This is the second part of a two-part series. Read part one here.
I. The Chanukiah
I post a photo of my chanukiah in social media each night of the Festival of Lights, before joyfully scrolling through my feed to look at all the pictures my friends had posted of their Chanukah menorot shining defiantly and hopefully in their windows. The Talmud says that it is a mitzvah, a righteous act, to light the chanukia in a place where it can be seen by all passersby in the market, though, “in a time of danger, when the gentiles issued decrees to prohibit kindling lights, he places it on the table and that is sufficient to fulfill his obligation.” (Tractate Shabbat 21b)
Each image of flames flickering against the darkness, reflected in outdoor-facing windows, or even on an interior table, gives me joy. They they are the signal, over eight nights, that we are still here and we will endure; we have been lighting our lights from right to left – just as one writes in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish – the same way for two millennia. Whatever reservations I might have about the Chanukah myth, that makes me feel inexpressibly happy.
We are still here and, in those moments when the flame in each branch of each chanukiah in every Jewish home around the world “ascends of itself when it is kindled,” as the sage Rami Bar Hama (c. 280-352 CE) said, we all connect to one family, as we have for two millennia.
Yet, we are a diverse, and often fractious family, whose kinship is made even more complex by the convolutions of our lengthy history. Beyond the heroic myth of the Maccabees, a deeper understanding the history of Chanukah, and of the social and cultural context from which the Festival of Lights emerged and in which it was nurtured can offer clues to our diversity and a way to make it ever more relevant to the 21st century.
II. The Divisions
The factional conflict in the Temple priesthood that had ignited the Maccabean War was only one of a number of rifts in a deeply divided Levantine Jewish society. While the Jews in the Diaspora, who accounted for about half of the total Jewish population, had a significant degree of religious and political autonomy, those in the Jewish homeland in the Judean hills lived under the watchful eye of the Temple priesthood.
Beginning in 516 BCE with the return of the exiles from the Babylonian captivity, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the creation of a new polity,* both temporal and religious power resided in the Temple. The Persian emperor appointed a governor usually from within the Jewish community, the last of whom was Hezekiah, but the priesthood, and above all, the Kohen Gadol (the High Priest) exercised almost complete authority over the lives of Yehud Medinata’s Jews.
For the most part, the governor’s administration focused on taxation or, more accurately, the collection of tribute for the emperor, with some responsibility for the military. Jewish soldiers served in the Persian army, mostly, it seems, in Jewish units, and the governor in Jerusalem appears to have managed their logistics and pay. The Jewish garrison at the fort of Elephantine in the upper Nile during the Persian rule of Egypt addressed its grievances and requests to the governor Bagoas of Yehud.
In many respects, the Jewish community of Yehud Medinata was what the Biblical scholar Joseph Blenkinsopp calls a territorially-restricted “temple state,” where questions of power and public order within the province were religious matters governed by the priesthood. To the extent that there was a civil or political life at all – and Lester Grabbe has noted that the peasants who made up most of the population had minimal daily contact with civil or political authorities – it was largely co-extensive with religious life.
At the same time, there was a profound social division in Jewish society between the Temple community and the population over which it exerted power dating from the return of the Babylonian exiles. Grabbe writes that “many of those Jews descended from those who had remained in the land were excluded from the temple community while others participated only on the terms laid down by the returnees.” By the Hasmonean period, the term “people of the land” had the specific meaning of the Jewish peasantry, and the admonition in the Book of Ezra for the returning exiles to “put away” their wives from “the people of the land” (Ezra 10:2-3) suggests that this social division was zealously enforced. It was more of the nature of caste than class.
Things probably did not change much for Levantine Jews after the Alexandrine conquest of the Persian Empire in the late-fourth century BCE. Under Ptolemaic, and later Seleucid domination Yehud was reorganized into the larger province of Ceole Syria, under a Greek governor in Ptolemais or Tyre, but the authority of the priesthood and the Temple community remained largely unchanged. Still, most Levantine Jews’ interactions with the Temple would have been sporadic, and limited to the major pilgrimages of Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot, when possible, and perhaps to make sacrificial offerings for important events like a marriage or the birth of a child.
The Temple was the focus of all Jewish religious life, and in that sense, there was a considerable amount of religious unity. Josephus was probably right when he wrote that “With us all act alike, all profess the same doctrine about God, one which is in harmony with our Law and affirms that all things are under His eye.” (Against Apion 2.24) The importance of the Torah and the oneness and omnipotence of God, expressed in the Shema then as now, was never a matter of question or debate among the Jews – as Greek and Roman commentators often noted with hostility.
