The Moral Meaning of the Hasmoneans’ War on Sports

Dec. 22 2022

The opening chapter of the first book of Maccabees complains of Jewish “transgressors of the law who seduced many” of their fellows. These transgressors “built a gymnasium in Jerusalem according to local custom, and did not circumcise their children, and left the holy covenant for heathen practices, and did wickedly in the eyes of God.” Cole Aronson reflects on this rejection of sports and athleticism on the part of pious Jews of the 2nd century BCE:

Throwing a discus can surely divert you from prayer and Torah study, but other things can do that also, and so I have to think the problem with this Jerusalem athletics center was more basic. Raising physical prowess from a military necessity into a society’s main form of nobility can teach contempt for the small, the fragile, and the sick. If muscles and speed are how your community says you ought to flourish, the frail among us will be absorbed into a spectating mass useful only as an audience for a mighty few.

Which is a shame, because one of the very best things about civilization is that it gives vulnerable people a chance at decent, dignified lives. Without walls, cops, and laws, everyone is a tribal warrior, or beholden to tribal warriors, or a victim of tribal warriors. The pagan Jews wanted to restore the warrior virtues to a softer form of the dominance they enjoy without restraint in savage times.

The Maccabees fought with heroic strength against the total exaltation of heroic strength.

Read more at First Things

More about: Hanukkah, Hasmoneans, Judaism, Sports

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict