Rabbi Freedman’s Shabbat Message

I wrote this article before the horrific events of last Sunday. In some respects, everything now seems irrelevant, but perhaps now, even more so, we should learn a little more about Chanukah and spread the light of learning and goodness.

During our recent stay in Israel, I was introduced to a delightful Israeli woman called חֲמוּטַל / Hamutal. I asked her about the derivation of her name and she informed me with a degree of pride that her name was taken directly from the Tanakh. I looked at her quizzically and she said that as far as she knew, Hamutal (632-619 BCE) was the mother of two Judean kings and that her namesake was a famous queen in ancient Judah. In fact she was absolutely correct. Hamutal was the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah, not to be confused with the prophet Jeremiah. Her marriage to King Josiah of Judah positioned her within the Davidic line, and she bore him two sons who would ascend to the throne, namely, Jehoahaz and Zedekiah.

Neither of these two kings could have been described as particularly successful or pious. Jehoahaz was dethroned and carried off to captivity in Egypt by the ruling Pharaoh, from where sadly he never returned. Zedekiah’s fate was even worse, for as the last king of Judah he was captured by the Babylonians, blinded by them and placed in chains, and then transported to an ignominious death in a Babylonian prison.

Hamutal is mentioned but three times in the Bible, twice in the Book of Kings and once in Jeremiah:

Jehoahaz was twenty-three years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months. His mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah; she was from Libnah. (2 Kings 23:31)

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. His mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah; she was from Libnah. (2 Kings 24:18)

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. His mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah; she was from Libnah. (Jeremiah 52:1)

Not only did these two kings suffer greatly, they were both criticised sharply for their lack of righteousness. The Book of Kings does not mince its words, speaking of King Jehoahaz, it says the following:

He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, just as his predecessors had done. Pharaoh Necho put him in chains at Riblah in the land of Hamath so that he might not reign in Jerusalem, and he imposed on Judah a levy of a hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold…and he took Jehoahaz and carried him off to Egypt, and there he died. (2 Kings 23: 32-34)

As for Zedekiah, the Bible delivers an equally scathing attack:

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. He did evil in the eyes of the Lord his God and did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke the word of the Lord. He also rebelled against King Nebuchadnezzar, who had made him take an oath in God’s name. He became stiff-necked and hardened his heart and would not turn to the Lord, the God of Israel. (Second Book of Chronicles 36: 11-13)

Perhaps, because the Biblical text chose to mention their mother as each son ascended to the throne, some commentators sought to blame their mother Hamutal, for their derelict behaviour. Why else, ask these scholars, would her name have been recorded alongside theirs as they commenced their reign – other than to insinuate that her parenting was somehow at fault and that she had failed to properly educate and inspire her children?

If this is so, then Hamutal is yet another example where some of the early Zionists deliberately chose names for their children that would never have been chosen by Jewish parents in the Diaspora. Where once Jews chose names such as David and Moshe, Avraham and Yosef, Rivkah and Leah, Chava and Miriam – some modern Israelis have instead chosen names such as Omri (one of Israel’s most wicked kings), or Nimrod (a mythological king who attempted to kill Abraham, and now a third example – Hamutal – a woman whose only achievement was to raise two kings, both of whom, failed in their duty to their people and their God.

In an article on-line entitled How’s Nimrod for a Nice Jewish Name?, Joel Weisberger wrote that with ‘the birth of Zionism and the First and Second Aliyah, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish settlers in Eretz Yisrael began giving their children names that probably had not been utilized since Biblical times.’

He continued –

For the first time in Jewish history since the days of the Bible, nice Jewish boys were walking around with such names as Nimrod (a particularly evil Mesopotamian king who some identify with Gilgamesh), Omri (another evil Israelite king), and Amatziah (an evil Judean king).

It seems that the main founders and leaders of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th century were mostly non-religious and consequently reinterpreted the whole of Jewish history (including, and especially, the Bible) from a secular nationalist viewpoint considerably different from and sometimes diametrically opposite to the religious Jewish tradition. A classic example was that of King Omri of ancient Israel, whom the Bible describes as an evil idolater but the Zionists saw as a successful monarch and the founder of a strong dynasty.

Another example was Yitzhak Danziger’s statue of Nimrod, produced in the late 1930’s. The “Nimrod” statue is 90 centimetres high and made of red Nubian sandstone imported from Petra in Jordan. It depicts Nimrod as a naked hunter, uncircumcised, carrying a bow and with a hawk on his shoulder. Its unveiling at the time caused a huge scandal. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which had commissioned Danziger’s statue, was not happy with the result, and religious circles made strong protests.

