Main news for 3 December 2017

Human logic can sometimes be very peculiar. One of these peculiarities is a kind of "mirror image" thinking concerning spiritual life. In Jewish history it appeared, in particular, in the attitude toward paganism and pagan cults. It began already in the period of the Judges, when the Hebrews had only begun to enter into settled life and first came into close contact with local Palestinian paganism, which of course did not disappear anywhere after the Hebrew conquest and continued to live alongside Yahwism. But in later times too, under Solomon, in the period of the divided Kingdoms, and even after the Babylonian exile, when it would seem that paganism no longer had any place in Jewish life, the situation, if it changed at all, changed only outwardly.

The matter concerns the striving to join pagan religious life and bring it into the life of Jewish society. For the most part, paganism interested the Jews not in itself as a religious tradition, but as part of the culture they wanted to master and the civilization they wanted to join. Outwardly, the logic of the preachers of such "culture-bearing" paganism seemed flawless: if we recognize the superiority of one civilization or another in technical, and sometimes cultural, respects, then its religion and its spiritual life must certainly be better than our own.

They either forgot, or did not think at all, that spiritual life is determined not by technical and cultural achievements, but by the depth and fullness of relations with God, which have no direct relation to culture and still less to technology. Meanwhile, a refusal, sometimes formal and more often actual, of Yahwism in favor of paganism almost always turned into serious problems for the people, both spiritual and moral, and social, and often also military and political.

And that was when that same "mirror image" logic began to operate. It began to seem to many that the problem was not departure from God, not the rejection of Yahwism and the spiritual tradition connected with it, but insufficient zeal for the pagan gods. To resolve the problems that had arisen, these people proposed becoming still more consistent pagans: then, they said, when we finally part with Yahwism in all its manifestations, we will at last become a "normal" people, we will live "like everyone else," and then we will have no problems, or no more than "everyone else" has.

A conclusion in the spirit of "the wind blows because the trees sway," but to many it seemed quite adequate. There were such people in Judea also in Hellenistic times, when it was under the power of the Syrian kings. Antiochus Epiphanes, mentioned in the book, was of course glad to support those who opposed Jewish national and spiritual distinctiveness in favor of pagan unification.

But, as soon became clear, the support was by no means disinterested, and Antiochus was not acting for the triumph in Judea of "universal human values." This understanding came later, when open persecutions of the Synagogue began and the Temple was defiled by direct order of Antiochus himself. Did the zealots of pagan culture in Judea anticipate such an outcome? It is hard to say with certainty: there were very different people among them. But Jewish society learned the lesson and drew the conclusions. Supporters of total Hellenization never appeared among the Jews again. Never.