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Chanukkah Revisited: Not Letting the Light Go Out

December 14, 2007

So, I know we just did 8 nights of it, but will the real Chanukkah story please stand up? As kids, we started out learning the fantastical story from the Talmud. When the Maccabees entered the defiled Temple to rededicate it, there was only one jar of oil with the priestly seal on it that could be used to kindle the eternal light. But a miracle happened. That one jar lasted eight days, just enough time for fresh oil to be produced. And so each year, we remember that miracle by spending eight nights lighting candles on our Chanukkah menorahs. But when we grew up, we may have discovered that there actually is a Book of the Maccabees, and that book tells a very different story.

There we read that after the Maccabees defeated the Syrians the Jews of the time celebrated by carrying lulavim and etrogim, reciting Hallel for eight days. So, the first Chanukkah may have been a Sukkot make-up day, and for years after, an occasion to remember winning the war. And then in a history class along the way, we may have come across Josephus’ History of the Jews which contains an account of an extravagant, eight night long Temple celebration of the success of Judah Maccabee who, two hundred and thirty five years before Josephus, restored the sacrificial cult after defeating the Syrians. Josephus reports that in his time, the holiday was called the “Festival of Lights,” he assumed because the right to worship appeared at a time when the Jews hardly dared hope for it. And we may have been surprised to learn that Josephus also mentions nothing about oil or miracles. Religions of his time spent the darkest days of winter lighting candles hoping for the light of spring to return. Josephus naturally connects that universal hope to the victory of the Maccabees.

To make matters even more confusing, in that same history class, we may have learned that the Chanukkah war may not have been as much a war of the Jews against the tyrannical Syrian Antiochus Epiphanes, but actually a violent internal struggle between two very different kinds of Jews. A hundred years before Judah Maccabee, Jews had been exposed to Hellenistic Greek culture- its philosophy, its literature and its impressive technology and power. And the Jews who dwelled in the big cities saw an opportunity to join the larger world of wealth and power by becoming merchants and traders or by establishing political and economic relationships with these Hellenistic folks. To those Jews, the tribal religion of their forefathers seemed antiquated in the emerging modernity they were experiencing. The other, vast majority, group of Jews were farmers in the country, only venturing into the city of Jerusalem three times a year at the pilgrimage festivals. In contrast to their city dwelling merchant cousins, these Jews resented foreign rule because they bore the brunt of the taxes imposed by the foreigners. Even more, the country folk Jews resented their brethren who cozied up to the Hellenizers and were adopting some of their idolatrous ways. The peasant Jews refused to submit to the rule of imperialists because God was the real power of the universe, and God rejected human oppression. They knew the story of the Exodus from Egypt very well, and for them it was a story about a slave rebellion against another imperialist power thought to be invincible, Egypt of the Pharaohs.

The Maccabees belonged to this anti-Syrian group and when Antiochus attempted to force these rural Jews to Hellenize, the Maccabees, armed with their faith in a God who rejected human oppression and with their stories from Torah about Jews winning a slave rebellion against impossible odds, they went to war against Antiochus and they won.

Enter the Rabbis, who lived under Roman rule, shaped rabbinic Judaism and created the story of the oil, the one with which we started. And the question is, why? Why didn’t they perpetuate Josephus’ version of the Jewish people’s hope being restored in the darkest of hours? Why didn’t they pick up on the Book of Maccabees’ account of an unlikely but glorious military success of a small band of guerilla warriors against the forces of a great empire?

After all, these Rabbis knew first hand about living under the rule of tyranny. The Romans ruled with a very heavy hand. And these Rabbis witnessed many failed rebellions. So instead of building up Chanukkah’s message of faith based nationalism, they conservatively chose to reframe it. To the rabbis in Babylonia who were afraid that their young people might foment rebellion in their time, the military victory of the Maccabees was a real problem. So the Rabbis just changed the story by creating miracle of the oil. In their telling, Chanukkah was about God creating a miracle in the Temple so that Jewish life and light would survive. No military might, no force, no rebellion.

Fast forward now to the present day. And let’s you and I ask, as the Rabbis asked 2000 years ago, Mai Chanukkah? What is Chanukkah?

Which version of our history and what message of this festival speaks to us about the realities of today?

David Brooks recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece that 65% of Americans are satisfied overall with their own lives, one of the highest rates of personal satisfaction in the world. 86%, of Americans say they are content with their jobs. 76% say they are satisfied with their family income. And 62% expect their personal situation to get better over the next five years. We Jews, in particular, enjoy extraordinary sustained freedom and security in this country. But that doesn’t mean Americans have no worries, no darkness to dispel.

