Beyond the Eclipse

On August 1 according to the Julian calendar, August 14 in the civil calendar this year, the Byzantine Churches celebrate an unusual conjunction. The Precious and Life-Giving Cross is brought forth – ἡ Πρόοδος τοῦ Τιμίου καὶ Ζωοποιοῦ Σταυροῦ – while the Church commemorates the seven Maccabean martyrs, their mother Solomonia and their teacher, the elder Eleazar.

The proximity deserves attention. The Cross is brought forth into the life of the city and of the faithful. Beside it stand people who lived and died long before Jesus of Nazareth: Jews who accepted torture and death rather than abandon the commandments of the Torah and the Oral Tradition.

This is not a marginal survival in an overloaded calendar. Gregory of Nazianzus devoted his fifteenth Oration to the Maccabees, while John Chrysostom preached homilies in their honor. Raphaëlle Ziadé has studied precisely this remarkable passage of De l’histoire juive au culte chrétien: Jewish martyrs killed defending the Law entered Christian martyrology. The difficulty was already apparent in the fourth century. How could Christians venerate people who had died before Christ, precisely for their fidelity to the ancestral Jewish Law?

The answer preserved by the Church should not be softened into vague language about “shared values.” Eleazar did not die for an abstract principle of religious liberty. He refused to eat forbidden food. Solomonia and her seven sons preferred death to apostasy. Food, body, Covenant and obedience belonged together.

The historical distinction is equally important. The Maccabees were not fighting Greek language, philosophy or civilization as such. They resisted pagan coercion: an imperial attempt to impose idolatry and suppress their distinctive fidelity to the One God. There is a profound irony here. Greek subsequently became one of the principal languages through which their resistance was preserved: the Books of Maccabees, the preaching of Greek Fathers and Byzantine hymnography transmitted the memory of Jews who had resisted coercive Hellenization.

The Church therefore inherited something more demanding than an inspiring ancient story. It glorified people whose sanctity consisted precisely in refusing to renounce their Jewish fidelity.

This became unexpectedly concrete in Jerusalem in 2003. Members of my Rum Orthodox community asked to meet the late Greek Orthodox Patriarch Irenaios. Some had been born Jews; others had Jewish parents, children or relatives who had remained Jewish. They continued to meet their families at Pesach or Rosh Hashanah and encountered Jewish dietary and family practices as living realities. These were not theoretical questions about Judaism. They concerned families sitting around the same table.

The request initially surprised the Patriarch and those around him. Yet Orthodox tradition already contained something capable of making the question recognizable.

The Maccabees were already saints.

This does not mean that Jewish halakhah becomes a rule imposed upon Christians, nor that Judaism and Christianity cease to be distinct. It means something simpler and perhaps more challenging: Christianity has preserved within its own sanctity the memory of Jews whose obedience to the commandments of Israel was recognized as fidelity to God worthy of martyrdom.

The question therefore remains alive. What happens when Jewishness is no longer an ancient biblical background but a living practice encountered in a family, a parish, Jerusalem or present-day Israel?

The Maccabean witness concerns a boundary beyond which accommodation becomes renunciation. Yet this should not be confused with hostility toward surrounding cultures. Assimilation is more subtle. It can suggest that inherited practices are embarrassing remnants of another age, that visible differences disturb social harmony, or that acceptance requires particular identities gradually to become invisible. The Maccabees remind us that fidelity cannot survive solely as an idea.

This is why the encounter with Patriarch Irenaios remains significant more than twenty years later. The Orthodox faithful who approached him were not asking whether Christianity should become Judaism. Their situation was much more ordinary and therefore more difficult: Jewish relatives remained Jewish; Christian and Jewish members of the same families continued to meet. Pesach often occurs during Orthodox Great Lent; different religious practices could encounter one another around the same table.

The surprise provoked by their request revealed something of the distance that can develop between the Jewish world preserved in Christian Scripture and encounters with actual Jewish people. Yet the Church possessed within its own tradition an ancient response. It commemorated Eleazar and the Maccabees precisely because they had refused to abandon what they had received from God.

This recognition is particularly significant in Jerusalem and in the present State of Israel. It is possible to praise the Maccabees liturgically while scarcely recognizing the Hebrew and Jewish reality for which they died. The contradiction need not become an accusation. It is enough to allow the feast itself to make it visible.

The Church had canonized the Makkabim, and resolved the question.

Genuine recognition allows the other to remain what the other is. Nor can the Maccabean martyrs legitimately be recruited to sanctify every contemporary religious, national or political conflict. Antiochus represented pagan coercion and enforced apostasy; this ancient situation cannot simply be transferred onto whatever confrontation we wish to justify today.

This brings the Maccabean commemoration close to the other observance of August 1. In the Byzantine tradition the Cross is brought forth. Faith cannot remain safely stored in a treasury any more than the Law can remain merely written upon stone.

