Richard Hidary
Jewish Review of Books, Dec. 27, 2016
“The early rabbis rejected these books from the canon not only because of the late date of their composition but likely also because they wanted to suppress their revolutionary message.”
In his response to Rabbi Shlomo Riskin’s review of his book, Not in God’s Name, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks invokes the religious failure of the Hasmonean dynasty:
[N]either will I defend the toxic mix of religion and politics that has been the downfall of every culture that embraced it: Judaism in the late Second Temple period, Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, and radical political Islam today.
The separation of church and state, he argues, derives from the Bible’s insistence upon divesting the monarchy of its sacred aura. When the Maccabees turned priests into kings, they ignored this central biblical teaching, thus courting spiritual disaster. Strikingly, in his rejoinder Rabbi Riskin also invoked the Maccabees, but for more or less the opposite reason:
[P]ower is religiously significant if and only if it is used to religiously significant ends. This is why . . . our sages added the al ha-nissim prayer to commemorate the victories of the Maccabees on Hanukkah.
Rabbi Riskin’s biblical ideal is “a constitutional nation-state . . . integrally related to the Abrahamic vision” of ethical monotheism. “Without power,” he argues, “how can the chosen people protect the powerless against their exploiters? And, of course, without power, how can the chosen people protect themselves?” ….SOURCE