The Female Voice

There are so many aspects of the current conflict to reflect on; at this moment, it is the female voice. One of the biggest issues has been the silencing of the female victims of the October 7th massacre. On the positive spectrum are the number of women who, on social media platforms and in regular media, have come out in protest of the atrocities being committed to our people – the female heroes of our nation. Not just the women who are supporting their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers on the frontlines of the war, but those fighting the war themselves. Our female soldiers are fierce. We need to celebrate the women running volunteer organizations across Israel and the diaspora, raising funds, raising awareness, raising their voices; their war cry is simple – do not ignore us. We are the mothers, the sisters, the wives, and daughters; we are what makes this world go round, and we are not happy with the way things are running, so we are going to do something about it.

Is this a new voice, or is it an ancient call? As a student of history and my very favorite Bible commentator, the Rashbam, says, women weren’t ‘involved’ in the miracles of our nation; they were the miracles. Miriam ensures that Jews don’t stop procreating; Esther saves the entire Jewish world, and what about Judith, the heroine of the Hanukkah story? Who is she? What is her book about, and why is she connected to Hanukkah? Read on to find out more about Judith, but please know, the women in our lives are the reason you and I are here; respect them, honor them, and listen to them; they are the miracle.

JUDITH – THE HEROINE

The Book of Judith is part of the folklore of our nation, written probably during the 2nd century BCE. It tells of a beautiful widow who outsmarts the commander Holofernes and helps break the siege of her town, leading the Jews to a victory over their enemies and control over Jerusalem. Why wasn’t it included among the canonized books of the Bible? Either it was written too late to be included, or it had too many historical anomalies. Yet the book forms part of our consciousness and was somehow connected to the Hanukkah story; let’s delve deep:

The Book of Judith opens with a conflict between God and Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar is trying to gain sovereignty over the Western World. His commander-and-chief of the Assyrian army is Holofernes (this is one of our historical anomalies, as Nebuchadnezzar was Babylonian and not Assyrian – yet we stick with the story). Holofernes leads a massive force in a punitive campaign against the Assyrian western vassals, including Israel.

Israel is attempting to block the advancement of the Assyrians against all the nations of the West (wow! Talk about parallels) at the town of Bethulia (another one of our historical anomalies, as Bethulia isn’t mentioned anywhere else in biblical literature, and the name means ‘virgin’). The town of Bethulia guards the route to Jerusalem.

Despite the warning of Achior the Ammonite that the Jews cannot be conquered unless they sin against God, Holofernes lays siege to Bethulia, cutting off its water supply. After 34 days, the exhausted town is ready to surrender. The leader of the town, Uzziah, urges compromise; he asks the town to give God five days to save them. Uzziah’s hope is to temporarily delay the inevitable surrender of the town and the opening of the route to Jerusalem.

In Part two of the Book, we meet Judith. A pious widow in Bethulia, she comes forward to challenge the five-day compromise, which she says is imposing an ultimatum on God. She sends her maid to call the town magistrates to her house, calling them out for putting an ultimatum on God. She says that God is testing them; they do not get to test God. God, she says, has the power to help them at any time.

Uzziah responds that she is right, but that people are thirsty, and the best, he says, Judith can do is pray for rain. Judith feels there is more she can do aside from prayer; yet first, she prays. She then dresses beautifully; she takes a basket filled with kosher food, and she and her maid leave the besieged town at night for the enemy camp. Judith meets the Assyrian patrol and tells them that she is a Jew who is defecting and will share a ‘true report’ of what is going on behind the town’s walls. The soldier is so impressed by her that he chooses one hundred men from the ranks to escort Judith and her maid to Holofernes.

Judith bows before Holofernes and offers the following plan: she will go out each evening to pray to God, and God will tell her when the townspeople have sinned. In this weakened state of sinning against God, it will be the perfect opportunity to attack the Bethulians. Four uneventful days later, Holofernes invites Judith to a banquet in his tent. All leave the banquet save Judith and Holofernes, and he is passed out drunk. She uses his own sword to cut off his head. The maid puts the head in the food basket, and they leave the camp as they had been practice on the previous evenings. Yet on this evening, they head back to Bethulia (head in a handbasket). Judith displays the head and tells the people to attack the Assyrian camp at daybreak. The Bethulians win, and the route to Jerusalem is secure.

