As Jews around the world kindle their Hanukkah lights tomorrow night, the reasons for why we do so will be as numerous as the candles being lit. Hanukkah, our annual festival of lights, is a time for giving gifts, spinning dreidels, eating latkes, and – if you happen to be in Israel, as I will be – enjoying sufganiyot, jelly donuts. But beyond the fried food and festivities, what is Hanukkah really about? In the words of the Sages, Mai Hanukkah? “What is Hanukkah?”
Most if not all of us were raised on the miracle story. As the Talmud relates, when the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the ritual oil. When the Hasmoneans rededicated the Temple – Hanukkah means “dedication” – they found just one cruse of pure oil, enough for only one day, yet it burned for eight. Eight nights, culminating with eight lights: the Jewish “little engine that could” story, a message of divine providence and spiritual endurance (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 21b).
But while that may be the most famous explanation, it is not the only one. Our prayer book, for instance, makes no mention of the miracle of the oil. Rather, it is a military victory against the Greeks for which we give thanks, the strong delivered into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the impure into the hands of the pure, and so on. This understanding – of national liberation and political sovereignty secured by the courage of the Maccabees – appears in our prayer book, in the Books of the Maccabees, and in the words of the historian Josephus. It is this explanation, not surprisingly, that is embraced by modern Zionism – the Maccabees as heroic Jewish fighters for self-determination.
Where I grew up, in the mean streets of suburban Los Angeles, I was taught the anti-assimilation Hanukkah story of cultural survival. Yes, the Greeks were the enemy, but the real enemy was Hellenism’s cultural imperialism – language, philosophy, athletics, aesthetics – a battle we fought then, as we do now. Synagogue or Little League, Jewish camp or tennis camp? How do we retain our spiritual distinctiveness but not self-isolate, balancing the hyphen of our Jewish and secular identities? That is what Hanukkah is all about.
So many explanations. Are the eight days a remembrance for the miracle of light or a mulligan, if you will, for the missed fall festival of Sukkot, as told in the book of Maccabees. Is the story a critique of those Jews who Hellenized and adopted Greek practices or perhaps a critique of the Maccabees, whose defense of the faith bordered on zealotry? Is it a mystical holiday, a festival about the inner light we search for? Or is it an outward-facing festival, focused on the mitzvah of pirsumei nisa, proclaiming the miracle, something to let the whole world know about.
Mai Hanukkah? What is Hanukkah? Hanukkah is all these things. There are as many explanations as there are rabbis giving sermons today, the day before Hanukkah. This morning I want to offer another explanation rooted in the sources, one about which I have never preached, one that speaks to this moment and to the challenges our people face. And that is this: Hanukkah as a cautionary tale on the dangers of intra-Jewish strife and the outbreak of civil war.
Usually, we think about the battle of Hanukkah as an us-against-them story: militarily, the Maccabees against the Greeks; or spiritually, as noted, a pushback against the pressure to Hellenize. That remains true. However, as historians such as Elias Bickerman and Lawrence Schiffman explain, Hanukkah is also the story of how the Hellenistic world prompted different – even contradictory – responses within the Jewish community, responses that soon brought the Jews into conflict not only with the Greeks, but with one another – a struggle within the house of Israel itself.
This story begins around 336 BCE, with the rise of Hellenism and Alexander the Great, who, as I tell our Hebrew school students, shares a middle name with Winnie the Pooh. His conquests forged not only a military empire but a cultural one, bringing with it much that was admirable: art, architecture, philosophy, even the Septuagint, the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. But that cultural dominance had a dark side. By the middle of the second century BCE, under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Greek cultural influence shifted from an attractive option to an imposed orthodoxy, the appeal of universalism turning into the coercion of uniformity. Jews had to decide how to respond. For many, especially among the Jerusalem elite, there was an appeal to blending in: physically, in the Greek gymnasium; and religiously, by letting lapse the observance of Shabbat, kashrut, circumcision, and other covenantal signs that set Jews apart. To complicate matters further, Antiochus appointed Hellenized Jews to positions of religious authority – a mechanism of control for him, a path to power for them. Priestly figures with names like Jason and Menelaus embodied this new orientation, their very names reflecting accommodation to the dominant culture. Jews empowered to tell other Jews that they had to conform to the practices legislated by non-Jews. Statues of Zeus were erected in Jerusalem; Jews might be accepted, but Judaism was not.
None of these developments sat well with a group of pious Jews, the Hasmoneans, led by Matityahu the priest, who lived in the village of Modi’in, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, with his five sons, the most famous being Judah Maccabee. In 167 BCE, when a royal envoy arrived in Modi’in and ordered the townspeople to offer a pagan sacrifice, a Hellenized Jew stepped forward to comply. Matityahu, outraged, stabbed him to death and tore down the altar – his first, but not last, act of open rebellion. He and his sons fled to the hills, beginning a guerrilla campaign ostensibly against the Greeks, but in truth also against the Hellenizing Jews who collaborated with them. It was a pressure cooker of competing loyalties, exposing a deep fissure within the Jewish family – some drawn to the promise of Greek civilization, others clinging fiercely to ancestral law; some opting for the universalism of the majority, others fighting for the particularism of the minority.
I never knew until this year why the 25th of Kislev – tomorrow night – was designated as the first night of Hanukkah. I always assumed it was simply the date the Maccabees happened to re-enter the Temple. The reason is more specific and more telling. Three years earlier on the 25th of Kislev, Jewish Hellenists, under the authority of Antiochus, had defiled the Temple altar itself, offering pagan sacrifices upon it in honor of Zeus. Judah Maccabee chose that same date for rededication as a deliberate, defiant reversal, not only to reclaim the Temple from the Greeks, but to reclaim Judaism from those Jews who he believed had forsaken it.
