I was at a meeting earlier this week with my minister colleagues from the Unitarian Universalist churches in this area. We meet every month.
I told my colleagues that I was planning on preaching on the theme of “conflict” this Sunday as part of several weeks of sermons around the larger theme of Leadership. Conflict within communities is a common challenge that leaders face, and fears about leading communities through conflict is a reason many folks resist accepting leadership roles. Conflict is also an appropriate theme for the Hanukkah holiday, which begins this evening.
One of my colleagues asked, “What’s the connection between conflict and Hanukkah?”
She was thinking about the part of Hanukkah that has to do with lighting the Menorah, the festival of lights, the miracle of the oil, enough only for one day that lasts for the full eight days. She was thinking about Hanukkah as the family celebration, and the eight days of gift giving. For her the spiritual theme of Hanukkah was dedication and faithfulness; joy, not conflict.
But the background of the Hanukkah celebration is conflict. A big conflict. The rededication of the Temple follows an earlier profanation of the Temple. The Feast of Lights is the closing scene in a story that begins with 20 years of war. The joyful occasion of Hanukkah is a victory celebration after a Jewish family, nicknamed, “The Maccabees”, led their people in a religiously-based war, against the Greek Seleucid Empire who had occupied their land for a hundred and fifty years after Alexander the Great.
So the Hanukkah story is a story about great conflict and gives us one example of a way to right a wrong and resolve a conflict. Like so many religious stories that resonate centuries after they happened, the celebration of the next eight nights gives us an opportunity, within the frame of an old story to meditate on a common spiritual theme in our own lives. How do we resolve conflicts? How do we decide what’s worth fighting for? How do we heal from past conflicts? Conflict within our families perhaps. Conflict within our communities, such as the church. Conflict within our nations. And conflicts, even, between nations.
The long background of the Hanukkah story is this:
About a thousand years before the Common Era, the Hebrew speaking people organized themselves into a unified nation under the kings Saul, then David, and then Solomon. Their capital was at Jerusalem. Solomon built a great temple there.
After Solomon, the nation split into two. The northern area took the name Israel, and was a lose collection of 10 of the original 12 Hebrew-speaking tribes. The southern kingdom took the name Judea composed of the other 2 tribes.
The divided kingdom lasted about 200 years, until about 700 years BCE (Before the Common Era) when the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrian empire under the leadership of Sargon II and Senacharib. The 10 tribes of the northern kingdom became the “10 Lost Tribes” of Israel that you may have heard about. Jerusalem, still the capital of the southern kingdom, was sieged by Senacharib, but not conquered, mostly because the Assyrians were now themselves under attack at their rear border by the growing Babylonian empire.
The Babylonian empire eventually overthrew the Assyrian empire and around the year 600, BCE, the Babylonians under a general named Nebuchadnezzar, came back to Judea and conquered Jerusalem. This is when Solomon’s temple, the first temple, was destroyed. With the fall of Jerusalem the residents of Judea were transported east into Babylon, in what is known as the Babylonian captivity.
About 50 years later, the Babylonian empire was itself destroyed by an empire even further to the east, the Persian Empire, under a leader named Cyrus. Cyrus’ policy was that conquered people within his empire could retain self-rule, as long as they understood their vassal state and respected the empire. So the Judeans were released from their captivity and were allowed to return to the area of their former kingdom and rebuild. It was then, shortly before 500 BCE that the Judeans re-built the temple in Jerusalem, now called the second temple.
The Persian Empire continued to expand westward into the Mediterranean and eventually attacked the Greek nation. The Greeks fought back and under Alexander the Great defeated the Persians and then created a Greek empire stretching all the way into modern-day India. The Hebrew-speaking people watched their rulers change from Persian to Greek, but continued to live and worship as they had.
After Alexander’s death, in 325 BCE, the Greek empire was divided into 4 parts, each part ruled by a different general. At first the Greek generals allowed the subject people to retain their individual cultures. Eventually, though, the Greek ruler sought to forcibly convert all the residents of the Empire to Greek culture. This practice was called Hellenization, after the old name for Greece.
