Chanukah, the shape-shifting holiday
Human uprising or divine miracle? Religious freedom or religious fundamentalism?
Last night I celebrated Chanukah with Sinai Coexist, a group within my synagogue that several of us started last spring to express our angst at the human toll of the Gaza war and our desire for a future in which both Israelis and Palestinians can thrive in self-determination, peace, and safety. Before we lit the candles, I gave a few comments about the holiday of Chanukah. Because they were well-received, I thought I’d share them here.
Chanukah is a shape-shifting holiday.
Unlike other Jewish holidays whose meaning is fairly immutable—Yom Kippur is unquestionably a day of atonement, Passover a celebration of deliverance from slavery—Chanukah morphs with the ages.
It was originally a minor holiday, not one of the festivals mandated or even mentioned in Torah. The books of Maccabees 1 and 2—the source of the Chanukah story—recount events that took place between 175 and 134 BCE, long after the Hebrew Bible was written. While they’re considered canonical by the Roman Catholic church, they’re not included in the Tanach, the collection of Torah, Prophets, and Writings that make up the Hebrew Bible.
Chanukah commemorates a nationalist, religious uprising by Jews in Palestine against their Greek rulers, who were desecrating Jewish holy sites and repressing Jewish religious traditions. It was widely celebrated in the first century CE, even documented by the Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.
But the early centuries of the first millennium were a period of change and fear in Jewish society. The Roman Empire had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, forced Jews into exile, and decimated much of Judea in the wake of the failed Bar Kochba uprising. The rabbis who were preserving and redefining Judaism for a post-Temple era of exile didn’t want to spark any further Roman crackdowns. So they de-emphasized the uprising story and instead focused on a tale of divine miracles—of a Temple lamp that had only enough oil for one day but burned for eight days.
Fast forward a thousand years or two. As a teen in a Zionist youth movement in the early 1970s, I and my friends defiantly reclaimed the nationalist aspect. We pooh-poohed the religious focus on miracles: we don’t believe all that pie-in-the-sky stuff, and besides, religion is the opiate of the masses! Instead, in those waning days of the Vietnam War, we saw the Maccabees as an ancient Jewish version of the Viet Cong—freedom fighters trying to throw off the yoke of an imperial power.
Decades later, studying to become an adult Bat Mitzvah, I found myself wondering if the Maccabees were less freedom fighters than religious fundamentalists—Taliban rather than Viet Cong. Their war was not just against the Greek overlords but against fellow Jews who were adopting Greek ways. If we Reform Jews or modern secular Jews had been living then, we might have been their targets.
Meanwhile, Chanukah morphed in completely new directions in late 20th century America.
Deeply grateful for the acceptance they found in this country’s “melting pot,” American Jews recast Chanukah as a holiday of religious freedom and the right to worship as each of us pleases.
It also became a bigger and more materialistic holiday—inflated as an alternative to Christmas by parents who worried their kids would feel left out without a lot of gifts.
Most recently, with the Jewish Renewal movement and New Age influences, Chanukah has sometimes been reframed as a solstice-like celebration of light in dark times, part of the universal human desire to find hope in the depth of winter.
So what is Chanukah? A celebration of God-given miracles or of national liberation? Of religious freedom or of religious fundamentalism? Of light and hope in the darkest hours? We can each embrace our own Chanukah and give the candles our own personal meaning.
As we light the candles tonight, the fourth night of Chanukah, here are four wishes relating to the past year of darkness in Israel and Palestine. They express our hopes for a future of light:
Candle 1 — an immediate ceasefire and return of the hostages.
Candle 2 — reconstruction of damaged Gaza and the kibbutzim ransacked on October 7th.
Candle 3 — an end to the West Bank occupation, and creation of a meaningful and viable Palestinian state that will allow residents a hopeful future.
Candle 4 — integration of Israel into a Middle East of peaceful neighbors, where someday Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians and others will travel back and forth, sharing economies and cultures as fruitfully as the European Union.
From the simple to the complex, the realistic to the aspirational…. The above candle blessings were for the first four nights. We still have four more to celebrate! I invite you to create your own blessings and wishes, whether they’re aimed at overcoming the darkness plaguing the Middle East or the many darknesses in other parts of our world. For sure, we all can use some more light.
Thanks for this, Ilana.