However, the Torah itself was not part of most Jews’ daily lives. Few Jews were literate, and most spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew. By the end of the Persian period, it is highly unlikely that most Jews outside of the Temple community and the aristocracy had much more than a passing familiarity with the language in which the Torah was written.
This was complicated by the fact that, aside from the priestly functions, sacrificial procedures, and descriptions of Temple organization, which are spelled out in considerable detail, the Torah is rather vague about the religious laws that apply to day-to-day life. For example, while marriage is regarded as a social and religious obligation, just how one marries is never made clear. The dietary laws, which Jews must observe daily, are likewise full of holes. The prohibition on mixing meat with dairy, “thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19, 34:26 and Deuteronomy 14:21), is important enough to repeat three times. But does that apply only to goats? Is poultry meat and, if it is, can you have it with a cream sauce, anyway? After all, birds don’t lactate.
By the beginning of the second century BCE, the process of interpreting the laws of food, purity, and family for daily life had produced a body of extra-biblical knowledge called “the traditions of the fathers,” preserved and promoted by a movement that would be called the Pharisees (from perushim, “apart”). Moreover, there is evidence that, by the late-third century, there was a religious practice outside of the precincts and control of the Temple, modeled on the synagogues that had emerged among diaspora Jewish communities which had no access to the sacred precincts of Jerusalem.
The Pharisees and their teachings would become central to Jewish life outside of the Temple community; the “teachings of the fathers” and their collected opinions would form the basis of the Talmud, and their teachings became the foundation of Rabbinical Judaism after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. But they were also rivals of the Temple priesthood, whose authority was based on the written word of the Torah.
It is very likely that at least some of the early Pharisees were members of the priesthood, or of the Temple community; after all, they would have had to have access to the holy books which, in the days before printing, would not have been widely available outside of priestly circles. Yet a another movement soon emerged within the priesthood, which Josephus calls the Sadducees, aiming to defend the authority and prerogatives of the Temple.
“There may have been certain socio-economic differences between the groups, in that the Sadducees are said to have the support of the wealthy and prominent persons, whereas the Pharisees have the support of the masses,” Grabbe wrote, “on the other hand, popular leaders do not necessarily come from the lower social strata, and some priests are said to be Pharisees.”
Nor were these groups, often called “sects” or “parties,” strictly either religious or political; in a theocracy, which the Jewish community of Ceole Syria essentially was, politics and religion are one and the same. In the years leading up to the Maccabean War, Levantine Jewish society was in ferment, divided between Hellenists and traditionalists, to be sure, but also between Jerusalem and the countryside, Tobiads and Oniads, pro-Seleucids and pro-Egyptians, legitimists and Menelaus’s supporters, and between Pharisees, Sadducees, and any number of other groups who, like the Hasideans, appear only as shadows in the texts.
III. Maccabees and Hasmoneans
These deep divisions in Levantine Jewish society were reflected in the resistance to Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ persecution between 167 and 164 BCE. The Maccabean War began as a power struggle between factions in the Temple priesthood, becoming a resistance movement against Seleucid authority following the intervention by Antiochus IV Epiphanes and his attack on the Temple itself in 167 BCE. The traditional story, narrated in the First and Second Books of Maccabees and recalled at Chanukah, holds that the Jews rose up together, united and led by Matitiyahu and his sons.
This was not, however, the case.
Grabbe notes that, while the First and Second Books of Maccabees “have a Hasmonean bias and give the Maccabees all the credit for resisting Antiochus’s decrees and retaking the temple from Seleucid control,” the resistance movement was, in fact, quite diverse. There is strong evidence for example of a passive resistance movement in the biblical Book of Daniel, the only extant text that can be confidently dated to the time of the Maccabean war.
In a vision of the Antiochus Epiphanes’ desecration of the Temple, the author of Daniel writes: “… but the people that know their God shall show strength, and prevail. And they that are wise among the people shall cause the many to understand; yet they shall stumble by the sword and by flame, by captivity and by spoil, many days. Now when they shall stumble, they shall be helped with a little help; but many shall join themselves unto them with blandishments. And some of them that are wise shall stumble, to refine among them, and to purify, and to make white, even to the time of the end; for it is yet for the time appointed.” (Daniel 11:32-35)
The biblical scholar Philip R. Davies has noted the tone of condemnation for the armed resistance to the Seleucid king, and those who “stumble by the sword and by flame” in contrast to “the wise among the people” whom the author insists will ultimately prevail. The “little help” might have come from the Maccabees, but the author is “not interested in such military actions,” Davies wrote. “The end would come about by divine intervention, and meanwhile the ‘wise’ suffered so as to be ‘purified.’”
