Shabbat Morning D’var Torah * 9 Kislev 5783 * December 3, 2022
This is Shimon Ben Zoma! Our congregant Karen Herman made him for me a few years ago to help me teach Kitah Zayin, our seventh graders, because Ben Zoma was a sage of the second century who has a series of statements in Pirkei Avot like “Who is wise? Eizehu chacham? The one who learns from every person.” So I was using this as like a koosh-ball; you could only talk when you’re holding Ben Zoma, and everyone else has to be quiet and listen.
Anyway, Ben Zoma is here because of one of his other questions in the series: Eizehu gibbor? Who is powerful or who is courageous. It’s this question that I want to explore over the next few weeks through Chanukkah, through this Hebrew month of Kislev. Who is courageous, Eizehu gibbor. Who is heroic.
Gibbor is from the root gavar, which can mean to be stronger than, or to overpower — and not necessarily in a bad way. In the Hallel psalms we sing at the Seder and on holy days, we sing: Ki gavar aleinu chasdo, Divine love overpowers us — even when we resist being loved or deserving love. So this word can be a very physical image, or a spiritual image, to have more inner power than something else pushing on you or from within you. I’m going to use the word gevurah, the abstract noun from that root: power or courage or heroism, but like all the important Hebrew words we can’t reduce it to even a few English words. When we took out the Torah we sang L’cha Adonai hagedulah v’hagevurah, to you Yah is the greatness and the power, or the greatness and the courage.
But I am particularly hoping we can all concentrate through the month on what it means for us to have gevurah. In the litany of the morning blessings, we are thankful to the Divine who is ozer Yisrael bigevurah, who girds us with gevurah. On Chanukkah we sing mi y’malel gevurot Yisrael — who can recount all the gevurah of the Jewish people, all the courage and heroism of us.
I’m sure that the word courage already summons for you meanings and images, and contexts for courage. And probably the word or the question Eizehu gibbor has you thinking about whether you consider yourself to be a courageous person, based on some notion of what courage is.
What I want to do here is to draw two kinds of pictures about courage or gevurah, based on two ways of telling the Chanukkah story.
So we were probably all told the Chanukkah story originally the same way in terms of gevurah. It was more than 2100 years ago, during Hellenistic times. There was a tyrant, Antiochus, who arose all of a sudden, and he set his power against Judaism, forbidding the Jews of Eretz Yisrael to practice or even to learn Torah, and converting the Beit Hamikdash in Yerushalayim into a pagan Temple. When his officials came to the city of Modi’in, which is near today’s Ben Gurion Airport, they asked Matityahu, the patriarch of a local family of kohanim (priests) to make a pagan sacrifice — and he told them off, and when they brought another Jew to do it Matityahu ran up and killed that Jewish man and the imperial official, and called to everyone who was zealous for Torah to follow him and his family to the hills. They became a guerilla army, led by his son Yehudah Hamaccabee (Judah Maccabee). It took them three years but they defeated the armies of Antiochus and returned to Yerushalayim and rededicated the Temple and created the eight day dedication festival we call Chanukkah.
Eizehu gibbor. Who is courageous. In this version of the story, a person of courage stands up for a principle or for others, when you can’t know at all what is going to happen to you as a result. Courage involves risk, even risking your life. Gevurah is setting aside what the majority or the greater power believes and what most other people are doing or not doing, and then acting out of your own conviction.
These are how we often think of gevurah. Yet there are some gaps and even some traps here.
The traditional story presents the courage of the Matityahu as something individual and something in the moment, impulsive maybe. It’s clear what is right and what is wrong, even though it’s the greater number or power who are wrong and only a small group are right. Gevurah is expressed in this version of the story in violence directed even against a fellow Jew, and not just against an imperial official. In fact the Maccabees according to this version of the Chanukkah story figure out that they have to be warriors even on Shabbat. Now, that’s an important source of the idea that protecting someone else’s life overrides everything, even the laws of Shabbat — but it’s also a particular vibe about the nature of courage. It’s a very masculine picture, and indeed one of the other words you can mix from gevurah is gever, which means a male.
These are not the only ways to be courageous, and to act in some of these ways may even be wrong in many situations. And this particular Chanukkah version of gevurah is for sure incomplete, because for a lot of the moral challenges we face in our lives generally or as Jews these aspects of courage are just not applicable.
But Chanukkah itself does present another potrayal of gevurah. The story as I just retold it is according to the book that came to be known as First Maccabees. There is a different angle on what happened, in a book that’s known as Second Maccabees.
