Hannukah in Historical Context
[This essay is elaborated from a column I published in the Metro West Daily News in December 1996 and, in revised form in The Outpost in January 1997. It is even more timely now and its message merits expansion. A fuller version is posted in the December 2006 archive. Years fly; truth remains].
Hanukkah is the supreme holy day: light in the darkness; the triumph of Judaism and the loving, long-suffering Jewish people after millennia of slaughter and persecution. Courage, victory, sovereignty, Torah and light held within each family till it can fill the world…
There will be nothing without victory: liberation, service, endurance, faith must culminate in victory to be complete. G-d is not a magician; He requires us to complete His work and draw close to Him. Faith is proved in deeds; Joshua completes Moshe.
Hanukkah is a joyous re-dedication of worship, purity and national integrity. Like all Jewish holy days it is a memorial (tziyun from tZion), it commemorates a refusal to bend the knee to state power and concludes with a miracle achieved through active faith.
It also is relevant that the original triumph memorialized by Hanukkah did not, in the historical sweep of things, have staying power. The battle between a Torah state and those who follow the international cult of the body, of force, fraud and sexual extravaganzas still rages, and a blend of fidelity, courage and faith is needed to save the land — and world again. So when we light the candles and again sing the blessings, “in those days, at this season” the substance of the wonders, battles, victories and need for salvation of Hanukkah is greatly with us.
The bridge of peace, shalom linking heaven and earth must be reflected back to heaven in our deeds, proof of our gratitude and refinement, and it can only be forged and arise from the midst of shaleim, the integrity of Israel which is inseparable with its victory and eternity, synonyms for the Creator.
The Book of Maccabees begins by glancing at the ascension of Alexander whom the world calls “The Great.” But the children of Israel had a different perspective: “he traversed the earth to its remotest bounds, and plundered countless nations” the text reads, as if critiquing the principles set out three centuries earlier by Pericles in his “Funeral Oration” for the Athenian dead: “our adventurous spirit has forced a way into every land.” Indeed, as the text states of Alexander, “His pride knew no limits.”
“And then,” the text adds, “he died,” dryly making the oldest point in the book, that mortal pride is ridiculous. The problem was that Alexander bequeathed his pagan empire to kings “who brought untold miseries upon the world,” the winged goat blazing a path for “the beast with iron teeth.” One of these predatory Hellenistic kings was Antiochus Epiphanes, ‘the incarnation’ one could loosely translate the Greek idea of his title, who became king at Antioch about 175 BCE in the historical land Aram that the Greeks in their imperial ignorance called “Syria.”
By that time the Jewish people, fighting many battles and taking many losses had survived many foreign empires and tyrants. Compared to Tiglath Pileser, Ashurbanipal, Nebuchadnezzar, or Shishak, Antiochus was small potatos. He was not the main problem but rather “a gang of renegade Jews who sought…to enact non-Jewish laws and customs. They built a sports stadium in the Greek style, repudiated the holy covenant and abandoned themselves to evil ways.” They sought to assimilate to a homogenized, secular super-State. They wanted peace in a “New Middle East.”
Antiochus backed this secularizing initiative (“yesterday’s gone”) and the habits to which it led. “He issued a decree: his subjects were all to become one people and abandon their own laws and religion.” It could have been the first world security state: highly managed entertainments and vulgairty. “Nations everywhere complied, as did many in Israel. Swine were slaughtered on the holy altar and “anyone in possession of a Book of the Covenant was put to death.” Prostitutes were housed in the Temple…
But in the town of Modi’in an old priest named Mattisyahu one day had enough. His battle cry was, “everyone who is zealous for the law and the covenant follow me!” For almost three years he led the Jews against the cultists of the body and the world State. When he died, his son Judah the Hammer led. The medieval Church considered Judah one of “the seven worthies of faith.” Writing in about 124 BCE, the authors of Maccabees put Judah in a line including Abraham, Joseph, Joshua, Caleb, David, Elijah and Daniel.
Like all those who worship their own power and have a glitzy new cult to sell it, Antiochus was outraged that a bunch of ragtag Jewish ‘extremists’ kept defeating his Greek machine. He assembled an immense force but found himself running a big monetary and popular deficit “as a result of the disaffection and violence he had brought upon the world by abolishing traditional laws and customs.”
But tyrants, whether in blue, green or bronze helmets know all about deficit-spending so Antiochus sent out his United Nations army complete with the high-tech weapon of that day, elephants. Praying for divine mercy, Judah unfurled a Torah scroll, sounded the shofar, led the Jews into battle against the Greeks and, as the text relates, “humbled their pride.” Nest year, he marched into Jerusalem, “restored the Temple, renewed the sacred vessels and menorah, burnt incense, lit the lamps, and set the loaves of bread for each tribe on the table. On the very day of the anniversary the gentiles had profaned it, the Temple was rededicated with hymns of thanksgiving” (the Hallel).
“And the entire congregation of Israel declared that the rededication should be observed with joy and gladness at the same season, each year for eight days.”
The gentiles and their Jewish allies fought twenty more years to install the Olympian cult complete with service to Aphrodite (two centuries later they did it, with Roman might). Long before then, the Hasmonean dynasty, having conquered began adopting Greek names and ways; the Romans backed the interloper Herod and put them out.
Today the west is a society in which creatures like Salome are icons and the cult of the body, of concupiscent and erotic fantasies seems to have triumphed utterly. The rainbow proscribes another flood; fire and bloody hail are on tap.
In small hill towns and outposts away from urban centers and omnipresent media and police, beautiful holy people of grace and integrity are going against the regression that is modernism. Perhaps folks are more and more studying the original social paradigm of Israel: a confederation of tribes linked by language, kinship, shared history and customs, led by distinguished elders and judges. No huge Federal apparatus, bureaucracy, national debt, taxes and foreign adventures; just a well-trained militia of citizen-patriots ready to assemble at a moment’s notice and keenly aware of the bond between patrimony and covenant. This is perhaps more risky than the method of the powers with their permanent warrior caste and many mercenaries; perhaps more durable for it inculcates habits of personal responsibility and brotherhood. In any case, it is a way to live rightly. And when one does this, and I have seen it in the center of the hills of the Land, one’s life is complete and fulfilled of days. The Victory of Israel is in these hills; that’s why the powers are desparate to uproot the Jews from there.
The Rambam, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (“Maimonides”) writes that for a Jew anywhere in the Promised Land (see “your boundary,” Deut. 11:24), war is obligatory (milchemet mitzvah) when non-Jews come to wage war against Israel, to steal land from them, to collect tax from them or enforce a decree upon them” (Camp David, Oslo, the Road Map do all of these). “No permission is required to undertake mandatory war.” And at such times, “a man should not think of his wife, his children, or his possessions but he must free his heart of everything and set himself to the battle. And more – he should think that the entire existence of Israel depends on him.” That emphasis on individual responsibility and a link to G-d that is personal and national is the essence of Judaism and everything best in the West. ”If a man is afraid and turns back, it is as if he spilled the blood of his comrades…any delay is considered part of the bloodshed” (Hilchot Melachim [“ways of kings”] 5-7:15). So “be strong and of good courage.”
What if we would re-dedicate ourselves to this ideal? Jews might even pray again on the Temple Mount opening the ‘gates’ to heaven activating the bridge of light to fill the world with integrity and peace. A happy Hanukkah it will be when this path to joy is more fully pursued and achieved. Israel, “the stone the builders” of various world security states “have despised [will] become the cornerstone”; the heavens will be glad and the earth will rejoice. The justice and righteousness of Jacob - Yeshurun will be in place and the world will yield its produce. “It will be wondrous in our eyes.” We will go to the water and bathe in the stream of healing light of Judah’s milk and wine.