The Trouble with Hanukkah

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

December 5, 2010

 

Reading

Rabbi Michael Lerner, Jewish Renewal, “Jewish Holidays:  Chanukah”, pp. 371-377 passim.

 

CHANUKAH

From the moment that the Greeks took over Judea in 320 B.C.E., there were Jews who felt that the best strategy of survival was to cuddle up to the Greeks and adopt their ways….  Forcibly dragged into the larger Mediterranean world, many Jews could see that the "real" world was dominated by wealth and power…. It was apparent to [some elite] Jews that their tribal religion would have little meaning to those who had conquered the world. The religion of their fathers and mothers seemed irrelevant in a world reshaped by the "modern realities" of science, and they were allured by a society that worshipped the body and defined reality in terms [the Greeks promoted] – what could be tasted, touched, and directly experienced by the senses….

[But the vast majority of] Jews resented foreign rule and detested the city-dwelling elites who seemed to be earning favor with the [Greek] conquerors, imitating their ways, abandoning the religion of the past….

[An especially cruel ruler came to power in 175 B.C.E.] and attempted to impose [Greek] culture by force. He ordered sacrifice to the Greek gods in the Temple in Jerusalem and forbade the practice of circumcision, kashrut, and observance of Shabbat….

[The elites believed it would be pointless to fight the Greeks, but] the Maccabees, leaders of the [common…] people [who felt committed by their religion to rebel].… [They] understood Judaism as teaching that "not by power, and not by might, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts."

To fight against superior military force was totally illogical and unrealistic from the Greek’s standpoint. But the Maccabees drew upon the Jewish religion and the stubborn spirit of a people who had come to believe that every human being is created in the divine image, hence has a right to be treated with respect and decency…. [They remembered] their origins in a slave rebellion against [the Pharaoh of Egypt, also] thought to be invincible.

Armed with these stories, the Maccabees and their followers used guerrilla tactics to win a national liberation struggle against overwhelming odds…. They retook Jerusalem, purified and rededicated the Temple (Chanukah means rededication), and rekindled the eternal light. The fighting continued many more years, but eventually the Maccabees … set up an independent Jewish state….

[The heart of the] Jewish sensibility was its refusal to accommodate to a world of oppression, its insistence that what is could be transformed and ought to be transformed….

The rabbis who shaped Rabbinic Judaism [after the time of Jesus] were depressed about the high cost of [later] failed Jewish rebellions against Rome….  Frightened that the Chanukah story might inspire more of these rebellions, these rabbis at first resisted popular celebrations of the victory, then later tried to redirect those stories by focusing on a legend of a miracle of a pot of oil that kept the Temple's menorah burning for eight nights. By downplaying the importance of the struggle, they reframed the miracle as merely a "religious" event. But the Jewish people knew intuitively that something really miraculous had happened in the political struggle.

[Rabbi Lerner concludes that] The miracle was this: a critical mass of people had come to recognize that there is a Force in the world that made possible the transformation of what is to what ought to be. It had given them courage to fight against insuperable odds, and then to triumph. Here was [the beginning of the] knowledge that when large numbers of people become aware of God's presence in the universe in this sense, that recognition in part becomes a manifestation of God's presence, and in that presence "the power of the people" becomes greater than all the technology and manipulations of the most sophisticated forms of oppression.

Sermon

The storyline of Hanukkah is quite simple.  As outlined by Rabbi Lerner and repeated year after year, it tells of how the Jewish people were dominated and oppressed by their Greek rulers, one of whom attempted even to wipe out the religious traditions inherited from generations – practices such as avoiding pork and keeping kosher, of teaching Torah, worshipping a God of whom no idols could be made, and circumcising all young boys.  A tiny band of guerrilla fighters rose up against this oppression and, against all odds, defeated the overwhelming might of their enemy.  When they had recaptured the temple, cleansed it of foreign idols and desecrations and turned to the task of rededicating it to their God  -- Hanukkah means to dedicate – they found that they had only enough oil to light the eternal flame in the temple for one day but would need eight days to prepare more oil in the prescribed manner.  Somehow the flame lasted for eight days until new oil could be consecrated, and this miracle sealed their triumph over the enemies who had attempted to destroy their religion and themselves as a unique and chosen people.

It’s a wonderful and inspiring story and worthy of being repeated each year.  When we begin to peel off some of the details, though, we begin to discover that the heroic tale has some defects.  One of the troubles with the story of Hanukkah is that we are led to believe that the rebels – the Maccabees, as they became known after the name of their leader – were simple religious people who were motivated by love of their traditions and of God.  As it turns out, the rebels were more like one group of the priestly elite who had been displaced by another group that was more willing to collaborate with the foreign rulers of the land.  When they had defeated their opponents, they set themselves up as rulers and proved to be as corrupt and incompetent as their predecessors; somehow their righteous triumph turned into a pursuit of power, thus undermining their claim to represent the interests of their religious faith and their people.  Nevertheless, the miracle of liberation and the story of the triumph of good over evil became deeply rooted among the people and was celebrated year after year as a holiday of its own – a holiday which had originated in the desire to celebrate the feast of Succoth, a harvest festival of eight days celebrated in open-air booths as a reminder of the hardships of the journey in the wilderness from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land of Israel many centuries before.

As the years went by, the story of triumph and miracle remembered each year at Hanukkah inspired new revolts against new rulers – the Romans this time.  The first revolt, the Jewish War fought between 66 and 70 of the Common Era – about 30 years after Jesus was crucified – resulted in the utter destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the devastation of the Jewish people.  Sixty years later Simon Bar Kochba emerged to lead a new revolt against the Romans.  He was acclaimed by some of the Rabbis –the leaders of the Jewish people known in the New Testament as Pharisees – as the Messiah, a leader who would crush the enemies of the people as had King David a thousand years before.  This revolt, too, was put down by the Romans at a terrible price; this time Jews were forbidden to set foot in Jerusalem at all except on one day of the year when they were permitted to mourn the destruction of their temple.

