A Hannukah Thought

Now that Hannukah is here, it would be appropriate to share a thought or two.

Hannukah is an interesting holiday in that the symbols we celebrate really have very little to do with the holiday itself.  (For a wonderful history of Hannukah, click here).  In fact, this is the only holiday where the Talmud itself asks the reason for its existence.  From a terrible civil war and a war against oppression to a celebration with a menorah and latkes is quite a stretch.  What's going on?

Very simply we are seeing the rabbinic mind at work.  The celebration of Hannukah was transformed into a celebration of religious freedom and its warlike and violent chapters were subsumed under the layer of a necessary evil, but evil nonetheless.  As a result, the violence is referred to, to be sure, but only in the context of seeking religious freedoms.  In other words, the values of the rabbis - values that extol mitzvot and service to God, adherence to Torah and the freedom to be Jewish - overtook and diluted the history of the confict.  Indeed, what we are celebrating is not so much a holiday which commemorates the repurification of the Temple but rather the ultimate success of the rabbinic molding of Judaism.  It is a molding of Judaism without which Judaism would never have survived.

How we Jews endure from generation and how we adapt ourselves while staying true to our core is what the celebration of Hannukah is all about.  Today, we have the same challenges.  How do we stay true to what being Jewish is all about? How do we live Torah - and ancient document - with the demands of the 21st Century?  How does our diet express who we are?  How does our ethical life express what we believe?  Do we stand up for injustice and Jewish rights when it is either inconvenient or even dangerous?  There are a thousand more questions like this.  And that is what the Hannukah story is really all about.

The cleansing of the Temple and the defeat of the Greeks is a high point and something to celebrate.  But the real story of Hannukah is how we recovered from the terrible excesses and corruption of the Hasomoneans and the priesthood and how we as a people never threw in the towel.  That is a lesson worth celebrating and worth learning.