As I write this, Hanukkah will begin tomorrow night. One thing that confuses me to this day is how it manages to be so successful. “Oh, the Yuletide sentiment!”, you tell me, “Without Christmas, Hanukkah would be forgotten and ignored!”
Not so fast. There was indeed a Hanukkah before Christmas commercialism on the scale seen in the United States. North America has the knack for taking Christian holidays and stripping them of religious content. Saint Patrick’s Day in the United States is a festive time, but anyone who spends this day in Ireland will probably find it closer to a time for spiritual meditation.
But what was Hanukkah before America and why did it flourish?
It was a Zionist Holiday, a celebration of renewed Jewish autonomy. It had the distinction of an Independence Day Celebration, without any harvest-season cues like Spring or Fall holidays like Passover. To say that Hanukkah is not important is to belittle the importance of the Independence Holiday Genre, and would also downsize July 4th, Bastille Day, and Cinco de Mayo.
Sheva Zucker, author of my first Yiddish textbooks, has people in one of her readings describe Hanukkah as the best of all holidays, and it is not an unfair distinction.
I am puzzled by its success because people are divided over the aspects of Zionism and Jewish Nationalism, the pillars of Hanukkah. Pride in one’s nation can be an uneasy thing to wholeheartedly endorse, especially when you know how your country fares diplomatically and how others see members of your nation.
If you need further proof for division over Nationalistic Holidays, look at how the Ancient Rabbis treated Hanukkah. Within the Talmud, one of the longest religious codes in existence, they allotted Hanukkah and its accompanying narrative the equivalent of this paragraph in terms of length.
The Maccabees wanted to institute a fundamentalist regime in the Holy Land and made people undergo forced conversions to Judaism. Jews in America had uneasy times defending the actions of the Stern Gang and other modern Jewish terrorists groups (even Albert Einstein), but certainly no one has any qualms about the Maccabees. Except for the Talmudic Rabbis, of course, who themselves felt threatened by the Hasmonean Dynasty—they left it to the people in later generations to magnify Hanukkah’s importance. If they had their way, they could have very well abolished it.
“BUT THE MACCABEES SAVED JEWISH IDENTITY! OTHERWISE, THEY WOULD ALL BE GREEKS!!!”
No.
Within three generations of that miracle of Hanukkah, the Hasmonean Dynasty instituted by the Maccabees had leaders with names in Greek only (not in Hebrew!) and instituted measures to persecute those who did not agree with THEIR version of their religion. The salvation of the Jewish Religion was due to the ingenuity of those they hunted, not due to them.
Would I abolish Hanukkah? I’m going to be kinder than our Pharisitic friends and say “no”. It is by far the easiest religious holiday to observe that I know of—light candles, recite a minimal amount of blessings. (Holidays with complicated rites can often be forgotten more often than those with simpler ones.)
Why is it so successful?
While I and many other people would not look too fondly on what the Maccabees did later on, or even in their revolution, any good national identity needs a revolution, and as Mao Zedong noted, a revolution is not a dinner party.
Except, of course, when you make a holiday out of it, in which case we can all celebrating winning. And winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing…especially when you are a nation in a struggle for existence. Happy Hanukkah!
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