December 2009

Rabbi Janice Garfunkel

The meaning of Chanukah is:

a) A commemoration of the first fight for religious freedom.

b) That one day’s worth of oil lasted for eight days and nights, showing us that God does miracles.

c) That the few won against the many, the weak against the mighty, demonstrating that God does miracles, and that God will help the weak against the powerful.

d) A commemoration of the first fight against assimilation; it was primarily a civil war between Jews who wanted to assimilate into Greek ways versus Jews who wanted to keep Judaism alive despite the overwhelming power and attraction of the dominant culture.

e) A festival pagan in origin in which lights are lighted at the darkest time of the year in the hopes of coaxing the sun to return.

f) A minor Jewish festival elevated to a decorating, gift-giving extravaganza so we won’t feel left out of all the Christmas hype.

g) All of the above, plus more!

The answer, of course, is g, all of the above.

As an undergraduate, I was a history major with a special interest in historiography, which is the study of how we interpret history.

Chanukah is a prime example of how facts remain the same, but our understanding of those facts — the spin we put on them — changes significantly depending on what is going on in our own lives at the time.

When I was a child growing up in Dayton, I was taught that Chanukah was the first fight for religious freedom.

My teachers were still of the generation that felt an unstated need to prove that we were really Americans.

America is all about religious freedom, along with other individual freedoms. We American Jews celebrated Chanukah as a pre-cursor of U.S.-style democracy.

Our ancestors just wanted to be free to observe their faith unmolested by foreign rulers, much like the Christian Pilgrims who came to America escaped the religious persecution they experienced in Europe.

The Pilgrims, the Maccabees, we were all the same: small groups making a stand so that we could practice our faith quietly, unmolested by tyranny.

At the same time, halfway around the world in Israel, Chanukah was being lifted up as the celebration of the weak against the strong, the few against the many. Israelis saw themselves as modern-day Maccabees.

Just as our ancestors fought the huge and unstoppable Greek army (foreigners on our native soil) and won, so would the Israel Defense Forces in the 20th century succeed against multiple armies of attacking Arab nations (foreigners on our native soil), despite their being better armed, wealthier, and much greater in number.

As the modern Israeli Chanukah song Mi Yimalel puts it, “Who can retell the mighty acts of Israel, who can count them? In every generation a hero will arise to redeem the nation. Back then it was the Maccabees who saved; today all the nation of Israel will unite, arise to be saved!”

The song emphasizes the saving actions of fighters, not God. It is up to all of us as a people to save ourselves.

In recent years, historians have “discovered” that in the years leading up to the Maccabean revolt, many Jews embraced the Hellenization (“Greekification”) of Israel.

After all, the Greeks were enormously successful, having conquered the “civilized” world. Greek was the lingua franca, the common language of the day, certainly spoken by the elite.

Jews Hellenized their names from “Joshua” to “Jason,” “Elisheva” to “Alexandra.”

Greek culture completely dominated. There are even true stories of men undergoing painful procedures in an attempt to make it look like they had not been circumcised, so that they could participate in athletics (which were done naked) or go to the public baths.

The Maccabees didn’t only fight the tyrant Antiochus, but also all those Hellenizing Jews who believed that an antiquated and outdated Judaism needed to give way to Greek culture, which they saw as more powerful, more modern, and superior to Jewish culture.

Of course, one of our biggest challenges today is maintaining pride in our own Jewish religion and culture in the face of an overwhelmingly dominant culture.

At no time of the year do we feel the sense of being different as much as we do in December, when Christmas music, decorations, greetings, and parties seem to inundate the very air we breathe.

So we are now drawn to aspects of the story that speak to our own struggles to maintain our identity in the face of powerful temptations to assimilate and be swallowed up in a culture that can seem more successful than our own.

The meanings we find in the Chanukah story change from generation to generation, depending on the environment and the times in which we live.

While I, personally, do not believe in the miracle of the oil, which was first recorded only in the Talmud many centuries after the Hasmonean war, the rest of the story of Chanukah was a genuine historical event.

That this minor festival endures and thrives and is so variously interpreted is testament to the richness and beauty of this story of a tiny people who, with God’s help, successfully fought against a much larger culture and army in order to preserve itself, its Holy Temple, and its right to connect with the Divine in its own land, in its own ways.

May the day come soon when all are free to connect with the Holy One in peace in their own land, in his or her own way, each sitting under his vine and under her fig tree, with none to make them afraid.