By this time it was clear that revolts against the Romans were fruitless, and that the glorification of the guerrilla war of the brave Maccabees against their enemies was promoting destruction rather than liberation.  The Jewish people were so fond of Hanukkah that Rabbis were unable to suppress the celebration and instead started telling the story in a new way, focusing not so much on the guerrilla war which only brought new oppressors into power but instead on the miracle at the end of the story, the miracle by which God caused one day’s oil to last for eight days so that worship in the temple could be resumed in the manner prescribed by the Law of Moses.

It was this new understanding of the story that gave rise to the Menorah as a centerpiece of the holiday, and to this day the miracle of those eight days is remembered by the eight candles of the Menorah – plus the shamash, which stands above the other candles and is used to light them each day.  The Rabbis instructed that this symbol of miraculous redemption and of light in the darkness was to be placed in the window of the home so that all who passed by could see its light.  In this way the miracle is always remembered, and in this way new miracles may sometimes occur, miracles like the appearance of the squire in our time for all ages, an appearance which brought both wealth and healing to a destitute family.

Here’s another such story, also told by Isaac Bashevis Singer in his Hanukkah collection called The Power of Light:

During World War II, after the Nazis had bombed and burned the Warsaw ghetto, a boy and a girl were hiding in one of the ruins—David, fourteen years old, and Rebecca, thirteen.

It was winter and bitter cold outside….  Every few days David would go out to search for food. All the stores had been destroyed in the bombing, and David sometimes found stale bread, cans of food, or what­ever else had been buried….

[One night David finally returned from his foraging with a feast and a surprise.  When they finished their feast, Rebecca asked ] "What is the surprise?"

"Rebecca, today is the first day of Hanukkah, and I found a candle and some matches."

"Hanukkah tonight?"

"Yes."

"Oh, how wonderful!"

[David lit a match lighted the candle, and] pronounced the benediction over the Hanukkah candle, and Rebecca said, "Amen." They had both lost their families, and they had good reason to be angry with God for sending them so many afflictions, but the light of the candle brought peace into their souls. That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left….

Somewhere in the forest there were young men and women called partisans who fought the Nazi invaders. David wanted to reach them. Now, by the light of the Hanukkah candle, [they] felt renewed courage.

David and Rebecca were soon on their way through the ruins. They came to passages so narrow they had to crawl on hands and knees. But the food they had eaten, and the joy the Hanukkah candle had awakened in them, gave them the courage to continue….

Many miracles seemed to happen that Hanukkah night. Because the Nazis were afraid of enemy planes, they had ordered a complete blackout. Because of the bitter cold, there were fewer Gestapo guards. David and Rebecca managed to leave the sewer and steal out of the city without being caught. [After a week they found the partisans….]  It was the last day of Hanukkah, and that evening the partisans lit eight candles. Some of them played dreidel on the stump of an oak tree while others kept watch.

From the day David and Rebecca met the partisans, their life became like a tale in a storybook. They joined more and more refugees who all had but one desire—to settle in the land of Israel…. [After a long and dangerous journey, they got on a small Haganah boat at the seashore of Nazi occupied Yugoslavia.]

[Despite the dangers on the small boat, strafing from Nazi planes, and the risk of submarine attacks, they all survived.] There was nothing the refugees could do besides pray to God, and this time God seemed to hear their prayers, because they managed to land safely.

The Jews of Israel greeted them with a love that made them forget their suffering. They were the first refugees who had reached the Holy Land, and they were offered all the help and comfort that could be given….  When Rebecca was eighteen, she and David were married.

[The author concludes:]  I know all this because David and Rebecca told me their story one Hanukkah evening….  The Hanukkah candles were burning, and Rebecca was frying potato pancakes served with apple­sauce for all of us. David and I were playing dreidel with their little son, Menahem Eliezer, named after both of his grandfathers. David told me that this large wooden dreidel was the same one the partisans had played with on that Hanukkah evening in the forest in Poland. Rebecca said to me, "If it had not been for that little candle David brought to our hiding place, we wouldn't be sitting here today. That glimmer of light awakened in us a hope and strength we didn't know we possessed. We'll give the dreidel to Menahem Eliezer when he is old enough to understand what we went through and how miraculously we were saved."[i]

Another trouble with Hanukkah is something that began happening in the United States in the 1950’s.  Jewish children began noticing that all of their Christian friends were getting lots of gifts for Christmas and they were left out.  So the tradition of giving tiny gifts each night of Hanukkah became, in some families, an opportunity for bigger gifts; and now Jewish children could feel that they were even better off than their Christian friends – because they got gifts on eight nights and not just on Christmas Eve!  But in this way, the same sort of commercialism that distracts from the real meaning of Christmas also obscures some of the real meaning of Hanukkah.

As Unitarian Universalists, we remember and celebrate stories of Hanukkah because they remind us in particular of the need for religious tolerance in our world, a commitment we express in our fourth principle, to “affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”  In this way we come to understand that the true miracle of Hanukkah is the inspiration it gives us to persevere even when circumstances seem hopeless, to understand that light shines through even the deepest darkness, and that grace and redemption may be awaiting us just around the next corner.

I’m reminded of a line from a Leonard Cohen song:  “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget about your perfect offering; there is a crack, a crack in everything:  that’s how the light gets in.”

So let us remember, so let us celebrate.

Amen

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