And this year another calendar opens at precisely this point. August 14, 2026 is Rosh Chodesh Elul, 1 Elul 5786, the beginning of the final month of the Jewish year.

According to Jewish tradition, on that day Moses ascended Sinai once again. He carried tablets he had hewn himself.

The first tablets had been given and broken after the Golden Calf. Moses had interceded for the people. Now, on Rosh Chodesh Elul according to Jewish tradition, he ascended Sinai for a third period of forty days, which would end on Yom Kippur with forgiveness and the second tablets.

There is an essential difference between the two sets. Of the first, Exodus says: “the tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing” (Exodus 32:16). For the second, God tells Moses: “Hew for yourself two tablets of stone like the first” (Exodus 34:1).

The Covenant continues, but not by pretending that nothing happened.

This is breakability: not brokenness as an exceptional accident, but the permanent possibility that what has been received, built, transmitted and loved can be fractured. Bodies are breakable. Communities and societies are breakable. Temples can be desecrated, relationships ruptured, words emptied of their meaning. Religious traditions themselves may preserve texts perfectly while losing the ability to recognize what those texts require of living people.

The Talmud states that לוחות ושברי לוחות מונחין בארון — the tablets and the broken tablets were placed in the Ark (Bava Batra 14b). The arrival of the second tablets did not cause the fragments of the first to be discarded. Wholeness and breakage travelled together.

Repair does not restore an imaginary condition in which the breaking never occurred. The fragments remain part of what is carried forward.

The Maccabees belong to this same movement. Their resistance was necessary because something could not be surrendered without breaking the Covenant itself. Yet resistance was followed by purification and rededication. The Temple had to become a living place again.

The eve of a Rosh Chodesh may be observed as Yom Kippur Katan (small Yom Kippur): a later Jewish custom of prayer, examination and repentance before entering a new month. The practice is not universal, but its intuition is clear. Renewal requires some accounting with what precedes it. This becomes particularly meaningful as Elul opens the final month of 5786 and leads toward the Days of Awe.

And this year the movement from obscurity toward renewal has received an unexpected astronomical image. On August 12, two days before Rosh Chodesh Elul, a total solar eclipse crossed parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

An eclipse is not an omen, and celestial mechanics should not be transformed into prophecy. Its image is powerful for a simpler reason: obscuration is not disappearance.

Something similar can happen to memory. The Church preserved the Maccabees while their concrete Jewishness could become obscured within Christian consciousness. The Commandments remained written while their significance could become difficult to recognize. The Cross itself, on this Byzantine feast, is brought forth: what was already present becomes visible again.

The Maccabees resisted because fidelity could be broken. The Church preserved their memory because their resistance was recognized as a witness to God. The Cross is brought forth because what is kept must also become visible among living people. Moses ascends again because what has been shattered does not mark the end of the Covenant.

That may be essential for our present generation. A community that remembers only its intact tablets eventually misunderstands itself. The same can be said of peoples, Churches, families and societies. History cannot be repaired by suppressing what has been broken, nor can identity survive by endlessly contemplating its wounds.

This is also why the Maccabean day cannot remain a picturesque commemoration of ancient heroism. It asks Christians to recognize something their own tradition has preserved: Jewish fidelity did not cease to be real simply because Christianity appeared in history. The canonization of the Maccabees does not erase the profound differences between the two traditions. It prevents those differences from becoming an excuse for denying the reality of the other.

The experience with Patriarch Irenaios showed how unexpectedly concrete this can become. Jewishness was no longer a chapter preceding Christianity. It appeared in living families, around actual tables, among people who had returned to Zion and Jerusalem. The question preserved by the Church suddenly had faces.

The Church had canonized the question long before contemporary Christians were prepared to ask it.

There may be something useful in recognizing this now, precisely when religious, national and cultural identities are so easily turned into instruments for breaking through, breaking down or hiding realities that disturb us. Fidelity need not mean refusing to see another person. Recognition need not mean dissolving differences. And memory need not require us to live permanently inside the moment of destruction.

Elul proposes another movement: Moses climbs.

The eclipse offers a final, modest image. There is no prophecy in it. The light is obscured because another body passes before it. Darkness overshadowed the hour when Jesus breathed his last.

Perhaps much of what matters in human and religious life survives in this way: obscured, fragmented, sometimes misunderstood, yet still present.

The Maccabees remain in a Christian calendar. The broken Luchot (Tables) remain in the Ark. The Cross is brought forth. The moon renews its course. Elul begins, and another year approaches.

This is why the traditional greeting acquires particular weight before 5787: לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו – Leshanah tovah tikatevu vetechatemu. May you be written and sealed for a good year.

To be written again does not mean that the previous page was never torn.

It means that the breaking has not exhausted the future.