A Hanukkah Message for Today

Excerpted by permission of the author from "The Jewish Way: Living the Jewish Holidays."

Not as tightly knit in paradigm, theme, and practice as the other holidays, Hanukkah lends itself to being a type of holy day Rorschach test. Every community and generation has interpreted Hanukkah in its own image, speaking to its own needs.

When the rabbis of Talmudic times asked, "What is Hanukkah?" their answer focused on the purification of the Temple and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days, despite the fact that there seemed to be oil enough for only a single day. As a new spiritual leadership dealing with the religious challenge of Jewry's survival after the loss of Jewish sovereignty and power, the rabbis stressed the divine miracle to the exclusion of military and diplomatic acts and the sovereignty exercised by the Maccabees after their victory.

Similarly, medieval Jews focused on the divine miraculous activity in Hanukkah, projecting their own sense of helplessness and their longing for the messianic redeemer to do it all for them.

By contrast, modern Zionists saw in Hanukkah a reflection of their agenda: They celebrated Maccabee military prowess and political achievement. An early secular Zionist song proclaimed that "a miracle did not happen to us, we found no cruse of oil." To these Zionists, the Maccabees' state-building was the eternal message of the holiday.

For modern liberal Jews, Hanukkah became the holiday of religious freedom. The Maccabee fight was presented as the uprising of a religious community against suppression. The Festival of Lights was a victory for, and a living model of, the religious tolerance that Jews sought in the modern world. To uphold this view, liberals had to filter out the fact that while the Maccabees fought for the right to practice their own religion, they were hardly pluralist. In fact, the Maccabees fought Hellenizing Jews--those who were assimilating into Greek culture--to the death and suppressed them as they achieved power.

Similarly, American Jews have turned Hanukkah into the great gift-giving holiday. Other than the children's games and very modest Hanukkah gelt--money--there was not much in the tradition of the holiday that supported the idea of an eight-day orgy of giving presents. But Christmas is so pervasive in America, and the children's sense of being shut out was so fierce, that Hanukkah was rededicated as the season for giving.

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