The Freedom to Be Different: Rekindling our Eternal Hanukkah Light

When my son was little, his two favorite Biblical stories involved the Maccabees and Joshua. He was mesmerized by the Maccabees’ strength and bravery, which I emphasized through the words Mattathias said to his sons before sending them off to battle Hellenism: Chazak ve’ematz “Be strong and have courage.” 

He was equally captivated by Joshua in “The Ten Commandments,” so I borrowed a line from the film and turned it into a daily mantra: Use your strength for good.

But it wasn’t just their strength and bravery that appealed to him. His favorite Hannukah book focused on the fact that the Maccabees didn’t just free the Judeans from the rule of King Antiochus. The Maccabees freed the Judeans to be different — to live as a distinctive people in our homeland. 

In retrospect, I think these stories made him proud to be both Jewish and male, both of which were not trending in NYC public schools, nor at the synagogue we attended. Throughout my own life, I’ve had run-ins with what I used to call anti-Judaism, but I had no idea that NYC would take this to another level: over-assimilation, self-idolatry, ostentatiousness, idol worship.

The neo-Hellenism kicked into high gear after Oct. 7. The NYC Jewish world has sadly been hijacked by the loudest and showiest. Some have egregiously tried to use Oct. 7 to become FAMOUS. If the focus had been on Zohran Mamdani from the beginning, we wouldn’t be in this place right now. 

At the same time, what has become more obvious are the Judeans of all ages who radiate so much light — what I used to call “touched by G-d.” Never looking for credit or applause, these lights have done the work, while the nonprofits focus on the glitz. Their dignity and serenity inspire both in those around them.

Because authenticity — not Instaporn — is at the heart of Judaism. It begins in the soul, the home, the synagogue. It’s only through fully recognizing our individualism that we can be unified as a people. And it’s only through nourishing the soul that the bravery, nonconformity, and the true spirit and resilience of the Maccabees be achieved.

Neo-Hellenism

All that is good, all that has meaning, all is up to you alone.

– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

King Antiochus IV (175 to 164 BCE) is best remembered for his persecution of the Jews in an effort to spread Greek culture and institutions. Hellenism came to mean over-assimilation, idol worship, conformity, soullessness.

Two thousand years later, many Jews in the Diaspora and especially in NYC, now bow down to either antisemitic orthodoxies on the left or the glitz and narcissism of extravagant galas and incessant selfies.

Michael Steinhardt warned about this in his memoir, “Jewish Pride”: “There’s a whole system of accolades and honors and galas and plaques that numbs most donors into believing that they are already doing their part. Their public status is commensurate with the size of their gifts, not with their effectiveness.”

For Steinhardt, Jewish pride is the opposite of assimilation: We are who we are. If you don’t like us, that’s your problem; we don’t care what others think.

For Steinhardt, Jewish pride is the opposite of assimilation: We are who we are. If you don’t like us, that’s your problem; we don’t care what others think.

Social media only exacerbated a problem that was already festering. With social media, we lose ourselves and become addicted to external validation and the need to constantly up the ante for clicks. 

In the past, self-promoters were mocked, relentlessly. Today, self-promoters are worshipped, literally, creating what can only be called neo-Hellenism: an attempt from within to conform, to think ostentatiousness is a value, to worship false idols. 

Authenticity

In our uniqueness lies our universality. 

– Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

I always thought that my own nonconformity began in high school, when I discovered the Russian Jewish author Ayn Rand and devoured each of her books. It’s only been in recent years, after losing my parents, that I realized it had started with them — and was nourished by what I now call a real synagogue.

My parents taught me and my brother that ostentatiousness — from wearing all your jewelry at once to bragging about it — was a sin. As was conformity. They lived this reality by never doing anything just for show or to please their friends.

I was also really shy as a child. I used to attribute that shyness to my dislike of groups, but I’m no longer shy and I still hate groups. When the cliques and “mean girls” began in high school, I escaped — into books, theater and dance. The arts were not just a respite but a love. I wrote an article for the school paper, discussing the negative effects of cliques. I guess you can say it was the first time I was “canceled.”

It was hard at first. But this was my father’s response: “Everyone hates you? That means you struck a nerve.” Those sentences have defined who I am as a writer, for better or worse. Nonconformity almost became a reflex. 

My first synagogue could not have been more nurturing of this soulful spirit. My Judaism and nonconformity were intertwined. We learned that Judean heroes were the ultimate nonconformists, but more than anything we learned that bravery stems from the soul, nourished by G-d and Judaism.

My Judaism and nonconformity were intertwined. We learned that Judean heroes were the ultimate non-conformists, but more than anything we learned that bravery stems from the soul, nourished by G-d and Judaism. 