This story has inspired many artists like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and my favorite, Artemis Gitealeski, and musicians such as Vivaldi and Mozart.

Sebastiano del Piombo Judith 1510

Eglon Hendrik van der Neer Judith about 1678

Yet how does this become a Hanukkah story? For more than a thousand years, the story of Judith was forgotten. Even though the Book of Judith is found in the Septuagint – the Greek translation of the Torah, completed in 285–247 BCE. She disappears only to reappear a thousand years later in medieval Jewish texts. It is in these medieval Jewish texts that Judith becomes a Hanukkah heroine. In them, Nebuchadnezzar is Antiochus, Judith is the daughter of Judah, and her victory over Holofernes mirrors Judah the Maccabee’s victory over Nicanor.

In the Septuagint version, Judith brings her own food in order to keep kosher; in the Hanukkah version, Judith brings salty cheese which she feeds Holofernes, causing him to binge on wine.

The commentators allude to Judith, and some mention her straight out in stating that one of the miracles of Chanukah was brought about by a woman. Another names Judith as the daughter of the High Priest Yochanan and cites her story as the reason we eat dairy on Hanukkah.

What is the truth? The truth is that this is what Jewish folklore looks like.

The Maccabees’ real miracle was the winning of the war over the Seleucid Greeks, and the Books of Maccabees 1 and 2 go into great detail about that victory, yet it was also not included in the Tanach. When the Sages came to writing about how we celebrate Hanukkah, the emphasis wasn’t on the military victory, but on what doesn’t even get a full mention in the Books of Maccabees – the oil that lasted not for one day but for 8. There are two different reasons I have heard for emphasizing the miracle of the oil over the military victory. I will share the one that Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l speaks about in this video. The reason, he says, is that for all their military victory, the Maccabees sinned, and ultimately the victory itself was short-lived, as the Hasmonean’s hard-fought independence lasted less than a century. What did last? The light lasted.

Our spiritual resistance is what has ensured Jewish continuity. When the outside world asks us to bow our heads in shame, to denounce our heritage and our customs, we stand tall and proud. When the world tries to erase us, deny us, we use our voices as a weapon to state our right, nay our need, to belong in this world. We do not accept a dystopian world that is Judenrien. We do not accept a world that does not have an Israel in it. When they attack our souls, as they are doing online, on TV, and in the papers, we use our voices that come from the very depths of our souls to fight back. And when they attack our bodies, we fight back even though it is anathema to who we are; we will fight to protect our children and our land.

And what of Judith, and what of the light? The medieval world of Rashi and the Rishonim (the first commentators after the Talmud) was a Europe that expelled Jews over and over; every county in western Europe expelled Jews, some did it multiple times, and in the days of Rashi, Jews were being murdered as the crusaders tore through Europe, for no other reason than they were Jews. While the Maccabees ultimately did sin, the commentators looked for a hero, a woman committed to both prayer and action, who did not cower in the face of the enemy but used her intelligence and charm and her unwavering faith in God to defeat the enemy and save Jerusalem. What better message could you send to the Jewish towns of Europe as the crusaders made a beeline for Jerusalem? They called on every Jew to protect themselves, their families, and their town and to have faith, just as Judith did, and they connected it to Hanukkah because, like us, they were begging God for a miracle.

^{Menorah and tomb found at Beit Shaarim archaeological excavation in the Souther Galilee dating form the second Temple period.}

Why light? We learned that when God created the world on Rosh Hashanah, Adam – the first man – worried as the days became incrementally shorter from Rosh Hashanah to just before Hanukkah. This worry became fear as he thought the days would get so short that the night would overtake the day, and the whole world would be submerged into darkness. In his fear and anxiety, he prayed and cried, and all of a sudden, as he thought the days couldn’t get any shorter, the days started to lengthen again. The change was incremental, but he noticed, and he celebrated. It is the reason so many cultures have festivals of light because as the world descends into darkness, it is incumbent on us to believe that light will always conquer dark, that on the other side of the long night, the day starts to incrementally take over. And until that point, we will pray, and we will add our light into the world, one candle at a time, until every single corner is illuminated.

HANUKAH RECIPES: (I have listed the recipes in order of crazy easy to time consuming…)