Channah Cohen: voices, heroes, and the great confrontation of history

Guardian of the Flames, out just before Chanukah, is a story set in the time of the Hasmonean wars, deep in the Maccabbee camp. Chanukah may be over, but its story lasts. Guardian of the Flames mines a well-known epic of the past for roots that nourish our present.

While foraging for his past, Gilad stumbles upon his own heroism and is sucked into the frontlines of history. He’s elusive, mysterious, and doesn't trust anyone. As the Greeks draw closer and the stakes are raised, the close brotherhood of the Maccabbee camp is all he has - but can it survive the ever-increasing confusion? Guardian of the Flames is an enigmatic, sophisticated, and intriguing historical fiction that layers battle scenes and action with introspection and rich themes.

In one of the first scenes of the book, Gilad reflects, “I was the man, he was the villian, and we both knew it.” This clear hero archetype plays out throughout this story and sets the tone. Why does the Hasmoneam war period lend itself toward this pattern?

Narratives that have survived the test of time follow a similar pattern. Imagine a time where people were not writing stuff down, but just telling stories orally. There had to be something compelling and resonating between those stories and the people who were listening. That was the hero versus villain, the good versus evil.

The hero archetype reflects an inner part of ourselves, but we lose that language when telling the stories of our own history. I was trying to find a time period where the difference between good versus evil was very clear, so I could be historically accurate but still draw on that archetype. The Maccabean time period is every hero writer's dream, it’s very easy to be on the Maccabim’s side.

The story and characterization unfold with a deliberate mysteriousness and slow reveal. How does this approach affect our perception of the story?

The main character is sort of enigmatic. Throughout the book, the readers gets snippets of a future voice reflecting on the story. Gilad’s internal back-voice is scared of himself in some capacity and doesn't trust you as the reader. He doesn't want to tell you who he is or what he knows about himself, he's going to force you to stay in the book and find out as time goes on, as he builds trust in you. I liked it because it lets the reader understand that something about this character changes. In the beginning, his back-voice sounds very different than the character that you're following through the story. He's searching for something, and you want him to find it. And his back-voice keeps you pulled in, you’re curious about who he is and if he's going to find it.

I liked having these murky characters. Historically, we only know the five Chashmonai brothers and two other people’s names who fought under Yehuda HaMaccabee. As opposed to, let's say, the Churban Bayis period, where we know hundreds of names and what they did, the play-by-play, because Josephus was right there writing hundreds of pages of history. But in this period, there were real people– but we're not sure who they were. Who were those people who followed Yehuda HaMaccabee? We don't know the story of a single one of them. Gilad represents the real people who were the heroes that got us here, even though we don't know their names.

The book begins in an epistolary format, and then switches to first-person storytelling. But you keep in snippets of the epistolary style, where Gilad speaks directly and intimately to the reader. Why was this necessary?

The primary texts from which we know about the wars of the Chashmonai brothers are the First and Second Books of the Maccabees. The First is deemed much more historically accurate, but the question is, who wrote it? One of the propositions is that it was written by a young soldier who fought alongside Yehuda HaMaccabee. That was the first historical crutch for Gilad’s character, who would have fought alongside Yehuda HaMaccabeeand written the history of it afterward to compel the rest of the Jewish people - ourselves included - that this was important, and we should have shown up.

That back-voice was a tool to get you to think, What would I have done if I had encountered the brothers, if I had known that this revolt was fomenting, but if I joined it and we lost, I would lose everything that I hold dear? I wanted that tension to be percolating somewhere in the back of the minds of the readers. That's the power of the hero narrative; it forces us to confront something inside of us. Can we be greater than who we are? Can we show up more than we already have? His back-voice allows him to speak not only about his own story, but directly to the reader, and throws us into the throes of Jewish history so it’s not just a novel, but a challenge.

A cynical reader of the book will wonder how one character so conveniently meets so many famous historical figures. Is this writer’s license? Or does the size and structure of the Maccabee camp allow this to be realistic?

