Chanukah, Purim, Pesakh – all our stories end happy. But do they, really? Let’s take a look at what happens after “they lived happily ever after.” Let’s look at the real stories of Jewish holidays and find out why we tell only half the story.
We tell the story of chanukah, the retaking of the Temple from the Hellenized Syrians under Antiokhus, and the restoration of Judean authority, as if the the Maccabees and their allies were solely freedom fighters upholding the rights of all the Hebrew people. (They weren’t quite Jews yet, but that’s another story.) In reality, they and their Zealot (what we’d call today ultra-religious) allies were not at all concerned with the rights of the Hellenized Hebrew population who were people just like us – living in the real world, interacting with those of different nationalities, naming their kids Alexander and Chloë just like we do. And after the fighters regained the Temple, they enforced the Judean religion. In fact, as they expanded their territory, they forcibly converted the native populations. That is, they required the men to be circumcized. They became just like the oppressors, demanding everyone worship their god in their way.
The story of Purim is just as grisly. In this book of historical fiction, we pretend that Esther became queen because of a beauty pageant. When you actually read the Book of Esther, you discover that each young girl vying for the position of queen had to spend a night with the king. After he’d gone through all of them – girls from all over his empire – he chose Esther. And that’s possibly not the worst of it. We end the story with the villainous Haman’s plot to kill all the Jews foiled, and he and his sons put death, Esther’s guardian Mordekhai having been elevated to Haman’s position. The actual Book of Esther goes on to say that there was a huge battle in which the Jews killed 500 Persians. When Esther heard about this, she asked the king to let the Jews do it again the next day. Charming. The Jews became murderers, just like the people who had wanted to murder them.
And Pesakh, the story of the Exodus and resettlement in the land of Israel, includes bloody battles as well. The story we tell, the central myth of our people, is that the Jews left slavery in Egypt and wandered in the desert for 40 years, whereupon they walked into what would become Israel and settled there under their vines and fig trees. What’s left out is how the Israelites slaughtered all the nations that got in their way.
Why do we do this? Why do we tell only the pretty parts of the stories? Why do we hide our ugly, murderous, oppressive stories? I hope it is because we are embarrassed and ashamed that murder and zealotry are honored in these stories. I hope it is because we don’t want to be associated with that kind of behavior. But the problem is, when we don’t acknowledge these elements in our myths and fictions and histories, we forget that we, too, could become prey to these vile instincts, that we, too, can become murderers and oppressors. So, I say, let’s tell the whole story of our holidays and let’s take the lesson that we have to be ever vigilant against our own tendencies to act to others as they have acted to us.