The pseudepigraphal work The Testament of Moses offers additional details about the diversity of the Levantine Jewish resistance. Written in the late-second or early-first century BCE – thus, at around the same time as the First and Second Books of Maccabees – the Testament relates the story of a Levite named Taxo who exhorts his seven sons to passively resist the “ruthless (and) unclean visitation” of Antiochus Epiphanes:
“Now, therefore, my sons, hear me: for observe and know that neither did the fathers nor their forefathers tempt God, so as to transgress His commands. And you know that this is our strength, and thus we will do. Let us fast for the space of three days and on the fourth let us go into a cave which is in the field, and let us die rather than transgress the commands of the Lord of Lords, the God of our fathers. For if we do this and die, our blood shall be avenged before the Lord.” (Testament of Moses 9)
The author portrays Taxo’s seven pious sons as foils of the five Maccabees and their Hasmonean descendants (who would have then been ruling Judea) in a text deeply critical of the Temple priesthood (of which the Maccabees were a part). “For they shall not follow the truth of God,” he wrote, “but some shall pollute the altar with the (very) gifts which they offer to the Lord, who are not priests but slaves, sons of slaves.” (Testament of Moses 5) However, the Testament reserves its harshest condemnation for the Hasmoneans themselves: “Then there shall be raised up unto them kings bearing rule, and they shall call themselves priests of the Most High God: they shall assuredly work iniquity in the holy of holies.” (Testament of Moses 6)
The First Book of Maccabees acknowledges the existence of a rival passive resistance movement that bears a striking resemblance to the “wise among the people” in the Book of Daniel and Taxo’s sons. While the Maccabees take to the hills, the 1 Maccabees tells of “many who sought justice and judgment” who escape Jerusalem to “hiding places in the wilderness.” There, confronted on the Sabbath by Seleucid forces, the refugees refuse to fight. “They did not defend themselves, nor did they hurl a stone against them, no block up the hiding places, saying ‘Let all of us die in our innocence; may heaven and earth testify in our behalf that you destroy us against all justice.” (1 Maccabees 2:29-37)
Significantly, the war continued even after the Maccabees recaptured and rededicated the Temple and Antiochus Epiphanes abandoned his persecution of the Temple community, and this seems to have intensified Jewish factional infighting. “Most resistance movements seem to spend as much energy fighting among themselves as fighting the enemy, and what we now call the ‘Maccabean’ revolt was not likely to have been different,” Grabbe writes. “In the event, the Maccabees took over the revolt and received credit for it. In the process, their vision seems to have changed: from one of only restoring the temple and Jewish worship to one of political independence from foreign rule.”
The traditional Chanukah story ends abruptly with the Temple rededication and thus does not address the continuing civil war and the controversy that accompanied the Maccabees’ simultaneous assumption of political and religious power. The usurping Kohen Gadol Menelaus fled Jerusalem before it was captured by Judah Maccabee in 164 BCE and, following Antiochus Epiphanes’ death, he was executed – probably for being the cause of all the bother in the first place – by the king’s successor Demetrius I Soter.
This left a vacancy in the high priesthood, and Demetrius appointed a new Kohen Gadol in Menelaus’ place – this time, a legitimate kohen. The nomination of Alcimus, whose name is derived from the Hebrew Elyaqum, or “God will rise,” solved the legitimacy crisis that had precipitated the civil war, and should have brought an end to the conflict, but the Maccabees, now led by Judah’s younger brother Jonathan Apphus, had greater ambitions. Accusing the new Kohen Gadol of “Hellenism” (a term that, by this point, had as much substance as today’s American conservative’s use of “communist” as an all-purpose perjorative), Jonathan campaigned for Alcimus’ removal, and when the high priest died, he assumed the office himself.