Second Maccabees starts by zooming out and saying more about the world the Jews were living in during Hellenistic times. It was a world that already changed radically for Jews and for everyone over the course of one hundred and fifty years, since Alexander the Great. And just when it seemed that those dramatic changes were slowing down, when it seemed clear what the contemporary world was going to be — it turned out that even more change was coming. There were new political patterns. There was cultural conflict both between Jews and Hellenists, but also within the country, within Jewish society. Second Maccabees recounts how the disruption of the time also manifested in a runaway materialism among some part of the population, even in corruption as a group of kohanim were stealing from the Temple treasury and using it to bribe officials in the imperial government. The Chanukkah story is set in a very unsettled time. I’m making it sound like our time because in a lot of ways it was.
Some people thought the courageous act was just to say no to the future and the present, and to go backward toward some old purity. But the Maccabees were not like that. Before they began their uprising — and it was for sure a gevurah of physical force — before that they already had one foot in the future. Jews had not been an army in any way like the Maccabees for century; that itself was going to be brand new. The Maccabees and their advisors had taken some time to envision the world they would have to create for their people when they would defeat Antiochus. They were preparing the best they could, and while the oppression of the moment demanded something of them, the Maccabeee movement was also trying to lead people forward, even though they didn’t know yet what it would be.
Part of how they did that was as a collective leadership. Second Maccabees does not have the story of Matityahu rising up in Modi’in, and the book doesn’t even mention him at all.
And Second Maccabees doesn’t talk about fighting the war on Shabbat. Instead there is this description linking Shabbat and battle:
The Maccabees captured the money of those who had come to buy them as slaves. After pursuing them for some distance, they were obliged to return because the hour was late. For it was the day before Shabbat, and for that reason they did not continue their pursuit. And when they had collected the arms of the enemy and stripped them of their spoils, they observed Shabbat, giving great praise and thanks to Adonai, who had preserved them for that day and allotted it to them as the beginning of mercy. After Shabbat they gave some of the spoils to those who had been tortured and to the widows and orphans, and distributed the rest among themselves and their children.
At this time of narrow escape for the Maccabees themselves and many others, from nearly being captured and enslaved, you would think the Maccabees would be focused completely on sheer safety and some show of force. But no, the Maccabees showed their courage, their gevurah, by grounding themselves during the war in their eternal values and stretching them toward a new reality. So Shabbat was important, and taking care of people harmed in the war so far and widows and orphans was important — putting all of them first before themselves as soliders. Even while they were fighting a war, and the outcome of the war was not yet in their favor.
Their courage, their gevurah was collective, not individual. It came from preparation, not from a snap decision or impulsive action. Their gevurah was channeled through traditions and rituals and traditions like Shabbat, and then back toward Shabbat again, so that Shabbat and Torah would strengthen their courage toward the new and unknown. Again, they were heading toward a responsibility as heads of a country that Jews had not had for centuries.
In Kabbalah, gevurah means finding power and courage through routines and rituals that absorb the love and concern we have for all beings, so we don’t just act on those spontaneously and differently each time, all over the place, but rather with discipline and practice, so courage can be repeated and sustained.
To me a lot more of this Second Maccabees picture is relevant to what it means for us to be courageous people today.
I am really working personally on what we could call Second Maccabees courage. I don’t generally trust my own reactions in the moment, so I think about the moral challenges I need to prepare for and be well-prepared for. I don’t think that what’s important always is my individual action, what I write or what I say or what I post online. For me the individuality of courage is being personally accountable, but the most courageous things I do are together with others. I have come to rely on a small group of pastors in the community to be courageous together, whether it’s at a public meeting or when we’ve placed ourselves in the streets, as well as on other people within our shul community. Whichever of us is most visible, swe are all standing next to them or behind them.
And I am striving like the Maccabees to be grounded in what is stable in our Torah values as our own lives are turbulent, and as the world changes in unexpected ways. To use that Torah to envision and help you prepare for a world that is not finished changing. For us like for the Maccabees, the unknown is generating the chaos of culture wars, economic conflict, political upheaval. When we want to hide away, or just to be comforted, it seems like a risk to say we have no choice to give up certain certainties — to say so as many of us grieve for what we have lost Jewishly and as Americans, and as we are actively grieving for people who we loved who were so much part of what we cherish in our own past stories. But that’s the gevurah I have to bring as a rabbi. To stand by you and to stand up for the future in the midst of the chaos. To have faith in what we could create ahaed of us when you may not be ready to have that faith. To console you and at the same time to invite you and challenge you, gently but firmly, to envision and build together while we are hurting.
Eizehu gibbor? Don’t measure only against Matityahu, standing up alone and all of a sudden. We can all be people of courage, of gevurah, even in a swirling and changing world where the moral challenges seem to be in every direction around every corner. We come from Maccabees, all of us — and I invite you through this month to keep considering what we can learn from them, as we talk even more about them and their story. And let it be said one day about us in our time: Mi y’malel gevurot Yisrael — who indeed can recount all the gevurah, all the ourage, displayed by this community and this people and this nation.
Shabbat Shalom!