Our homes might be bigger than our parents’ homes and we might own more cars and feel more affluent, but terrorism, rising health care costs, growing public debt, global warming the energy crisis, the rise of India and China as competing economic powers loom before us to disturb our peace. And to compound these macro-threats to our personal contentedness, 68% of us feel our country is on the wrong track in addressing the problems. 62% believe government is only capable of inefficiency and waste. And 60% believe the next generation, our children, will be worse off than we. Believe it or not, we are more pessimistic about government’s ability to solve problems than we were in 1974 at the height of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.

And for the Jewish people, the freedoms this country have afforded us have been a double edged sword, affording many Jews the opportunity to cling to the rich traditions of our ancestors in the spirit of the Maccabees and others to abandon our faith as a relic of the past, as did many Hellenistic Jews.

From stage left, let’s bring in Chanukkah. Not the materialistic Chanukkah that gets displayed next to materialistic Christmas. The “religion of stuff” is irrelevant. I am talking about Josephus’ Chanukkah, when we hope despite the cold and the dark, even when it seems we dare not hope. I am talking about Chanukkah, our Festival of Lights, when we are commanded to kindle light even in our darkness.

And from the later Rabbis we learn that it is not enough to kindle light just to make our own homes feel good and warm and secure. Chanukkah teaches us that the menorah has to sit in the window to shed that light outside our home for all to see the hope and the miracle which is possible. And to remind us of what is possible for us to do to make more light shine in our world. If we are content with our personal lives but despair the problems of the world, Chanukkah comes like a shooting star on a dark night sky to remind us to keep fighting for what we believe in. Like the Jews of the history books who succumbed to Hellenization as the way to deal with their reality, it would be a modern day Hellenism to simply accept what is and not commit to what ought to be because we fear our visions are unattainable.

In this spirit, Chanukkah should remind us not to accept the things that oppress our world, but to remember our Torah’s injunction to seek justice, tzedek, tzedek, tirdof. Our survival as Jews and the survival of the planet depend on our ability to create a world of love and caring, a world of peace and justice, a world in which every human being is treated as an embodiment of the spirit of God, and where the resources God gave are used wisely and are available to all. Antiochus, the villain of Chanukkah, called himself Antiochus Epiphanes, God manifest. That he was God, that was exactly the opposite of what Judaism affirmed. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that what made idolatry so abhorrent in our faith was that only human beings, created in the image of God, could be worthy imitations of God. Not a statue. Not an engraving. And not one single man. Every human being is a reflection of the divine. And only when every human being is honored and given dignity in this world does the battle of Chanukkah end. No one can say this message is antiquated or irrelevant for our times.

And yet, there have been and there will be times when our hope seems to be running out that we, a small remnant of the Jews who have survived all these centuries, can be agents to achieve this vision. At such times we can call to mind a Chasidic teaching about the Talmudic Rabbis’ miracle of the oil. The Maccabees found only enough pure oil for one day and it lasted for eight days. And so they established a festival of Chanukkah for eight days, and each day kindling a light to commemorate the miracle of that day.

The Sefat Emet noticed that God’s miracle was only seven days, the Maccabees’ miracle was lighting that one day’s supply knowing it wouldn’t be enough. The one day’s worth of oil lasted eight because there are always spiritual reserves untapped within each of us. There are times in our lives we feel there isn’t enough fuel within to pull us through our trials: sickness, unemployment, the adolescence of our children, economic distress. We may think we are going to run out of gas. And then we discover there are deep reserves inside of us, to fight another day, to keep moving forward, to rebuild what has been broken. Sefat Emet knew what you and I know: that the miracle of the oil represents the miracle of what God put within us: the strength, the faith, the hope that we can do more and make things better in our lives and in our families and in our world. All of these messages should continue to speak to us, even now that we have cleaned the wax off our chanukkiot and put our driedels away until next year. The message that when we are apparently powerless we can at times defeat mighty adversaries, the message of rebelling against oppression and degradation of human dignity, and the message of hoping even when it seems the world gives no reason to hope. For 53 years, Temple Emanuel has sought to find ways of inspiring Jews to keep being a light to the nations and to bring these messages to the world. To keep our homes warm with the traditions of our people and to spread the light of Torah and holiness to the neighborhoods, communities and world in which we dwell. If there is anything at all that we Jews stand for, it is finding the ways to keep the hope of a better world as a bright vision before our eyes. If there is anything at all that we seek, it is to better know the stories that speak to our reality today, and teach us to hold fast to our most important ideals and to act on them. It is here in this synagogue and together that we seek not some new light, not some new miracle, but to unlock those vast reserves of energy and hope, just as the Maccabees unlocked their reserves in centuries past. The Maccabees transformed Judaism in their day. They fought for freedom and dignity and faith. In our day, we have much to fight for. All we have to do is reach into that reservoir of Jewish hope in the depths of our own hopeful spirits and move forward together. Kein Yehi rezonenu, may we have the will, the spirit to do so.

Amen.


Rabbi Batsheva Meiri