The First Book of Maccabees refers to Jonathan’s opponents as “men who hated their own nation,” who brought the case to Demetrius but, in the tried-and-true traditions of the Temple priesthood, the new Kohen Gadol took “silver and gold and clothing and many other friendly gifts,” almost certainly from the Temple treasury, and headed to Antioch. “When certain lawless men preferred charges against him, the king dealt with him just as his predecessors had done, and elevated him in the sight of all of his Friends.” (1 Maccabees 11:20-26)
By now, the agenda of the Maccabean campaign focused on expanding the family’s personal power. Jonathan, the new Kohen Gadol, now recognized as the ethnarch of the Jews, settled comfortably into the traditional client relationship with his Seleucid overlord, going so far as to dispatch some 3,000 Jewish troops to help Demetrius put down another uprising. After a few years of unpleasantness, the clock was reset, and Jewish-Seleucid relations returned to ante bellum conditions, but with the Maccabees in power.
The First Book of Maccabees declares that “Jonathan united their nation, and became their High Priest and was gathered to his people.” (1 Maccabees 14:30) Yet, the reality is that the new Kohen Gadol continued to face significant resistance from dissenters in Levantine Jewish society, and that did not disappear following his death and the succession of his brother Simon Thassi to the High Priesthood. More importantly, the resistance did not come from the much-hated “Hellenistic party,” the persistent bugbear of Maccabean myth.
The Hasmoneans, the dynasty Simon founded, were no less Hellenized than their putative enemies. The epithet of Simon’s son John Hyrcanus strongly suggests a Greek regnal name, even if he was not yet a fully autonomous ruler. His sons Judah Aristobulus, who in 104 BCE was the first to take the title of basileus of the Judean kingdom as well as Kohen Gadol, and Alexander Jannaeus were even more thoroughly Hellenized, minting coins for use in their Jewish kingdom engraved with Basilios Iudaeus on the obverse with Hebrew only on the reverse.
Nor did the repression of dissidents stop. It was one thing to assume the high priesthood, but it was another thing to combine it with the royal crown. Jewish tradition had held monarchy and priesthood separate since the time of King Saul, and only a descendant of the House of David could legitimately be a king of the Jews. As kohanim and Levites, the Hasmoneans’ assumption of the monarchy appeared to many as a usurpation, and the combination of offices in the person of a priest-king a blasphemy. While the Hasmoneans took advantage of the Seleucid empire’s terminal preoccupation with the Parthians to expand their realm, they also launched a bloody reign of terror against dissenting Jews.
Josephus reports that, at one point, Jannaeus had to rush home from a campaign against coastal cities to deal with civil unrest at home. “After his enslavement of these towns there was a Jewish rising at one of the feasts – the usual occasion for sedition to flare up.” The priest-king mobilized his foreign mercenaries, “these were Pisidians and Cilicians,” and slaughtered “over 6,000 of the insurgents.” (Wars 4.3) Feeling threatened by Pharisaic dissent, the priest-king captured a number of Pharisees and brought them back to Jerusalem in chains. “So unbridled was Alexander’s rage that from brutality he proceeded to impiety,” Josephus reports. “Eight hundred of the prisoners he crucified in the middle of the City, then butchered their wives and children before their eyes…” Jannaeus watched this most un-Jewish spectacle with all the pomp of a Hellenistic despot, “cup in hand as he reclined amidst his concubines.” (Wars 5.3)
During its lifespan of less than 70 years, from 104-37 BCE, the Hasmonean kingdom born out of the Maccabean war would drift unendingly from palace intrigue to civil war, until finally collapsing under Roman fiat. Forced to choose between the brothers Antigonus II Mattathias and John II Hyrcanus, both claiming to be the legitimate priest-king, the Romans chose neither and appointed Herod the Great in their place. The Romans had Antigonus put to death, while Herod saw to the execution of Hyrcanus II. Maccabean independence ended in a sordid pool of blood.