For the temple in Jerusalem this meant setting up a statue of Zeus in the Holy of Holies and converting the temple to worship of the Greek gods.
Many Jews, I’m sure, were happy to adopt Greek culture. The Greeks were powerful. The Greek culture was filled with literature and art and philosophy. Jews who converted gained much.
But to others, the attempt to annihilate Jewish culture was too much.
About the year 170 BCE, a Jewish family, led by a man named Judeaus and nicknamed “Maccabee” or “The Hammer” organized a revolt against the Greeks. After 20 years, the revolt was successful. The Maccabees, established a new Jewish kingdom, called the Hashmonean Dynasty.
The Hashmonean Dynasty ruled the area for about 100 years until the area was once again conquered by a foreign empire, this time the Romans, about the year 60 BCE. In the year 40 BCE or so, Caesar Augustus installed a local king, loyal to Rome, named King Herod. And then, well, the next part of the story is for a few weeks from now.
Hanukkah marks the time when the Maccabees re-took control of the temple in Jerusalem threw out the statue of Zeus, and re-dedicated the temple to Jewish worship. Hanukkah means “dedication” in Hebrew. The dedication ritual required burning oil lamps for eight days to purify the space. The priests could only find enough oil for one day, but they went ahead anyway, and then, (a miracle!), the lamps stayed lit for the full eight days.
Today, Jews light eight candles on a Menorah, one for each day. And they play with a little top called a driedl that has four sides on which are printed the letters: Nun, Gimel, Hei and Shin
Those four letters stand for the Hebrew phrase, “Nes gadol hayah sham,” which means, “A great miracle happened there”. In Israel the driedls say “Nes gadol hayah poh” which means, a great miracle happened here.
When the Greek rulers changed the former policy that allowed the Jews to retain their culture, their religion, their Hebrew language, and decided that the new policy would require all residents of the empire to adopt Greek culture, Greek language, Greek religion, they created a conflict. Some Jews assimilated. To them, the advantages of identifying with the Greek state were many, and perhaps the values of Jewish culture to them were not so obvious, or not so important. Other Jews, led by the Maccabees, resisted, and started a revolution.
All people face this issue, this internal conflict between acceptance and assimilation or resistance and revolt. Jews face it today, in the United States. How important is it to be Jewish? Must I speak Hebrew? Must I belong to a Jewish community or keep kosher in my home? In what ways is it acceptable to capitulate to the US culture because the United States is, “my community”, and what for me, of my Jewishness, must I hold on to, because that is also, “my community?”
For the Maccabees, the values of retaining Jewish culture were obvious and important, important enough to go to war over. The Greeks weren’t “our community.” The Greeks were outsiders, occupiers, who threatened, “our community.”
Hanukkah is a holiday based on conflict.
The question for those who would chose assimilation, or those who would choose resistance, is “who is my community?”
The way we are encouraged to tell the Hanukkah story is to valorize the Maccabees who fought a war in defense of their Jewish community. By implication the lesson is not to be like those Jews who saw the Greeks as their community, accepted Hellenization and assimilated. That’s the Hanukkah story.
But requirements of choosing assimilation or resistance happen all the time and the “righteous” choice is not always one or the other, or so clear.
In the gay community, for instance, in the 1990s there was a feeling among some that the fight for marriage rights meant assimilation. Instead we should stake out our claim as sexual radicals providing a new model for the larger culture to learn from.
In Unitarian Universalism we’re having a lot of conversation in the last few decades about our culture of worship. To be more inclusive of people outside our white, middle class, core, some recommend we shift our worship culture to include more explicitly theist language, more emotion, more mystery and ritual, more music from outside the Protestant hymnal tradition. But those shifts would come at the cost of losing what many identify as essential components of our Unitarian Universalist culture. Do we resist that change? Or do we assimilate, to a changing culture?
“Who is my community?”
It’s common for instance, in the United States, that first generation immigrants retain their original language and culture in the new country. And then, usually, the second generation grows up speaking English and value being “American” over their parent’s national identity. By the third generation, or later, immigrant families might fully identify with US culture, but also become wistful about that earlier identity, and want to reconnect.