And then my family moved to a big, soulless synagogue before my Bat Mitzvah. The focus was on everything but Judaism. I was horrified by the spectacle, and I could see my parents were horrified as well. That anti-synagogue crushed my young soul, and it took years to regain my connection to the most sacred part of me.

When I eventually moved to NYC, I was stunned by the superficiality, the ostentatiousness, of so much of the non-Orthodox Jewish community. We joined an anti-synagogue, which, sadly, most NYC synagogues are. The soullessness was palpable. To this day I’m so mad that I ended up doing to my son what had happened to me. 

The truth is, like leaves on a tree, we are each unique, complex, imperfect. For the past couple of decades, we’ve been taught that we must conform, to trends and orthodoxies. But humans are part of nature. Conformity goes against our natural instincts.

True nonconformity — authenticity — begins in the soul. Authenticity allows you to be inner directed and not need external validation. Indeed, what makes someone distinctive is what gives them strength.

Judean Ethnicity

I am blessed to be a voyager on an ancient pathway.

-Rabbi Rachel Cowan

My father, like many who watched the Holocaust unfold from the U.S., always feared that “it” could happen again. He would tell my brother and me: “If anything ever happens, tell them you’re from Russia.”

Both sides of my family fled Russian pogroms, so I’m not exactly sure why he thought Russia would save us. But as a child, I would look at our olive skin and black curly hair and say, “Dad, we don’t look Russian.”

Jews are not from Russia anymore than we’re from Germany. Far from the white, privileged oppressors the Ivy League is keen on making us into, Jews are from Judea: we are a people, an ethnicity and nearly all of our ancestors arrived in this country with nothing. They worked hard because they had no choice.

The fact that Jews are an ethnicity with DNA tracing directly to Israel should have been taught in the synagogues beginning in the ‘70s. Instead of inappropriately bringing politics into a sacred space — instead of teaching that Tu b’Shvat is really about climate change or delivering a sermon about abortion on Kol Nidre (“They’re just dead babies!” our former millennial rabbi screeched) — synagogues could have been teaching our history, culture and, perhaps most importantly, conversational Hebrew. 

There is no question that the disconnect of so many Jews from Judaism today is because the synagogues, especially in NYC, messed up so badly in teaching Jews who we are and the values we stand for.

Nourishing the Judean Soul

When a Jew visits Jerusalem, it’s like a homecoming.

– Elie Wiesel

Those of us who tear up at the sacred beauty of Hebrew letters, who instinctively feel that the Star of David is a part of us, were blessed with either a soulful Judean home and/or a real synagogue.

The fight for our children’s future begins with their souls. And for those of us living in the capital of neo-Hellenism — NYC — it’s well past time to rekindle our own eternal lights so that we can begin to nourish the souls of the younger generations.

The Safra Center on the Upper East Side has become a model of everything synagogues need to return to: warmth, joy, creativity, love. The focus is on the inside, not appearances. Israeli music is playing continuously, especially musicians who have begun to reclaim Jewish prayer in their songs.

We are never going to be unified on politics or religious observance. And that’s OK: Jews are an ethnicity, not a cult. But on issues of identity and indigeneity, on issues of antisemitism, we must unite.

Bravery has little to do with self-idolatry, whether in the form of boasting, selfies, or narcissism. Bravery stems from the quiet confidence of a well-nourished soul.

Zionism hoped to recreate the tough, Maccabean Jew, and in Israel it has been largely successful. It’s now time for Jews in the Diaspora to follow suit, starting with decolonizing our minds and our souls. Judeans need to lean into our nonconformity right now, and to learn to look for beauty on the inside, the light that never dims.

How can quiet confidence be heard in a world inundated with shock, porn and degradation? Many of us have been told that our lack of desire to compete with the loudest and ugliest on social media is a weakness. But as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it in discussing Moses’ lack of oratory skills: “What we think of as our greatest weakness can become, if we wrestle with it, our greatest strength.” 

Because it is precisely the quiet, soulful ones who have the ability to tell the truth in a way that will be heard — who are able to “tell people what they do not want to hear, but what they must hear if they are to save themselves from catastrophe,” wrote Sacks. 

On this pivotal Hannukah, I pray that more parents begin to understand that the fight for our children’s future begins with ometz lev, which literally translates to “courage of the heart” and represents spiritual and ethical strength. We need our kids to be strong, proud Maccabees; they are on the front lines in this fight. Not only do they need to be equipped with the truth — facts — to counter the mountain of lies, but they need to have the bravery of a young King David, killing Goliath with a single slingshot. That type of bravery stems from the soul and begins in the home.

“You are a member of an eternal people

A letter in their scroll.

Let their eternity live on in you.”

– Rabbi Jonathan Sacks 

Karen Lehrman Bloch is editor in chief of White Rose Magazine.