IV. The Holiday
The actual observance of the Chanukah holiday probably goes back to the Maccabees’ recapture of Jerusalem in 164 BCE, and the rededication of the temple. In Hebrew, חנוכה means “dedication” or “consecration,” and there is evidence that the festival was celebrated at the Temple until its final destruction in 70 CE. In the Gospel of John for example, Jesus was at the Temple sometime around 30 CE for “the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.” (John 10:22-23)
Exactly how the celebration became the 8-day-long festival is a little less clear. The Second Book of Maccabees records a “Letter to the Jews of Egypt,”, sent by the Temple authorities in 124 BCE, which associates Chanukah with Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles observed during the autumn High Holy Days: “On the twenty-fifth day of the month of Kislev we will celebrate the Festival of Rededication just as we celebrate the Festival of Shelters. We thought it important to remind you of this, so that you too may celebrate this festival.” (2 Maccabees 1:18)
A few chapters later, the author of 2 Maccabees clarifies that the first festival of lights originated in the observance of Sukkot, which had been delayed for two months by the war: “… carrying green palm branches and sticks decorated with ivy, they paraded around, singing grateful praises to him who had brought about the purification of his own Temple.” (2 Maccabees 10:7)
Whatever the case, the annual observance of Chanukah entered Jewish practice as the result of a takkanah – a decree of Jewish law, or Halakha – sometime during the rule of John I Hyrcanus. As Kohen Gadol, Hyrcanus was in a position to legislate religious law and, given the impetus to establish a Judean monarchy in his own line (which began with his son), it made sense to make the celebration of his family’s exploits a halakhic obligation. That calculus almost certainly lay behind the “reminder” to the Jews of Egypt in 124 BCE.
As a religious obligation decreed by the Kohen Gadol himself, Chanukah assumed a meaning far greater than its initial political significance as a celebration of the ruling regime. It spread to corners of the Jewish community in the diaspora that were not under the temporal authority of the Hasmonean priest-kings, such as Egypt and Babylon, and even further to the growing communities in Rome and along the Silk Road in Central Asia.
Perhaps more importantly, Chanukah outlived the Hasmonean monarchy that it had celebrated. When the dynasty collapsed after 67 years of bloody misrule, the festival decreed by priest-kings moved from the Temple precincts into the home by the end of the first century BCE. The Sages formalized this transformation in a Mishna: “The basic mitzva of Hanukkah is each day to have a light kindled by a person, the head of the household, for himself and his household.” (Tractate Shabbat 21b)
Predictably, the two great Pharisaic schools of thought in the first century BCE disagreed on how the ritual should proceed over the eight nights. The House of Shammai insisted that, “on the first day one kindles eight lights and, from there on, gradually decreases the number of lights until, on the last day of Hanukkah, he kindles one light”. The House of Hillel demurred: “On the first day one kindles one light, and from there on, gradually increases the number of lights until, on the last day, he kindles eight lights.” Hillel ultimately won out, on the principle that “one elevates to a higher level in matters of sanctity and one does not downgrade. Therefore, if the objective is to have the number of lights correspond to the number of days, there is no alternative to increasing their number with the passing of each day.” (Tractate Shabbat 21b)
Significantly, there is no mention of the “miracle of oil” that would become so central to the Chanukah story, except in an Aggadah – a folktale or parable collected in the Talmud – dating to the third century CE. That tale, reinforced by the inscription on the dreidel נס גדול היה שם (“a great miracle happened there”) assumed greater importance as Rabbinical Judaism allowed the political significance of the holiday to fade from memory, while its observance remained a halakhic obligation over the next two millennia.
For all of this time, Chanukah was not regarded as a holiday of any consequence. It was not mandated by the Torah like Pesach or Yom Kippur, nor did it have a scriptural basis like Purim, as the Books of Maccabees never became part of the canon of Jewish scriptures.† In the communities of Sefarad and the Levant, Ethiopia, the ghettos of medieval Europe, the shtetls of the Pale, and along the Silk Road to Malabar and China, Chanukah became a domestic occasion, a minor celebration meant to bring some light to the lengthening nights with candles, gifts, and fried foods.
That began to change in Europe and America, as assimilated Jews came under the ideological influence of burgeoning 19th century nationalism. In Philadelphia in 1879, members of Keyam Dishmaya, an organization that hoped to revitalize an American Judaism they believed had become watered-down by assimilationists – their generation’s “Hellenizers” – staged a “grand revival” of the holiday. “For those seeking to revitalize Judaism,” the historian Jonathan D. Sarna has observed, “Hanukkah provided the perfect symbol.”
The seeds had already been sowed, the historian Dianne Ashton has noted in Hanukkah in America, when, a decade before, Rabbis Max Lilienthal at Temple Bene Yisrael and Isaac Wise at the Plum Street Temple, the great champions of American Reform Judaism, began holding Chanukah parties for the kids. “Cincinnati’s Jewish children enjoyed a Hanukkah festival where singing and instrumental solos, speeches, and refreshments framed an elaborate version of the holiday’s traditional candle-lighting ceremony.”
