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1.
Clear and Simple
To everyone it is clear that in its present form, Hanukkah dates back
to the struggle led by the Maccabees a family
from the priestly tribe
against the Hellenistic
overseers of the Land of Israel and against Hellenized Jews, from 169
to 166 BCE.
The Maccabean war was a fusion of anti-colonial and civil war. Antiochus
Epiphanes, the Hellenistic King of the Syrian branch of Alexander's
empire, had decreed that local religions, including Judaism, be rooted
out. Circumcision, kosher food and Shabbat were outlawed on pain of
death. Hellenistic rituals and sacrifices were instituted at the Holy
Temple in Jerusalem and at shrines throughout the land. Many Jews, filled
with admiration for the worldly wisdom and power of Hellenistic culture,
followed the direction and obeyed the decrees.
But
others, deeply committed to Torah, were filled were fury at the oppressive
decrees and with revulsion at the cooperation of their compatriots.
They rallied under the leadership of Mattathias the Priest, a Hasmonean
who lived in Modiin, and his five sons
who came to be called
the Maccabees. After three years of guerrilla warfare in the hills and
forests against the regular armies of Antiochus and his collaborators
in the Jewish community, the Maccabean forces won. They recaptured Jerusalem
in 166 BCE, and set out to rededicate the Holy Temple.
During
the next century, the deeds of the Maccabees were recorded and celebrated.
The eight-day celebration of rededicating the defiled altar in the Temple
is described in detail in I Maccabees chapter 4. In II Maccabees chapter
10, Hanukkah is described as a kind of rerun of Sukkot, the Festival
of Huts, which the Maccabean guerrillas ("living like wild animals
in the mountains and caves") had been unable to celebrate in its
proper season. The First and Second Temples were both dedicated at the
season of Sukkot, and so the reenactment of Sukkot may have seemed an
especially appropriate way to rededicate the Temple. And so, from I
and II Maccabees, the story seems fairly clear and simple.
2. It ain't so clear and simple
Jewish tradition about Hanukkah, however, is not so simple. The books
of the Maccabees themselves became an issue. They seem to have been
treated as holy books by the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria. The
rabbis, on the other hand, never regarded them as holy, and never entered
them among the books that made up the Jewish Bible. And it was rabbis
who determined what became Jewish tradition. Ironically enough, these
books that celebrated the Maccabees' victory over Hellenism survived
not in Hebrew but only in the Greek language... (Indeed, the Maccabean
books survived into modern times only because some of these Hellenized
Jews became recruits to Christianity, and brought with them the assumption
that these Books of the Maccabees were holy writings. The Christian
Church then included Maccabees among its version of what it called the
"Old Testament.")
For the classic Jewish view of the origins of Hanukkah, therefore, we
must turn to the Talmud. Here we find Hanukkah in a most peculiar position.
It is the only one of the traditional festivals that does not have a
place in the Mishnah (the earlier level, or layer of the Talmud). And
in the later layer, the Gemara, it is treated in a very off-hand way,
without the focused attention that is normal for deciding how to observe
a holy day.
In
a discussion of what kinds of candles may be used for Shabbat, one rabbi
asks, rather casually, whether the rules for Hanukkah candles are different;
in this context, another asks
as if he had barely heard of the festival
"What is this
Hanukkah?"
And this is the answer he receives:
Our
rabbis taught: On the 25th day of Kislev [begin] the eight days of Hanukkah,
on which lamentation for the dead and fasting are forbidden. For when
the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils in it, and
when the Hasmonean dynasty prevailed over them and defeated them, they
searched and found only one bottle of oil sealed by the High Priest.
It contained only enough for one day's lighting. Yet a miracle was brought
about with it, and they lit [with that oil] for eight days. The following
year they were established as a festival, with Hallel (prayers of praise)
and Thanksgiving [Shabbat 21b].
After this brief explanation, the rabbis go back to discussing the candles.
They have no more to say about the internal divisions of the Jews, the
revolt against Antiochus, the victory of the Maccabees, the rededication
of the Temple. How can we explain this?
3. A very cautious attitude
The reason for this cautious attitude towards Hanukkah is that the rabbis
were not happy with the Maccabean approach to Jewish life. They were
writing in the period when similar revolts against Rome, seeking to
win the Jews political independence, to turn Judea into a rocky fortress,
and to toughen the Jewish people had been systematically and brutally
smashed by the iron first of Rome. The rabbis believed that only the
rabbinical kind of power
the power not of the fist but of the spirit
had protected and preserved the Jewish people in the past and could
do so now.