Within a few years, however, the statue was universally acclaimed as a major masterpiece of Israeli art, and has noticeably influenced and inspired the work of later sculptors, painters, writers and poets up to the present.

According to Weisberger, the Nimrod statue was eventually accepted as an emblem of a cultural-political movement known as “The Canaanites” which advocated the shrugging off of the Jewish religious tradition, cutting off relations with Diaspora Jews and their culture, and adopting in its place a “Hebrew identity” based on ancient Semitic heroic myths.

No doubt, it was in the spirit of this movement, that a young Israeli girl some 40 or 50 years ago was called חֲמוּטַל / Chamutal by her secular, progressive Israeli parents.

It is strange to be commenting on this very topic, on how cultural changes often affect the names we give to our children in the very week that we celebrate the victory of Jewish belief and custom over the extraordinarily powerful Hellenistic culture which had dominated most of southern Europe and the Middle East for hundreds of years following the advent of the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great (333 BCE).

Judaism has always objected strongly to the abandoning of traditional Jewish names as we see in Midrash Vayikra Rabbah 32, which explained that one of the reasons that Israel was redeemed from Egypt was because they did not change their names. It is therefore no coincidence that each one of the leaders of the Jewish rebellion against Greece at the time of Chanukah had authentic Jewish names. In spite of the influence of Hellenism upon the entire region, each of the major protagonists in the Chanukah story had recognizable ‘Jewish’ names. Matityahu (lit. Gift of God) led the rebellion and he was supported by his five sons, Yehuda, Yochanan, Yonatan, Eleazar and Shimon, each one distinguished by their Hebrew or Biblical name.

Then there were the three women who played such crucial roles within the story of Chanukah. The best known of these is Hannah, who had seven sons, each of whom refused to bow down to the Greek emperor and suffered the ultimate fate.

Hannah, like her namesake, the mother of Samuel, became an iconic character in our tradition and her name which means ‘grace’ represents the finest Jewish qualities of loyalty, steadfastness, hope and belief.

A second Hannah is spoken of in books of legends. This is a young Hannah, sister of the Maccabees and about to be married. It is reported that the Greeks sent officials to the Land of Israel for the sole purpose of indecently assaulting brides before their marriage, a legal ordinance also called jus primae noctis or right of the first night

One version of the story is that when a Greek official entered the bride’s bedroom, the Maccabees defended their sister’s honour and that is what sparked the rebellion. A second version related by the Babylonian sage, Rav Ahai Gaon, was that after corrupting all the oil in the Temple, in a final act of desperation and desecration, the Greek official attempted to rape Hannah, the daughter of the High Priest, while her father and her fiancé, Eleazar the Maccabee, looked on helplessly. A Torah scroll was to serve as a mattress for the rape. Upon hearing this, Matityahu’s son Eleazar stepped out of the shadows and killed the Greek man – and so the rebellion began. One could argue that it was her Hebrew name that both inspired her and reflected within her a gracious act of self-sacrifice in order to defend her chastity.

Finally there is the story of Judith, in Hebrew Yehudit; a story of great courage that preceded and yet inspired the Maccabees in their quest for religious autonomy.

In this narrative, Holofernes, an Assyrian general from the time of Nebuchadnezzar, set out to conquer Judah, but was stopped by the people of Bethulia (possibly Jerusalem). He besieged the city, and, worn down by hunger and thirst, the elders decided to surrender. Enter Judith. The beautiful widow berates the leaders of the city for their lack of faith and devised her own plan. Taking her maid and a sack of food to eat (since she observed the Jewish dietary laws), she talked her way into Holofernes’ camp. There she convinced the general that she had deserted her people, and by praying to God she could bring them victory.

For three days, she left in the night-time to pray, and returned in the morning, thus accustoming the guards to her coming and going. On the fourth day, Holofernes gave a banquet in her honour. Overcome by lust and planning to seduce her, he dismissed his servants, then drunk himself into a stupor. Judith grabbed his sword and with all her might hacked off his head.

She and her maid left, this time with Holofernes’ head in their sack. After discovering his headless body, the Assyrian army fled in disarray, and the Jews won a great victory “by a woman’s hand.” For the third time, we discover a Jewish woman with a quintessential Jewish name.

The message is clear, be wary of tampering with age-old traditions; be cautious of changing customs that have sustained our people for millennia, and be cognisant of the significance of a simple thing such as choosing a name. Biblical and Hebrew names often have spiritual meanings and perhaps in some meta-physical way enhance the life of our children and through them – the life and well-being of our people.

In this week of Chanukah give special thought to those Jews who kept faith with Jewish customs and rejected Hellenism in any and every form – it is due to them that we today can identify as Jews, it is due to them that today we can still speak of a Jewish people and Jewish tradition.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Freedman