“Who is my community?”
If it starts to feel that, “my community” is the new community growing around me, then I will assimilate. If “my community” is the old community slipping away, I will resist.
Hanukkah is a story, in the way the holiday encourages us to tell it, where resistance was the righteous choice.
But when the answer to the question, “Who is my community” is something like, “My community includes people who are different from me, includes people who speak different languages, includes people who worship a different God, or no God” then the lesson of Hanukkah isn’t quite applicable. In that case revolution would be self-defeating, a civil war against your own larger, diverse, community.
But assimilation is also self-defeating, because it would mean letting important personal cultural values be swallowed up and disappeared by the larger group.
The problem with resolving conflict within a community by battle is that when one side or the other wins, the other side loses , and then our collective future is either bereft entirely of that vanquished culture’s gifts, or some remnant of the vanquished community hangs on but with unresolved resentment and anger.
The problem with resolving conflict within a community by acquiescence is that also one side wins and the other side loses and our future is either bereft entirely of that culture’s unique gifts, or some remnant hangs on with unresolved resentment and anger.
The problem with the revolution model is that it leads to victor and vanquished, and a community cannot be healthy when some of its members feel beaten up and defeated. The problem with the assimilation model is that assimilation simply feels like voluntary defeat. It’s vanquishing without the revolution. And again a community cannot be healthy when some members feel their important values have been dismissed and ignored.
What’s required then when a conflict arises within a community is a third way to resolve the conflict. A third way that is neither revolution, nor assimilation. A third way that rejects the two choices available to the Jews at the time of the Hanukkah story : Holy War or Hellenization.
The third way, when conflict arises within a community where crowning a victor and vanquished is unacceptable, is neither revolution nor assimilation, but transformation. Not my way or the highway, but a new way. Not the re-establishing of an old way, that the dissenters can either grudgingly take or leave, but a new community, a transformed community, in which both sides of the conflict create a new way of being together.
With this third way of resolving internal community conflicts, conflict can become, not an occasion of stress and anxiety to be avoided, but an opportunity for growth. A welcome opportunity for a needed new becoming. A chance for a beloved community that may have become ossified to transform into a new way of being beloved.
Imagine a conflict arising in a church community and instead of the members choosing sides and inciting a Holy War, they choose to, as Hosea Ballou says, “agree in love.” That doesn’t mean “making nice.” Agreeing in love doesn’t mean pretending to agree with the other side when you don’t really mean it, then continuing the fight through indirect means and sabotage. Nor does “agreeing in love” mean giving up, feeling defeated and leaving the community, or remaining but waiting for the chance to “take back my church”.
Agreeing in love means recognizing that when we have a conflict, that’s OK. We’ll get through this. We have a conflict, and we need to find some way to resolve that, but the first thing is to agree that we will recognize the bonds of love that hold us together, and our conflict resolution will be undertaken within that container of love. What we will seek, because we agree in love, is a conflict resolution that doesn’t result in some winners and some losers but results in transformation for all. That means, I’m willing to change, because I know you’re willing to change, too.
Within a community: churches, families, nations, and even between nations, because Unitarian Universalists affirm the goal of world community, we strive for conflict resolution through conflict transformation. A new culture for a new day. Not exactly the way it was, but not dishonoring the way it was either. Not entirely a brand new thing, but a new way that grows from the old roots and transforms what was essential about the old into a new expression.
When we sang, “Light One Candle” as our opening hymn, you may have noticed that the song names eight different candles, one for each day of Hanukkah. Two of those candles were a “candle for all we believe in, that anger won’t tear us apart” and, a “candle to bring us together with peace as the song in our heart.”
Hosea Ballou assures us “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury.” Our centering hymn explained even further what that means, “If we in love unite, debate can cause no strife: for with this love in sight, disputes enrich our life.”
In a community united by love, conflict is not a danger to be avoided, but an opportunity to enrich our lives by inviting us to transformation.
No one says that transformation is easy or comfortable, it seldom is, but in a faith community whose goal is transformation of our lives and of our world, conflict could be a guest, welcomed as any other into our community of love.