A
legend
When
Adam saw the day gradually diminishing, he said, "Woe is me! Perhaps
because I acted offensively, the world around me is growing darker and
darker, and is about to return to chaos and confusion, and this is the
death Heaven has decreed for me." He then sat eight days in fast
and prayer. But when the winter solstice arrived, and he saw the days
getting gradually longer, he said, "Such is the way of the world"
and proceeded to observe eight days of festivity.
Hanukkah
and the winter solstice
There is a great deal of evidence that in much of the eastern Mediterranean
and the Middle East, the winter solstice was a time for imploring the
sunlight to return and for celebrating its readiness to do so. The Romans
celebrated the 25th of December as the birthday of the Unconquerable
Sun, while the Persians lit great bonfires and sent out birds bearing
torches of dried grass, at the time of the winter solstice.
It has been surmised that Antiochus and the Syrian Greeks may have consciously
chosen the 25th of Kislev (in 169 BCE) — the
time of the winter solstice — to commence
their idolatrous worship in the Temple, as it coincided with a pagan
solstice festival. According to this line of thinking, the Maccabees,
by adopting the 25th of Kislev as the day of rededication (in 166 BCE),
were claiming victory over a pagan solstice festival that had won wide
support among partially Hellenized Jews. They were rededicating not
only the Temple, but the day itself, to Jewish holiness. The lighting
of candles, then, was perhaps a readaption of pagan custom in a Jewish
context.
|
|
From
Arthur Waskow, Seasons of our Joy: A Celebration of Modern
Jewish Renewal. Bantam Books, 1982. Reprinted by permission
of the author.
 Legend:
Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zorah 8a; English translation: The
Book of Legends, Schocken Books, 1992. Reprinted by permission
of the publisher.
|