Jew vs Jew. An internecine and far more sober version of the Hanukkah story. How the push and pull of the world in which we live can prompt different and even contradictory responses: accommodation, rejection, and everything in between. A battle not against the darkness of others, but against the darkness within our own house; not just the tragedy of the Greeks defiling the Temple, but of Jews ceasing to recognize one another as brothers.
And I know – because I know that you know that I know that you have heard me give a sermon or two – that this is where I make my homiletical pivot, to say what it is that I really want to say. That by substituting progressivism for Hellenism, the courage of the IDF for that of the Maccabees, I will have squared the circle and thus succeeded in impressing on you the need to remain vigilant to the dangers of yesterday as repackaged in our own day. And while I am sure that some rabbi on some pulpit, somewhere, is giving that sermon, it is decidedly not my message today.
It is not my message, first, because historically speaking, a case can be made that neither the Hellenists nor the Maccabees deserve present-day emulation. The Hellenists, for all their cultural sophistication and cosmopolitan ideals, traded faith for favor, confusing adaptation with assimilation, mistaking acceptance for belonging. The Maccabees, for their part, though animated by courage and conviction, soon became consumed by the very power they had sought to resist. Within a generation, their descendants had turned priestly piety into political dynasty – corrupt, violent, and, by the end, no less oppressive than the regime they had overthrown.
But it is also not my message, because it strikes me that in this world of ours, where the Jewish people face no shortage of threats from without, the greatest threat we face comes from within. Not any single group, but conflict within our own ranks. Different than that of bygone days but no less dangerous. This morning, I choose not to take this side or that side but our side, the side of the collective Jewish people.
No different than our ancestors, we live on the precipice of Jewish schism, when powerful cultural and political forces have driven a wedge into the heart of our small and fragile community. Caring Jews, prompted by the threats facing the Jewish people and our state, turn inward, like the Maccabees, rallying to defend Jewish life with passion and resolve, sometimes so fiercely that they risk sacrificing a host of other values on the altar of self-preservation. Caring Jews, equally sincere, who, drawn as they are to their liberalism, believe like the Hellenists that the strongest expression of their Jewish selves is to align with universal values, even it comes at the expense of parochial concern. Both camps are animated by love of the Jewish people; both believe they are safeguarding the future. Everyone is doing their best to navigate the complex terrain, the push and pull of being a Jew in our time.
And yet, rather than being patient, being generous, being curious, rather than recognizing that another Jew’s imperfect decisions, no different than our own, reflect the complex and evolving realities of the moment, we brand that person as treasonous, either to our people or to our shared humanity. No different than Joseph and his brothers, we lose sight of the greater good, which is family. We forget that we are, first and foremost, brothers and sisters in search of one another. It is not just the cliché that we are stronger together than apart; it is the sober recognition that when we tear ourselves apart, the one who benefits most is our actual enemy, the one who, from outside the tent, seeks to do us harm.
This, I believe, is the challenge of the hour: how to affirm our convictions while allowing space, and grace, for others to express their own. I am not, by any stretch, a relativist. Not all ideas are good ones, and while Truth may be in the hands of God alone, ours is a time to be both unflinching in conviction and generous in spirit. We read the same Torah and pray to the same God, and we must find within ourselves the charity to see each other in common cause. Because whether it is the American body politic, the Israeli, or the global Jewish, if we wish to preserve the greater good – of keeping rather than excluding from the fold, of not letting our own orthodoxies become barriers to another’s belonging – then we must choose relationship over righteousness, curiosity over certainty, and the courage to seek our brothers once more.
The unraveling of the Jewish family is the story of Hanukkah, the story of Joseph and his brothers, and if we fail to model an alternative, it will become the story of our own time. This past week, I found myself in conversation with the darndest people – in both directions – with whom I never imagined I would sit down. I felt like a spinning dreidel. It is new, it is disorienting, and yes, it risks being misunderstood that to engage somehow is to assent. I understand that risk, I accept it, and I champion those who do the same, even when they do it a bit differently than I would. Because what I am trying to model – what we should all strive to model – for our Jewish family and for one another, is the spirit of Hillel and Shammai, who, though they lit their Hanukkah candles in different ways, nonetheless celebrated as one. A rededication not only to our faith, but to each other.
All of which brings us back to the beginning — a question that some of you may have noticed I have yet to answer. If Hanukkah is a cautionary tale about intra-Jewish strife, then what is the miracle? Why exactly do we light the Hanukkah lights?
I came across a beautiful teaching, inspired by my Israeli colleague Rabbi Chaya Rowan Baker. Citing the Maharal of Prague, she notes that the power of light lies not only in its ability to illuminate, but also in its capacity to help us discern, to see one thing in relation to another. Light reveals distinctions: it allows us to recognize difference without confusion, to appreciate diversity without dissolving into sameness, and at the same time not let those differences become the source of division.
A light for this time of darkness. A light that increases each day. A light that reveals our individuality even as it reminds us of the shared divine spark within us all. A light that affirms each of us, even as it calls us to reach across to others. Like the light of the Hanukkiah itself, it is a light composed of many branches, each distinct, yet offering a single glow.
If, in our time, we could manage to light such a Hanukkah flame – a light that reveals our differences yet asks no uniformity, that honors our unity and binds us, branch to branch, in common purpose — then, yes, that would indeed be a miracle worth celebrating.