It seemed like good fun, and a way to get America’s Jews back into Shul, but it was the national angle that brought Chanukah to the center of Jewish life. Zionism resurrected the myth of the Maccabees as a model for Jewish national aspirations. “And what glory awaits the selfless fighters for the cause!” Theodor Herzl declared in The Jewish State in 1896. “Therefore, I believe that a wondrous breed of Jews will spring up from the earth. The Maccabees will rise again.”
It became Zionism’s persistent refrain: The movement would reclaim the Jewish homeland like Judah Maccabee and his band of brothers. And to make themselves worthy of the messianic project, Max Nordau told the second Zionist Congress in 1898, they had to transform themselves from “sorrowful weaklings, haggard and unable to defend ourselves in the narrow alleyways of the ghetto” into mythic heroes. Nordau launched the Maccabi sports movement in 1921, which has hosted the International Maccabiah Games since 1932 to promote an ideology of “muscular Judaism” based on the Chanukah myth.
In December 1917, the Zionist youth organization Young Judaea organized New York City’s – and the modern world’s – first public Chanukah festival. “Eleven theatres and halls were filled to capacity in various parts of the city,” the New Times reported. “The story of the valiant Maccabees… was told with enthusiasm, moving pictures and slides were shown to bring the story nearer to the hearts of the boys and girls, and poems were recited to touch the emotions of the children.” The event was enthusiastically received “on account of the recent taking of Jerusalem by the British.”
By 1948, following the horror of the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel, as American Jews, in particular, moved up economically and out to the suburbs, what for centuries had been an insignificant occasion observed in neglect, had become one of the central festivals of the Jewish year. In the suburbs, Chanukah offered an object lesson in resistance to assimilation at a time of year when Christmas consumerism became overwhelming, while articulating the messianic promise of Zionism and promoting a myth of Jewish harmony and unity.
It was, and still is only a myth, of course, but it has become dogma, and community leaders and organizations are just as inclined today to stifle dissent and disagreement in the Jewish community today as the Maccabees and Hasmoneans were two millennia ago. Then, it was through accusations of “Hellenism” deployed even against the Pharisees, whose teachings formed the foundation of Rabbinical Judaism, followed by acts of unimaginable brutality by the Judean state. Today, the accusation is of “anti-Zionism,” or “BDS,” or of being a “self-hating Jew,” followed by ostracism and social death.
The lesson that so many of us have taken from the story of the Maccabees, reinforced every year in the lighting of the chanukiah and a retelling of the myth, is that we were once a unified people, united in a common mission of national liberation. But that is a lie that elides the true complexity of Jewish life and history, and authorizes the very un-Jewish repression of diversity.
V. The Lights
As we light the candles, say the brocha, sing “Maoz Tzur,” and spin the dreidel that reminds us of a mythical miracle, we must acknowledge that we are only doing this because of that complex history, and the vast complexity of Jewish life. What had been the halakhically-mandated celebration of Hasmonean power was transformed by their rivals – Pharisees like Hillel and Shammai – into a festival of shining “light against the darkness,” which “elevates to a higher level in matters of sanctity.” A narrow, factional victory in the tiny territory of what would be called Judea, became the basis of a shared moment, stretched over eight nights and days, in a much wider global community stretching from Cyrene to the Nile, from the flood plain of the Euphrates to Central Asia, and beyond.
We don’t have to repeat the pernicious propaganda of the Hasmonean priest-kings for Chanukah to have value and meaning, and we can make it even more meaningful if we don’t. We light the Chanukah menorah in our windows, to be seen by passersby, and in the virtual marketplace of our networked world in an act of defiance. We are still here, and neither foreign tyrants, nor the ones in our own house will change that. Collectively, our chanukiot shining in all the millions of windows around the world on the same eight nights, evokes our unity, and each flame, standing in the branches that grow from the central shaft that holds the shamash evokes a diversity that could not be destroyed by Antiochus, the Hasmoneans, the Romans, or any within our own people who might aspire to snuff it out.
Happy Chanukah.
***
* The Israeli archeologist Israel Finkelstein estimates that the Babylonians deported about a quarter of the Kingdom of Judah’s population, mostly aristocrats, political leaders, priests and Temple functionaries. The remaining three-quarters of the population remained behind in the Judean highlands.
† We may speculate that part of the reason for this is that the Pharisaic sages who founded Rabbinical Judaism after 70 CE were not enthusiastic about the idea of celebrating the dynasty that persecuted the Pharisees.