H anukkah . The temple defiled, the one jar of oil, enough to last one day, mir- aculously lasting eight days. We recreate this every year to celebrate the miracle and the victory over dark forces that it represented. Let me let you in on a little secret. I know religious scholars and even rabbis who don’t really believe it. Neither, it seems, did many people who were around at the time or soon after: the documents that describe what happened during the rebellion in 164 BCE don’t seem to discuss a miracle at all. Maccabees I and Maccabees II are contemporary accounts of the events and they don’t mention it. Neither does Joseph- us, who wrote famous accounts of Jewish history in the first century. In one of them, Antiquities of the Jews , he mentions that the festival was called “Lights,” but assumes that it was because “this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us, and that thence was the name given to that festival.” It is only in the Talmud, written hundreds of years later, that we see the story that we now know as central to our celebration first appear. If we set aside the miracle of the light and turn our attention to other parts of the story, what we find is a struggle over assimila- tion, a surprise military victory—itself likely
Hanukkah is about many things— self-determination and freedom, but also Jews fighting other Jews. The parallels to today are alarming.
By Avi Finegold
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