One People, Many Stories

The oldest tradition of Hanukkah is that it celebrates many stories: the one of freedom from religious oppression, the one of Jews fighting back against their oppressors, and the one of communal struggle about what it means to be a Jew and how best to live that out. It is the story of unexpected fuel found in unexpected places, providing light to an entire nation, and it is the story of miracles and redemption in moments of darkness and despair.

These stories have been told in many languages: Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Yiddish and English. They've been told by every kind of Jew, and even by non-Jews, from almost every nation on the face of the earth. They are tales of a people on a journey looking for ways to confront the challenges that lay before them, and celebrating the victories that they experience along the way.

However, in American Jewish life, Hanukkah is often described as the story of the Jewish fight against assimilation. Judah Maccabee and his forces arose to defeat their Hellenistic persecutors. The underlying premise of this telling is the presumption of a pure Judaism struggling against external influences that would pollute it. Like most stories of the fight against assimilation, there is a false dichotomy between Judaism and the larger world in which the Jewish people live. The complexity and nuance that have always defined Jewish life in every age are removed from the story.

Ironically, Hanukkah, with its many tellings, preserves those nuances better than almost any other holiday in Jewish tradition. It celebrates a variety of ways to be Jewish - ways which have changed through the generations, the challenges, and the times. Whether in more recent history, when Jews felt distant from their homeland and early Zionists told the story in ways that emboldened them to return to the land, or in ancient times after the destruction of the Temple, when God felt very far away and the Rabbis told the story to help bring God back, our tellings of the Hanukkah story have invited new interpretations, questions, and meanings, each helping a generation of Jews rise to the challenge of its moment in history. In fact, the richness of Jewish tradition is its remarkable capacity to embody many forms of Jewish expression. Failing to recognize this on Hanukkah would be truly absurd.

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