I actually had the opposite question. How on earth could they have pulled this off? It wasn't a random miracle where they showed up to battle and everyone happened to be in the right place at the right time. There had to be some organization that allowed them to win. I spent a lot of time researching Viking military tactics and WWII partisan brigades for the setup of the infrastructure of the Maccabee’s camp. I tried not to rely on having absolute freedom of writer's license to just put an entire Jewish army into the Greek’s backyard by accident when they needed it. That's not how it happened. The strategic organization was my invention, but there had to be a way that it would not just have been luck for any characters to have encountered each other. It’s still miraculous, but not ridiculous.

Along with this same realization is the fact that Gilad's been used, to some extent. Yet, “far from resenting it, I found to my surprise that it made me proud.” How does this attitude bring Gilad full circle with his earliest hesitations about joining the camp?

To be honest, that was the part I had the most qualms about writing. It took me a long time to get into his perspective of what it would have felt like to have showed up against your will, being compelled into this war, fighting it, developing this emotional connection that you're not willing to recognize, and then to hear that the whole thing was a setup where you were used to save people whom you're only now willing to admit that you care about.

But I started thinking about the current war of October 7. Any soldier showing up to fight a war is willing to say, I am stepping into a position in which my life has to mean more than what it does to me right now. It has to be part of a larger symphony of music, of which I don't understand most of it, but I am hoping that someone does.

And if I'm going to show up in that kind of situation, I hope it's Yehuda HaMaccabee who is the conductor, and not anyone else.

I think we see clearly that he would not have said the same thing in chapter one.

For sure. I hope by the end, his back-voice makes way more sense. His narrating voice and his back-voice are getting closer the whole time, and at some point, they start to feel like the same person. You see his perspective changing. For example, he never talks about God and Divine Providence as he’s telling the story. But his back-voice often does talk about Providence, and being led to where he needed to be so that he could serve the people. So I think what you're pointing out is the first moments where those two voices combine, where he's able to say, I'm okay with the fact that there's something beyond me here that I have loyalty to, that I had a role in.

You stress how Gilad's lack of past affects his ability to experience the present. Gilad feels, “Pity for myself, who longed for some part of the past that I could not reach.” This, and the theme it concludes sound like you're talking about something larger. Can you talk about that?

What I was trying to do with this book is not tell a historical story about a time period, but tell a story about a potentially real person who interacted with history as it was. And I was trying to create a character that feels familiar, so that in some way you're along with Gilad in his development. You're not just reading about his journey, you're feeling your own journey. Most of us have some issues with our past, family, different traumas or developmental issues, something that went wrong, regrets, or something in our lives that we struggle to make peace with. Looking back, how do I think about my past? Do I pity myself? Do I become callous and refuse to have any sort of emotional experience of my past? Seeing how Gilad settles with his past allows us to look back at our own.

I went through a very difficult, formative time in my high school years. What got me through it were the hero narratives of the time, like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and a few others in that genre. Understanding how Harry reacted to the same kind of situation that I was going through - reading about the emotions that spilled out as he hollered at Dumbledore and threw stuff around the room - that means that the piece of me that wanted to do the same thing wa snot a monster. I'm normal. Gilad is dealing with things in his own way, but gives us permission to look back at our own experiences and ask ourselves the same questions he's asking himself in his head.

How did your work as a qualitative researcher for the OU impact your expectations or experience of fiction?

The skill of a qualitative researcher is to be able to take off your hat of assumptions and listen to what someone is saying, giving them the space to be able to live out their humanity in that phone call with you. I did the interviews of single men and women for a giant study, and I also did the interviews of the Shadchanim. They do not agree with each other. And sometimes I knew the shadchan and I knew the single person, and the stories they were telling were about each other, and they sounded one billion percent different depending on which side you're on. But all I could think about while listening was about the story from their perspective.

With fiction, your characters have to be real enough to get into them. Quite a few times while writing, I would get myself stuck in terms of battle strategy or what one character was going to say, and the only way I could get out of it was getting into that character in my head. What would he have done? If you don't have the muscle of being able to get into people's stories from their perspective, it would be hard to make your characters feel real.

You raised the funds to publish this book through a Kickstarter model (on GiveButter), a method common among seforim but never used for frum fiction, as far as I know. Can you tell me what the process was like? Do you think this approach can help others and perhaps lessen the financial burden of frum publishing in general?

I started writing as a hobby, having no idea where I was going. I did not do any research about whether or not this was going to be a viable hobby - forget about profession! So I didn’t have that amount of extra cash that it takes to actually publish a book yourself; and I only hope to make enough back to forward-fund another book.