Moreover,
the Maccabees had made themselves and their offspring kings, after expelling
the Syrian-Greek empire. That, in itself, was a violation of the ancient
Israelite constitution, which required that priest and king be of different
tribes, so as to create a check-and-balance system between religious
and political power. Even worse in the eyes of the rabbis, the Hasmonean
kings
despite their anti-imperial, anti- assimilationist origins
had invited the Roman Empire to become protectors and overlords of the
Jewish kingdom, paving the way for the ultimate Roman conquest. Finally,
and worst of all, the Hasmonean kings sided with the Sadducees, the
priestly upholders of the primacy of Temple offerings as a channel to
God, against the Pharisees
forerunners of the
rabbis who saw prayer and the study and interpretation of Torah as the
path to God.
All
these Maccabean ways of exercising power seemed to the rabbis a subtle
surrendering to the habits of the Gentiles (ironically, a form of assimilation)
as distinct from pursuing a life-path that the rabbis saw as authentically
Jewish. And so, in retrospect, the rabbis were critical of the meaning
and ultimate outcome of the Maccabean revolt; without utterly rejecting
the national liberation movement, they refocused attention away from
it toward God's miracle
toward the spiritual
meaning of the light that burned and was not consumed for eight days.
4.
Tables are turned; Hanukkah is reborn
Through almost
two millennia, Hanukkah remained a real but secondary festival of
the Jewish people. Beginning late in the 19th century in central and
eastern Europe, Hanukkah had a second birth. There were two major
factors in this second birth, both of them stemming from the emancipation
of the Jewish people and their increasing day-to-day contact with
the Christian and secular world.
As secular, non-religious, or rational religious ideas grew during
the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment in the 19th century), there was
a special disdain for the irrational notion of the miracle of the
oil in the Temple. In addition, with the growing popularity of the
secular notion of Jewish peoplehood, including the Zionist notion
of the Jews as a nation seeking political rehabilitation through politico-military
action, the Maccabees began to seem less dangerous and more heroic
than they had throughout the centuries of rabbinic tradition. Indeed,
many Zionists identified the rabbis' fear of militant action against
oppressive governments as a major element of exile mentality to be
transcended in rebuilding the Jewish people.
Thus, from about 1890 on, the miracle of the lights declined, and
the Maccabees advanced in attention and popularity. Hanukkah became
more and more important as a celebration of Jewish political courage
and military prowess. At the same time, the Christian Apocryphal books
of the Maccabees became more accessible to Jews, as the barriers between
the Jewish and Christian worlds crumbled.
An additional factor contributing to the rebirth of Hanukkah was the
growing popularity of Christmas as a major society-wide event among
Christians in Europe and North America. As Jews became more assimilated
into the broader (Christian) society, they felt themselves both attracted
and threatened by the joyful Christmas celebrations and especially
by their appeal to children. Hanukkah
both because of its date and because of its anti-assimilationist content
became a useful tool for strengthening Jewish identity.
Out of these twin facts, Hanukkah was reborn as a popular holiday,
with a greater emphasis on the Maccabees, on resistance to assimilation
and the defense of religious and ethnic pluralism, on the giving of
gifts, and on the pleasure of children.
5. Reflections
As we have seen, the Rabbinic tradition was hostile to the Maccabees,
and modern Zionism, identifying with the Maccabees, was often hostile
to the Rabbis. From the standpoint of the Rabbis, Hanukkah celebrated
God's saving Spirit: "not by might and not by power..."
From the standpoint of the Maccabees, Hanukkah celebrated human courage,
the human ability to make history bend and change.
Is there any way to integrate these conflicting orientations to Hanukkah?
Can a new generation of Jews help resolve this contradiction? By perceiving
that Hanukkah is the moment when light is born from darkness, hope
from despair, we understand that the real conflict is not between
Rabbi and Maccabee, not between the spiritual and the political, but
between apathy and hope, between a blind surrendering to darkness
and an acting to light up new paths. By acknowledging the season of
darkness, we know it is time to light the candles, to sow a seed of
light that can sprout and spring forth later in the year.
Seen this way, Hanukkah can become a time for accepting both the Maccabee
and the Rabbi within us, and a resource to help us experience our
moments of darkness whenever they occur throughout the year and strike
new sparks.
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From:
Seasons of Our Joy: A Celebration of Modern Jewish Renewal,
Beacon Press, 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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Rabbi
Waskow is a Pathfinder of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal and
the author of a number of works of Jewish renewal, including Godwrestling
Round 2 (Jewish Lights Publ., Woodstock, VT) and Down-to-Earth
Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, & the Rest of Life (Wm. Morrow).
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