This is what the rabbis meant by sinat chinam.
Much of our contemporary infighting fits here as well: the judicial reform crisis, where both sides argue they want to preserve democracy; disputes about how to fight antisemitism in America when we all agree it’s bad and dangerous. Painful, consequential — but fundamentally internal.
Category #3: Disagreements over who the enemy is. This is betrayal — when some Jews align with forces seeking to erase or harm Jewish life. The Hellenized Jews whom the Maccabees fought did not merely reinterpret tradition or “assimilate.” They collaborated with Antiochus IV, who banned circumcision, outlawed Shabbat, forbade Torah study and executed Jews who resisted.
This wasn’t a theological dispute. It was collaboration with a regime intent on destroying Jewish practice.
Genesis warns us not to turn Category #1 conflicts into Category #3 — don’t make family disagreements into existential threats. The Second Temple warns us that Category #2 conflicts can destroy us even when we agree on what matters most. And Hanukkah teaches us that Category #3 conflicts exist, and that boundaries are sometimes not only permissible but morally required.
The point isn’t that we should copy the Maccabees’ response; their methods were extreme, their religious vision fundamentalist, and what we face today isn’t identical to what they faced in the second century BCE.
Rather, the point is to recognize that different kinds of crises demand different kinds of responses. And the work of distinguishing between irritating family members, strategic disputes among allies and actual collaboration with enemies remains essential.
Here is what makes this work so difficult, though: everyone imagines themselves to be the Maccabees. Almost no one recognizes themselves in Joseph’s brothers…
Read the full piece here:
👉 https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/why-i-refuse-to-choose-between-jewish-peoplehood-and-jewish-red-lines-this-hanukkah/
In the full essay, I argue that we’re seeing category 3 conflicts again—especially around forms of anti-Zionism that align with forces seeking Jewish harm. I distinguish between young people absorbing these frameworks and Jewish leaders who legitimate them, and I reflect on how to draw institutional boundaries without excommunicating people from Jewish life.
On this final day of Hanukkah, may we have the courage, restraint, and discernment required to be responsible for one another.
Excellent article! In addition to social media, the sale of our educational institutions to Qatar, another major source of the problem is that so many Jews know little if anything about Judaism. The lack of investment by parents in their children's Jewish education makes them an easy mark against the pressure to "fit in" particularly when being greatly outnumbered. Parental coaching is also critical. Living in a time when younger NYC voters can overlook a candidate's failing to immediately condemn globalize the intefada, and "from the river to the sea" we are living in a country that is starting to become unrecognizable, just as every major European city.
Unless being a Jew is of absolute significance, how can we justify the ultimate price which our people
were often forced to pay through out its history? - Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel