Chanukkah and Jewish culture

a thought on חנוכה and Jewish culture

As Malka Simkovich discussed in her recent Lehrhaus article, we often frame Hanukkah as being a clash between Jews and Greeks, between Jewish and Greek culture which are portrayed as mutually exclusive while the historical reality is more complex given the Jewish embrace of aspects of Hellenism and Hellenistic influences on the later Hasmonean kings.

Over the weekend, I read David Fishman's new book "The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis". the book follows members of the Jewish intellectual community in Vilna who were forced by the Nazis to catalog and sort Jewish material for use in Nazi institutes for the study of the Jewish question as part of the philosophy of "Jewish studies without Jews." these individuals undertook to smuggle material they were supposed to be sorting back in the Vilna ghetto and hide it to ensure that even if Vilna Jewish and its institutions of cultural memory such as YIVO and the Strashun Library were destroyed, the memory of Vilna Jewry would live on. 

What struck me while reading Fishman's book, especially during Hanukkah, was how the fight to preserve Jewish culture in the face of Nazi attempts to obliterate it served as a source of hope for those involved. while these individuals could have smuggled clothes, food, weapons or money into the ghetto, they instead chose to risk their lives to save the physical manifestations of Jewish culture. there is an added irony here as many of the book smugglers were avowed secularists, Yiddishists, Zionists and communists yet many of the rarest items being smuggled were religious in nature be they early Hebrew printings from Venice, haggadot and rabbinic texts from Amsterdam and western Europe.

While many of the book smugglers were murdered, a few survived the war and returned to Vilna to preserve that which they had risked their lines to save, and incredibly for a short while, a Jewish museum of sorts operated in post-war Vilna. reading Fishman's book and various articles about the Monuments men and Offenbach depot, a thought that Tali Adler shared about a line in al ha'nessim comes to mind

"בָּאוּ בָנֶיךָ לִדְבִיר בֵּיתֶךָ וּפִנּוּ אֶת הֵיכָלֶךָ וְטִהֲרוּ אֶת מִקְדָּשֶׁךָ

Then Your children entered the shrine of Your House, cleansed Your Temple, purified Your Sanctuary...

I used to skim over this line, but this year it means the most. In this line warriors become janitors, cleaning the temple. I imagine them sweeping, cleaning up spills, moving carelessly cast aside objects back to their rightful homes. In between miracles, the miracle of the war and the miracle of the oil, it's this quiet moment of domestic work that gives the former meaning and allows the latter to occur..."

While the individuals Fishman discusses frame their efforts as a sacred duty to preserve Jewish history, culture and memory, I cannot help but think of their post-war efforts to restore some semblance of dignity to the institutions they founded in reference to this liturgical phrase.

As someone who is interested in the history of the Jewish book and Jewish material culture, the notion of holy cleaning and purification deeply resonates. when we admire rare Jewish books and manuscripts exhibited in museums or work with them as primary sources for research, we often overlook the "quiet, unheroic, unglorified, hard work" which was necessary to ensure the survival and continued research availability of these treasure whose very survival is often nothing short of a miracle.

I think of the emotionally and physical taxing work of sorting millions of volumes of looted books in the Offenbach depot, where looted books and cultural items were brought after world war 2. and i think of those individuals, many of whom will forever go unacknowledged, who came to the aid of JTS after its disastrous library fire in 1966 to prevent the loss of books which had been badly damaged by fire, smoke and water.

Tonight, and the rest of Hanukkah, as I am caught in a tension between the joy of Hanukkah and introspective, somber and at times depressing mood brought on by the study of Jewish Vilna during the Shoah, I’m thinking about the Jewish heroes whose stories are barely if at all know but whose actions and resistance to the Nazis enables me and thousands of others to be participants in the miraculous perpetuation of Jewish memory, history and culture.

While we have a day set aside to remember those who gave their lives for the state of Israel and those who were murdered in the holocaust, we don't set aside time to remember, commemorate and celebrate those who devoted their lives to ensuring that the Jewish story in all its many facets would never become a mere memory, that the living religion of the people of the book would never be told by their books alone in a museum but instead, would be told by their fellow Jews who learn from, read, treasure and preserve these books for future generations.

I believe that this commemoration and celebration of the preservation of Jewish history, culture and memory belongs in the month of Kislev when we celebrate one miracle of Jewish survival.