Every few years, I feel compelled to point out that American Jews, experiencing Christmas envy, turned one of the most dynamic and relevant stories of the Jewish tradition into one of the most tedious and anesthetized holidays imaginable.
People are often surprised to learn that Hanukkah, popularly known as the “festival of lights,” features very little about lights or very little heavenly intervention. Indeed, Maccabees 1 and 2 are hyper-nationalistic texts, principally concerned with the patriarch Mattathias and his five sons, who rose against Antiochus, the Hellenic king who desecrated the Temple, banned Jewish rituals, and levied excessive taxes on the people.
When a messenger of the king travels to a village hoping to bribe clan leader Mattathias into making a sacrifice to the Greek gods, the old man refuses. Another Jew, hoping to calm down the situation, intercedes and volunteers to make the sacrifice instead. Well, Mattathias murders him on the spot and then kills the representative of the crown, for good measure. This sparks the revolt. The Maccabees, which does not mean “light” but “hammer,” conduct a protracted and bloody guerrilla war against the Hellenic and Jewish ruling elite.
Really, we should be handing children toy swords, not dreidels, which have as much to do with Hanukkah as Santa Claus does with the birth of Jesus.
Hanukkah, perhaps the only Jewish holiday that has been confirmed by the archaeological record, celebrates the singular, millennialong relationship between Jews and the land of Israel. It is the story of a civil and cultural struggle for sovereignty over its institutions. It is perhaps the most explicitly Zionist story in the Jewish tradition.
By the time the Maccabees rebellion broke out, Jerusalem had likely been a Jewish city for over 1,000 years. The reclamation of their historic homeland after being ruled by the Babylonians, Persians (the most tolerant of their rulers), and Greeks was a far bigger achievement than a one-day supply of oil lasting eight.
We can often take historical analogies only so far, but Hanukkah is also the story of a religiously devoted rural people rebelling against an urban government that intended to cleanse the masses of their backward belief system. The Jews, of course, are still around. The Zeus-worshipping Seleucids, not so much.
Now, quite understandably, a chronicle of a brutal civil war isn’t going to sell a lot of 65-inch televisions.
Take the story of the “woman with the seven sons,” found in the second book of Maccabees. In the tale, a mother and her sons are seized by Antiochus, who gives them an ultimatum: Eat pork to prove your loyalty to the crown or die. All the unnamed woman’s children refuse, and one by one, they meet increasingly disturbing ends — a tongue ripped out, limbs cut off, skin stripped from a body — until none are alive. The mother, unfazed, witnesses this macabre scene unfold, before being murdered herself.
The story would not be out of place in the medieval sainthood hagiographies of the Golden Legend because seeking martyrdom is not generally considered a Jewish value. Which might be one of the reasons the books of the Maccabees are canon in Catholicism but not Judaism.
Early accounts of the Hasmonean revolt, like those found in the Scroll of Antiochus, emphasize cunning, bravery, and violence. In one scene, Mattathias’s son Jonathan sneaks into Jerusalem and murders Antiochus’s top general, inciting a cycle of bloody retribution. After, the Maccabees erect a pillar to remember the event with the inscription, “The Maccabean has killed strong men.”
What an amazing slogan for a holiday card.
The early Zionists, for understandable reasons, stressed the aspects of the history, fusing nationalism and faith. Zionists argued that modern Jews, like the Maccabees, had a responsibility to take up arms rather than remain perpetual victims of history. The late historian Joseph Klausner claimed that Hanukkah “was the first time in world history that an entire people was persecuted for its faith and endured terrible suffering for its beliefs and dogmas,” contending that the revolutionaries were “martyrs — the first among Israel and, perhaps, among all the nations — who surrendered their souls for the sanctification of God’s name.”
Perhaps, but Hanukkah is still a minor religious holiday, not a Jewish “yom tov,” which translates to “good day” but, in religious terms, means the holiday was not handed to the Jewish people through the Torah. Unlike Passover or Yom Kippur, there are no restrictions on work.
The word Hanukkah means “dedication” because it celebrates the rededication of the Holy Temple after the reinstating of the Jewish kingdom. The story of Jews finding a single day’s oil in the Holy Temple that miraculously burns for eight was added centuries after the events by religious leaders who probably wanted to avoid fueling Jewish zealotry under Roman rule.
By the time of Jesus, the ruling Hasmoneans, who had become corrupt temple priests, were detested by the people. The Hasmoneans, in fact, had, during an earlier civil war in Judea, invited the Roman general Pompey the Great to tip the balance of the conflict. Perhaps Roman rule was an inevitability, but this act would lead to the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the Jewish diaspora.
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It wouldn’t be until 1948, some 1,800 years after Titus destroyed the Second Temple, that Israel would again see Jewish rule. This time, it was on the heels of near extermination and every Arab nation in the world attempting to destroy it. Like the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans, they failed.
If you want to talk about a real miracle, that’s one right there.