Food is big for Jews. We eat – all those holiday meals – and we fast. Today, the Tenth of Tevet, we repent of Hanukkah’s sufganiot and latkes and fast.

Almost all of the minor Jewish fasts have something to do with the eventual destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Today’s fast marks the beginning of that process. It commemorates not when the walls fell, but when the siege began – when the city was cut off, economically and politically. Significantly, the shortest fast of the year (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) is also associated with another break: the Greek translation of the Five Books of Moses. This caused an internal rupture, the alienation of the Jew from her own condition.

Yes, things get lost in translation – but notwithstanding Jewish food neuroses, why fast because of it?

It was King Ptolemy who commanded the sages to translate the Torah into Greek, producing what became known as the Septuagint. Ptolemy did not want to destroy the Torah, but wanted to flatten it, appropriate it, place it in the Greek Library, right next to the works of other traditions, one book among many. 

That there was now a new book was not the problem. By relocating Torah from home and synagogue to the library, reading changes, and reading as relationship gives into reading as conquest. The Greeks got Jews to read their own tradition from the outside.

The contemporary academy enacts Greek ways of reading where humility is a liability, and relationship treated as naïveté. Works are read not to be understood, but to be classified – patriarchal, colonialist, racist. Fear masquerades as cynicical sophistication – fear of being addressed, fear of being implicated, fear of allowing a text to make a claim.

The Greeks changed the way Jews read, not with generosity, but with suspicion. Not with the two characteristics required for relationship – with a book, a person – vulnerability and chutzpah. Both receptivity and courage are essential. Without receptivity, nothing beyond our defensive barriers, without courage, the relationship is imposed, not our own. 

The fast reminds us that the Greek version of replacement theory – as the apostle Paul wrote, “there is neither Jew nor Greek” – is alive and well in the contemporary academy. The BDS Hanukkah lighting ceremony on Bondi Beach is only the latest appropriation of Jewish symbols in the name of universal values – universal values that somehow always exclude Jews. As it turns out, Paul works out far better for the Greeks than for the Jews.

But the fast also turns us inward. It asks us to recover relationship – to our Infinite Book – and to find meaning not through mastery but through attention. The fast asks us to notice how easily we trade relationship for control, attention for position, and how quickly reading becomes a way of securing ourselves rather than opening ourselves.

mastered, explained, neutralized

This is the work that remains – not nostalgia, not retreat, but the discipline of reading in a world that prefers passivity or conquest to relationship. This is what the last professor still tries to preserve.