Bah, Hanukkah? Bah, Hitchens! (Updated)

Being a small blog, when I have nothing pressing to blog about I blog about my daughter. It appears that when Christopher Hitchens has nothing better to blog about, he decries Hanukkah.

It must be a really, really, slow day.

In Bah, Hanukkah, Hitchens describes how

Jewish orthodoxy possesses the interesting feature of naming and combating the idea of the apikoros or "Epicurean"—the intellectual renegade who prefers Athens to Jerusalem and the schools of philosophy to the grim old routines of the Torah.

It turns out that Christopher Hitchens is Jewish, though I have no idea how much personal knowledge of Judaism he may have. When discussing this with Baruch Who?, he told me of a classmate in his Yeshiva Ketana named Christopher, called Chris by his classmates and Yaakov by his Rebbeim--so who knows how much Christopher Hitchens might actually know first hand.

But he clearly has an ax to grind. Hitchens sings the praises of Hellenism and condemns those who would turn their back on Greek culture and philosophy, using Rabbi Michael Lerner as his whipping boy:

Let us instead celebrate the Maccabean peasants who wanted to destroy Hellenism and restore what he actually calls "oldtime religion." His [Lerner's] excuse for preferring fundamentalist thuggery to secularism and philosophy is that Hellenism was "imperialistic," but the Hasmonean regime that resulted from the Maccabean revolt soon became exorbitantly corrupt, vicious, and divided, and encouraged the Roman annexation of Judea.

It remains unclear how the failure of the Hashmonean dynasty excuses what Hitchens refers to as the 'imperialism' of the Seleucid empire, until you realize that Hitchens blames the Jews not for the death of Jesus--but for his life. An interesting variation on a theme.

Hitchens goes on to claim that

the Seleucid Empire, an inheritance of Alexander the Great—Alexander still being a popular name among Jews—had weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith.

Yet that entry in Wikipedia that he links to notes that in describing the Seleucids goal as 'weaning' Hitchens is being overly generous:

Synthesizing Hellenic and indigenous cultural, religious, and philosophical ideas met with varying degrees of success — resulting in times of simultaneous peace and rebellion in various parts of the empire. Such was the case with the Jewish population of the Seleucid empire because the Jews posed a significant problem which eventually led to war. Contrary to the accepting nature of the Ptolemaic empire towards native religions and customs, the Seleucids gradually tried to force Hellenization upon the Jewish people in their territory by outlawing Judaism. This eventually lead to the revolt of the Jews under Seleucid control, which would later lead to the Jews achieving independence.

The Seleucids failed because they were over the top in their desire to impose Hellenism in place of Judaism.

Christopher Hitchens--take note. If extolling atheism requires bashing religion, then perhaps there is not quite so much to atheism as Hitchens is determined to have us believe.

UPDATE: Sam Munson delves further into Hitchens' one-sided comparison and points out

It’s all very well for Hitchens to call Hanukkah a celebration of tribal Jewish backwardness. But were the practices of the Greeks any less backward? No to circumcision but yes to exposing imperfect infants? No to the special relationship with God but yes to the Oracles of Delphi and Dodona?

A little thought experiment: can you think of a more theologically “complex” story than the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham, after Abraham was commanded to sacrifice him? Ah, the binding of Isaac, you say! The signal example of Judaism’s “cruelty”! But hang on. Those Aeschylean and Euripidean “complexities of life” so beloved of Rabbi Lerner and cited with such approval by Hitchens—does anyone really need to be reminded of how blood-drenched they were? How Orestes suffers in their toils? How Medea’s children die? Isaac, you’ll remember, lives.

Read the whole thing.

Another interesting observation, this one by David Hazony (a former neighbor) at Contentions:

Hitchens likes to paint both his own war and that of the Greeks as the rational children of light against “tribal Jewish backwardness” (theocracy, irrationalism, etc.), but to me the story of Hanukkah looks more like a successful struggle for religious and national independence against secularizing and universalizing tyranny. Remember, unlike the Greeks, the Jews had no ambition to convert the world by force, to impose their truth on everyone else. All they wanted was their Temple, their God, and their way of life, as irrational as it may seem to others. Can a liberal like Hitchens handle this?