Why a secularist ex-Christian thinks an atheist Jew celebrating Hanukkah is silly

 I had written a bit about this in a takedown piece (my second) about OnlySky a few weeks ago. I had been thinking about a more in-depth pullout about this issue anyway, but Jonathan M.S. Pierce, aka The Besotted Philosopher, getting tetchy about that led me to figure that to spite him as a sidebar, this was a good reason anyway.

And, with that, let's dig in.

Paul Golin, not previously critiqued by me, talked about why an atheist Jew celebrates Hanukkah. As I noted last month?

First, as far as being historical? The events afterward didn't play out exactly as presented in 1 Maccabees. I've blogged about that before. I blogged about that more at my main blog. He also ignores, contra Shlomo Sand and many others, as I have also discussed, that Hanukkah is originally pagan. Since the menorah ran dry, as in had no miraculous refill night after night, since Hanukkah has pagan roots and since, per Yonathan Adler, the Torah in general wasn't widely observed until AFTER the Maccabean revolt, if Golin is intellectually honest in act as well as thought, he's just doing a Jewish-tinged solstice event. And, yes, that is exactly what Hanukkah was as a pagan festival.

So, he's like an ex-Christian still celebrating Christmas but not fully secularizing it. 

It would be like me, if I still celebrated Christmas in anyway, not only talking about Santa, but talking about a nativity or religious Christmas carols, but yet saying "I'm a secularist."

Of course, there's a deeper issue at root.

And, that is the tension, and this one is not limited to the English language, between "Judaism" as a religion and "Jewishness" as an ethnic identity. Given that Paul said "there is neither Jew nor Goy," outside of White nationalists trying to exploit Christianity, it's neither a linguistic nor a deeper identity issue that Christians face.

Ergo, it's not an issue that ex-Christian secularists face.

Now, given that, per Adler, Hanukkah eventually led to Judaism as we know it today, but not necessarily Jewishness, is it better to for an atheist Jew to celebrate it than Passover? It also has religious, metaphysical elements (setting aside that it totally didn't happen), but it is arguably as much or more the origin of ethnic Jewish nationalism than is Hanukkah.

Of course, if you're an atheist celebrating ethnic nationalism, there's the deeper question of whether or not you're an atheist who's not a real secular humanist? I celebrate (not too loudly) the Fourth of July, but not German-American Day.

The true meaning of Hanukkah?

Contra this New York Times guest columnist, the true meaning of Hanukkah is not that the Jews resisted the Seleucids (instead of a magic menorah).

Rather, here's some of the truer meanings of Hanukkah:
1. That in Big Religion, like Big Business, luck is as important as anything else. I of course am using luck in the sense of contingency and nothing metaphysical. Had the Maccabees lost one or two battles (entirely possible) or had Rome not told Antiochus Epiphanes to get out of Egypt, thereby triggering events that led to the Maccabee revolt, Judaism might be a "backwater religion" today and Christianity never even have come into existence. (Some other Messianic Jewish cult might have taken its place, though.)

2. It helps to have good scriptwriters. Between the canonical Book of Daniel and the deuterocanonical books of Maccabees, the Maccabeean party within rebelling Jews (did you know that the revolt had factions?) come off smelling like roses. The fact is that the ancestors of the Pharisees were ready to make peace when Jews were guaranteed religious freedom, but the Maccabees insisted on fighting for political freedom, too. That, in turn, probably fueled an impulse toward Messianic Judaism less than a century later, when a Roman, name of Gnaius Pompeius, or Pompey the Great, ended the brief experiment with Jewish political freedom.

3. It helps to have good scriptwriters, part 2. Although we're not sure, it's likely that a fair percentage of Jews in Palestine were comfortable with Hellenizing.

4. It helps to have good scriptwriters, part 3. Again, we're not sure, but a fair amount of Jews of 164 BCE likely held beliefs ascribed to the Sadducees in the Christian New Testament — including that there is no such thing as an immortal soul because it is not mentioned in the Torah (Penteteuch, books of Moses) and that's all the canonical scriptures there are. However, by the time of the turn of the eras, it's clear that, while not yet a fringe position in Judaism, it was certainly moving that direction.

(Update: See LOTS more at this longform for just what Daniel, First Maccabees and to some extent Second Maccabees, presumably willfully and polemically, get wrong.)

Of course, going back to books such as Haggai and the first part of Zechariah, where a failed early post-exilic revolt against the Persians, at the same time Darius I overthrew Cambyses, gets shoved under the rug, the Tanakh is full of "good" scriptwriting.

And, on another era of Jewish history, the New York Times just gets it wrong in this column, perpetuating a myth.

It's nice that Spain is making an (albeit limited) effort to welcome back Marranos, but most of the "Marranos" in New Mexico and Texas reportedly are NOT crypto-Jews from 500 years ago, but rather, Hispanic converts to Adventist sects of 100-150 years ago. In fact, I believe I first read about that ... in a NYT column!