I got the gusto to ask every person I ever met to forward-buy a book. I framed it as “a book and a bit”. I knew the book was going to cost around $30 in stores, so I asked everyone to pay $36 in advance, which included $5.30 to ship them a book afterward. Many people were very generous and gave me $50-$100. I did little incentives, like I would write a poem in the book if you donated a hundred dollars. But most people were kind enough to be supportive. Every time I need an ego boost, I go onto the website and see all those people who donated, over 200 people. It was very meaningful. It made about three-quarters of what I needed, and there were still quite a few thousand that we had to scrounge together from savings, but it allowed me to fund this one, and now any money I make can be used to fund another book.

You begin and end the book with some words from Rav Hirsch, which at first seem curious, but at the end of the story feels like a wholesome closure. What speaks to you from that paragraph?

Throughout writing the book, I felt like, far be it for me to put words in Yehuda HaMaccabee’smouth. I love Rav Hirsch, how he is this blend of someone who lived almost 200 years ago but is still very modern in how he talks. He has a reverence for Jewish history that is profoundly genuine. So Rav Hirsch was always my model in general. And a lot of what Yehuda HaMaccabee is saying when riling up the troops are words from Rav Hirsch, in his writing about Chanukah. I needed to pay deference to him in a certain way, to thank him for the influence he's had on me and the book.

And that specific quote where he's like, “The stories of Jewish heroes are never a story of the past, they're always a story of the present”-- it's beautiful. That is the point of hero narratives. It's a story about the light in the heart of real people who got us here. It should feel like you're reading a story of your history and of yourself right now. We don't tell the stories of Jewish heroes. We don't use the word “hero” when we're being all frum. Why not? You have to understand their stories so that you understand your own story, so that you show up as the best as you can in your own life, and so that you understand that you didn't get here from nowhere, but from a direct link to the past.

The Chanukah period is a familiar one, but as with all ancient history, any familiarity is in a vague sense. What's something you learned in the course of your research that would surprise readers the most?

When they rededicated the Beis Hamikdash three years into the war, they were certain the war was not over. They had a small respite, and they went to the Beis Hamikdash, cleaned it up, lit the Menorah, and then all marched back out to war. I also think there's a lot of confusion around when we won the war. It’s hard to say whether we won the war at all. It was somewhere between 32-37 years of fighting, and did we win? I don't know. We made a sketchy alliance with Rome, and Judea got taken over by the Hasmonean kings.

And Rav Hirsch’s phrase about the Hasmoneans is that they “dragged the throne and the altar into the abyss”. They were not good kings or Jews, they were hunting down the people we read about in Pirkei Avos. But winning the warcould never have been the point, because Chazal instituted Chanukah knowing that the war was not over. So it couldn't be that the Menorah was about the victory. It’s the light within the darkness. That's a good hero narrative theme: not everything always works out and ties with bows and ribbons. It certainly didn't in the Chanukah story.

What have you been reading that you could recommend?

Joseph Campbell is the Rebbi of hero narratives. I find his direct work hard to get through, so I'm now reading a secondary book on it called The Writer's Journey, by Christopher Vogler. It’s about the pathway that stories about heroes tend to follow, the different characters who appear in hero journeys, and the struggles the hero has to go through. I love it because it's not just a story about a hero. It's really a story about the collective education of humanity.

What’s coming next for you?

I already have a lot of the structure of my next book, a Churban Bayis story; it’s a historically fascinating time period. I started writing that story for my first book, but didn’t go with it because nobody expects a hero narrative to appear in the Churban Bayis story. Evil people in that story are compelling, and challenge us differently. The Maccabim is a much more clear-cut introduction of good versus evil. By the Churban Bayis it's a very different question: Where are the good guys? There was a proliferation of evil, what would a normal good person be doing?And what would it have felt like to fight a war you know you're going to lose? With the Maccabim, we know they won, which makes it harder to get into a space of suspending reality and believing they’d lose. With the Churban Bayis, we know that they lost, and as long as they were a Torah-true Jew, let's say following Raban Yochanan ben Zakhai, they knew they were going to lose too. So what would normal good people have done when going to fight a war that they were doomed to lose? That's the story of the Churban Bayis.