The True Meaning of Hannukah
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To celebrate Hannukah, you invite a few friends over on a dark night, light candles together, sing, eat some fried food, and spin toy tops while gambling for coin-shaped chocolates. It’s about as easy as holidays get, and it’s easy to understand why it’s so popular.
Sooner or later, though, some jerk will spoil your fun by asking what the holiday’s supposed to be *about*. The question of how to celebrate Hannukah is easy. The question of why we celebrate Hannukah is much harder.
The standard answer, at least in America since the 1960s or so, is that Hannukah is a celebration of religious freedom and ethnic diversity. The Maccabees, a group of pious Jews living in the wreckage of Alexander the Great’s empire, successfully rebelled against an evil Greek king’s attempt to make everybody else eat, exercise, and pray the same way he did, and so modern Jews set aside a few nights each winter to remember their heroic defense of minority rights.
The standard answer is, to put it mildly, revisionist propaganda. Like the Pilgrims of colonial Boston, the Maccabees were almost exclusively concerned with their own religious freedom. They had no interest in protecting other people’s right to liberty. On the contrary, they forcibly circumcised entire villages, tore down pagan temples, and killed civilians for the crime of being too culturally assimilated. They ambushed a wedding party and killed all of the guests. They repeatedly burned down the homes of their enemies and looted the countryside. Then they publicly celebrated their accomplishments.
Perhaps because they were embarrassed by this history, the Talmudic rabbis who lived a few hundred years after the events of Hannukah tried to re-focus attention away from the battles, and onto a “miracle of lights.” Supposedly, when the Maccabees finished liberating the Great Temple in Jerusalem from the Greeks, they could only find enough oil to light the Temple for one night, which was frustrating, because they wanted to hold a week-long celebration. Miraculously, their tiny flask of oil kept burning for eight nights, so the celebration was able to proceed as planned. On this theory, we light candles on Hannukah not so much to celebrate any particular battle or political theory, but simply to draw inspiration from the way people manage to carry on under what looks like impossibly difficult circumstances.
What bothers me about this story is that the Maccabees actually had plenty of oil — they just didn’t trust it. Most of the oil was in un-sealed jars, and might have been used by the Greeks. Maybe somebody used some of that oil to offer a prayer to Jupiter, or to fry some bacon. There was only one flask of oil that was still sealed with the stamp of the High Priest. The remaining oil was unclean; unfit for use in a Jewish celebration.
I can kind of sympathize with the impulse to get fresh oil. If you’re having an important party, you want to break out the nice silverware, not re-use the same leftover paper towels from Taco Tuesday. Sometimes I wonder, though: why couldn’t they just get some more oil from the neighboring olive orchards? Even today, olive trees grow wild only two miles from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Olives are in season in December, and can be pressed into oil in just a few hours. If you need more oil to keep your party going, why not pick a few olives, squeeze them into a lamp, and bring them back to the Temple?
Maybe one of you, reading this, will have an answer for me. All I can think of, though, is that the Maccabees were a bunch of religious zealots who didn’t trust anyone but the High Priest to make their oil for them. It didn’t matter how fresh the oil was; if it didn’t have the right seal on it, it was worthless. Perhaps the priestly class even had a lucrative monopoly over ritual olive oil production that the Maccabees wanted to help protect — the Maccabees were, after all, rather famously led by a priestly family.
So, while I enjoy lighting candles, I have trouble getting too worked up about their supposed message of faith and perseverance. For me, the candles also symbolize my ancestors’ petty, stubborn refusal to make use of the resources all around them.
What’s left? Playing dreidel? It’s a fun game, originally invented by Jewish mercenaries who got bored during guard duty, and later adopted by medieval Jewish school boards to help fund their local elementary schools. I can spin a dreidel upside-down, or off the back of my own shoulder, but it doesn’t inspire me to want to celebrate an entire holiday.
But I find that I don’t want to give it up, either. I’m not particularly proud of the Maccabees, but I’m not exactly ashamed of them, either. They had the courage to fight for what they believed in at a time when many people found it easier to sit still and do what they were told. The Maccabees did not start the fighting in ancient Israel — they really were content to let other Jews study Homer and work out at gymnasiums. The Maccabees took up arms because the government tried to make it a crime for them to practice their religion, and because neighboring states invaded Jerusalem and tried to kill the Jews.
While using those arms, the Maccabees did many things that strike me as excessive or brutal. But in a guerilla-based civil war like the ones the Maccabees had to fight, many people are brutalized. It’s difficult to trust people. Even if you know that your neighbors are sympathetic to you, can you trust them not to betray your location when an enemy army moves in and starts torturing them for information? How many years can you go on fighting and killing before it starts to feel normal? The Maccabees were at war for at least eight years, with no scheduled rotations of R&R. If I were in the Maccabees’ situation, I’m not at all sure that I would have done any better.
At the moment, for me, the True Meaning of Hannukah (tm) is all about acknowledging these kinds of complexities. When two cultures collide, there’s a tendency for people to pick a side, lionize its heroes, and demonize its opponents. But even when demonizing the other side is fair, it’s very rarely productive. Trying to stamp out someone else’s culture just breeds resentment and revolt. Real cultural change is much more likely to take place when you invite people over to share your joy. This is, perhaps, the message of the prophet Zechariah, inventor of the menorah, who said, “Not by might / not by power / but by spirit alone…”
And it is certainly the message of Debbie Friedman, who like a good Jew, finished Zechariah’s sentence for him: “Not by might / not by power / but by spirit alone, shall we all live in peace.”
So, this Hannukah, I remember the people who fought and died so that I could be free to practice my religion. I remember the people who they killed, sometimes because there was no other choice, and sometimes as an act of cruelty. I remember the hope that we can end the cycle of violent retribution. And, finally, I remember to make time for the simple joys of Hannukah —lighting candles, spinning dreidels, frying potato pancakes. To paraphrase Salahadin from Kingdom of Heaven: the specific rituals of Hannukah are worth almost nothing, but the chance to practice them in peace, according to the lights of my own culture? That is worth everything.