What is Hanukkah?

Hint: It ain't Jewish Christmas

I remember back in the days of Usenet, when I used to spend time on soc.culture.jewish, and its later version soc.culture.jewish.moderated (because we were inundated by Messies and Nazis) that one fall, a woman posted there to ask for advice about Hanukkah. She was a non-Jewish woman who wanted to do a real Hanukkah celebration for her Jewish husband.

You may find this hard to believe, but I used to be fairly rough on the Internet. I’ve mellowed a lot. My explanation ended, as I recall, with me telling her to let her husband know that Hanukkah was a celebration of a victory of people who probably would have killed him to death for marrying a non-Jew.

Anyway, at around the same time, Jeffrey Goldberg (the JINO who edits The Atlantic) had a weekly column in the Jerusalem Post, and he wrote one week about Hanukkah songs, and how pathetic they were. I mean, come on, “Let’s have a party, we’ll all dance the hora”… Gag me. So he did a contest for better Hanukkah songs.

I don’t remember if this one was one of the ones I submitted to him. But it’s the one that’s had the longest shelf life. This is the first verse. It’s called “Hanukkah O Hanukkah”, and it’s sung to the tune of “Hanukkah O Hanukkah”.

Hanukkah O Hanukkah
A holiday of war
First we killed a couple Greeks
And then we killed some more
Invited in by Hellenists
Who hated being Jews
They brought their filthy idols
And tightened the noose.

They called us
Fanatics
But we fought for truth and the Lord
Stupid Antiochus sent soldiers in to choke us
Because he didn’t think we’d raise a sword
Stupid Antiochus sent soldiers in to smoke us
And now they’ve all been killed by the sword.

There’s more to it, but first, did you ever hear that Hanukkah was a victory for religious freedom? It was, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. It was a very particular kind of religious freedom. It was freedom for religiously fanatic Jews to force their view on the whole nation.

From the time that Alexander arrived in Judea, some Jews began to assimilate into Greek culture. These were called Hellenists; the term for non-Greeks who pushed Greek culture. They engaged in sporting events in the nude, as Greeks did. They had painful surgeries to make it look like they hadn’t been circumcised, because Greeks considered circumcision to be mutilation. They cast off the Torah, which was the raison d’etre of the Jewish People. And they bowed down to Greek idols, which was intolerable.

And they met resistance. One of the reasons the Greeks came down hard on us was that they wanted everyone to be permitted to Go Greek. But our nation was a religio-nation, ruled by the High Priest, who at this point, was himself a Hellenist.

What set off the war, which wasn’t just a war against the Syrian Greeks, but a vicious civil war between Jews, was when a Hellenist Jew went into the town of Modi’in with an escort of Greek and Hellenist soldiers, and attempted to bring a sacrifice to a Greek deity. Mattiyahu the Hasmonean, whose father had been High Priest, saved this Jew from idolatry by killing him.

The five sons of Mattiyahu were named Yochanan, Shimon, Yehuda, Elazar, and Yonatan. Yehuda is Judah Maccabee. And he led the war against the Hellenists and the Greeks. Hence that first verse. The song goes on:

Hanukkah O Hanukkah
The Festival of Light
The flames of our fanaticism
Still are burning bright
’Cause Judaism’s never been
Some airy-fairy thing
Made up of nothing more
Than the songs that we sing

It’s truth and
It’s wisdom
It’s following God’s holy plan
To sanctify the world, man and woman, boy and girl
And to do just the best that we can
To sanctify the world, man and woman, boy and girl
By obeying the laws He commands

Hanukkah, you see, is about taking a stand, regardless of what other people might think. It’s about the opposite of assimilation. It’s in the spirit of our forefather Abraham, the first Jew, who was called the Ivri (Hebrew), because he stood on one side of the world, while everyone else stood on the other side (side being ever, the root of Ivri).

Even most religious Jews today don’t think about the enormity of the war we celebrate on Hanukkah. Judah Maccabee and his brothers were the cousins of the Hellenist High Priest. At the end of the war, Judah became the High Priest. There must have been many people who saw the whole war as nothing more than a cynical power play among the ruling family. If there were any proto-Marxists running around at the time, that is.

So how do we know it wasn’t? You’ve probably heard of the miracle of the lights. After we took the Temple back from the Greek occupiers, we found that they’d trashed it. We set to work purifying it, but one of the things that had to be done was to light the eternal light: the 7 branched menorah that stood in the Temple. But the menorah was made of solid gold. And it was gone, looted by the barbarians.

According to Megillat Taanit, a Tannaitic work from the Second Temple period, we made a makeshift menorah out of spears. Yes, the same spears with which we’d been conducting this civil war. It was on this bloody menorah that the miracle occurred.

The Maccabees found a single jar of pure (tahor) oil, which was enough to light the menorah for a single night. It was going to take another week to make more, because everyone was affected by the impurity of touching the dead, which requires a seven day ritual to get over. Until that happened, no new oil could be made that would be permissible to use in the Temple.

But that one day’s worth of oil lasted 8 full days. Long enough to make new oil that was usable in the Temple. A blatant miracle before the eyes of the people. A miracle that occurred on a makeshift menorah made of weapons of war bound together. If anyone wondered whether Judah and his brothers were on the side of the right, this miracle put an end to it.

The final verse of my rewrite of Hanukkah O Hanukkah goes:

Hanukkah O Hanukkah
A savage celebration
Of blood and death and war
That saved the soul of our nation
The Maccabees knew compromise
With Hellenism’s dreck
Would kill us just as surely
As a sword through the neck

Although they
Were farmers
They learned to be fighters mighty fast
Despite what they became, we still venerate their name
’Mongst the heroes of Israel’s past
Despite what they became, we still venerate their name
And their valor has never been surpassed

The story of the Hasmonean war didn’t end with Hanukkah, of course. Yes, we retook Jerusalem and the Holy Temple. Yes, Judah became our High Priest. But the war went on throughout the country. Elazar had died before we retook Jerusalem. Judah was killed afterwards. As was Yochanan. Yonatan was taken hostage by the Greek Tryphon and held at Ptolemais, at what’s now Akko in Israel. He demanded that Shimon hand over an enormous sum of gold, as well as Yonatan’s two sons to hold as hostages, in exchange for Yonatan’s release. Shimon complied, and Yonatan and his two sons were murdered by the hostage takers.

Not a lot has changed in 2200 years.

Shimon was the last of the brothers, and his son became a Hellenist. The sad story of the degredation and devolution of the Hasmonean Dynasty, ending with two warring brothers, one of whom asked the Roman Pompey to come in and end the fighting, resulting in a Roman occupation that didn’t end until the Muslim conquest, is too much to go into right now.

But the sad end of the Maccabees doesn’t take away from their heroism, and their willingness to fight the good fight, no matter how it may have looked to people from the outside.

If they hadn’t done so, we wouldn’t be here talking about Hanukkah at all.

And that, folks, is what Hanukkah is.