• News & Politics
• Life & Action
• Faith & Practice
• Arts & Culture
• Media & Tech

Angetevka: Hannukah, O Chanukah!

• Email
• Print
• Share

There’s nothing simple about being a Jew, and Hannukah is a good case in point. How to spell it, with or without the “C”? And then, who can remember from year to year how you light the menorah, left to right, or right to left? Do you sing “Ma’oz Tzur” every night or just the first night, and if you do insist on singing it every night, does that mean you suffer from OCD, as my son accused my husband, who loves nothing more than a rousing chorus of Ma’oz Tzur? Potato latkes – cakey or crispy?

Then, there’s the question of gifts: one every night? How many nights does a really big gift count as? Are my kids just thinking about the gifts, or do they still recall the miracle behind the story of Hannukah? Do they believe it? Or, now that they are grown, have they chosen to interpret the victory of the small band of Maccabees over the Syrian empire as a story of Jew power - we kicked Seleucid ass? Is it a national or a spiritual holiday?

Taking a break from these plaguing questions, I go online to see if any celebrity has been caught with his or her pants down in the last 24 hours. Turns out the big news is not an update on health reform or the war in Afghanistan but Barack Obama’s downsized Chanukah party, which might just touch off a Jewish civil war not unlike the one at the core of Hannukah! Obama is cutting back the guest list, from former president Bush’s 800 invitees to a mere 400. Does this telegraph to the Jewish world that Obama is anti-Israel? Or is it really about the high cost of kosher food?

In other surprising Chanukah news, Senator Orrin Hatch, a Mormon Republican and a philo-Semite, has written a sweet and sincere Chanukah song called “Eight Days of Hanukkah.” It was recorded by Rasheeda Azar, a Syrian-American from Terre Haute, Indiana which, as the crow flies, is not very far from where I grew up. King Antiochus would roll in his grave if he knew a fellow Syrian was singing a song written by a Mormon on behalf of Jews.

In Israel, the Ben Yehuda Street “Nefesh b’Nefesh” Hanukkah Flash Mob is making the rounds. In downtown Jerusalem on a bright, November morning, a man calls out, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Nights” and another person in the crowd asks, “How many nights?” and next thing you know, there are about 100 people dancing in the street to a song, “Hanukkah, Hey Ya!”. They spin around a la dreidels, they do synchronized backstrokes and stay in well-choreographed step with one another as a bemused and amused crowd watches on.

It’s a pitch for making aliyah (immigration) to Israel and at the end of the video the message is “Make Aliyah in a ‘Flash’”… Because Hanukkah commemorates the restoration of the Jewish state in the second century BCE after 700 years under foreign rule, and because it recalls the victory of a few idealistic, uncompromising Jews over a superpower, the holiday is well-suited as propaganda to entice potential immigrants to return to the land that a mere 61 years ago was revived as an independent country for the first time since the Maccabean revolt.

But so far this year, my favorite Hanukkah story is from a friend in Jerusalem who forwarded me an article about a broken stele (an inscribed tablet). Inscribed in Greek and dating from 178 BCE, eleven years before the Maccabean revolt, the stele includes instructions from Seleucus IV to his chief minister, Heliodorus, to collect money from temples. Both Heliodorus, as well as the attempt to seize money from the Temple, are mentioned in the second book of Maccabees. One of the reasons I like the stele is because I like anything that’s been unearthed from long ago and bore witness to another world and another time. But the other reason is because there’s so much mythic stuff that’s been hung on Chanukah, it’s nice to hear a little something objective, and from the non-Jewish side, to place it firmly within uncontested history.

What we know for sure is that in the second century BCE in Israel, Jews were prohibited from practicing Judaism, and the Seleucids set up pagan altars and sacrificed swine in the Temple in Jerusalem. We know that there was a huge schism philosophically and politically that pitted the wealthy, urban and aristocratic Jews who were in favor of Hellenization against the Maccabees, who wanted to hold onto their traditional Jewish values and beliefs and firmly reject nude wrestling and Hellenized names like Jason that were much easier to pronounce than Mattiyahu. And we know that when the Jews finally got the Temple back under their control, they knocked down the pagan statues and purified and re-consecrated the Temple to God, which entailed lighting the candelabra for eight days as was originally done during Sukkot when the first Temple was built. What we really can’t know is whether the miracle of oil actually happened. The story, written several centuries after the events took place, goes that there was only one container of consecrated oil prepared and sealed by the High Priest, oil which should have lasted for one day, but it burned for eight days, the time needed to prepare more oil, and the time needed to complete the eight day re-dedication of the temple. Because of this, we eat oily foods on Chanukah. That’s quite a burden our potato latkes bear.

Chanukah represents both a national and a spiritual victory, and the symbols of Chanukah, oil and light, seem to reinforce that message. Oil doesn’t assimilate, it separates when mixed with other liquids; likewise, Jews have remained a separate people despite the many different types of “Hellenizations” we’ve encountered. With Chanukah candles still burning in our homes two thousand years later, our spiritual light has not been extinguished. The Temple is long gone, but light remains, for faith and spirituality need no physical edifice to survive.

Sometimes, the weak can overcome the mighty; the few can defeat the many. From this, I can logically reason that maybe a little bit of oil lasted many days.