Have a meaningful Hanukah!

Growing up in America, I used to think a lot about Hanukah. Hanukah is a really weird time to be Jewish in America for someone who’s passionate about being Jewish while not being brought up religious or in any sort of insular Jewish setting.

On the one hand, I had Christians suddenly conscious, all around me, that Jews exist. This was in general contrast to the unspoken Christian-Jewish agreement, in force during 11 months of the year, for Jews to be as invisible as possible in America. Since Jews in America mostly see themselves through Christian American eyes, this has a big impact on our self-perception. I’m sure we can all share stories of great conversations, but here is one of my favorites: once some friends and I were asked during Xmas season (or perhaps by then it was already being called Holiday season), “Are ya’ll Christian or Hanukan?” And of course we replied, “Hanukan – we celebrate beer.” I also used to have people asking me left and right, year after year during December, What does Hanukah celebrate? and the favorite question that I got at least once every December, What’s the difference between Jews and Christians? / What do Jews believe in? / Jews don’t accept J*sus as the Messiah, right? As a child and young adult, if I hadn’t been so downright freaked out by that sort of attention, I would have loved it.

And on the other hand, we Jews had to come up with some sort of narrative about the Hanukah narrative, which is to say that we either had to go all out celebrating it, turning it part and parcel into the Jewish Xmas, or we had to justify not doing so. The explanation that Hanukah is a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar is decidedly weak when it’s one of the few Jewish holidays that most Jewish kids even know about. Besides the oil-miracle story being totally lame and obviously made up, the whole thing (at least the real elements of it) is very un-PC. Look: you’ve got a family that’s part of an hereditary priesthood waging a minority-supported war against the founders of western civilization in order to impose a theocracy over a proto-ethno-national entity. Exilic Judaism despises all of this, every aspect of it, not to mention all the parts about the Temple, which was totally glossed over in Sunday School … because, and I think this should be clear to everyone, if they’d taught us for real in Sunday School about rededicating the Temple, then they’d also have had to teach us about the importance of the Temple in Judaism. And there is no Judaism without the Temple (but I’ll get to that soon).

All of the above is why I stopped with the Hanukah bullshit many years ago. Yes, I still accept gifts on Hanukah, and occasionally give them too, but my sardonic “line” has for more than half a decade been that Hanukah celebrates the birthday of Moses and that it is therefore the holiest day of the Jewish year, because Moses is our Messiah. I was never jealous of Xmas – it annually turns millions of ordinarily good people into raving lunatics – I was just trying to be funny effortlessly and deflect the hassle of having to care.

Since making Aliyah, I’ve come to see it differently. It’s well known that when a Jew chooses to live outside the land of Israel, no matter how religious he pretends to be, it’s as if he has no god. But there are a lot of valuable ideas in Judaism with portability that can be applied to life outside the land of Israel. Hanukah is not one of those things. Jews who attempt to celebrate Hanukah outside of Israel are therefore not only making themselves out to be idolaters, but they’re mocking the rest of us who do live here and who do cherish what Hanukah is really all about.

Hanukah is a period to celebrate the beginning of a great dynastic family that ruled this country for over a century, the Hashmonaim. It’s kind of like if the Romanovs or the Tudors had decided to create holidays that celebrated the imposition of their rule, except the Hashmonaim were also priests – high priests after defeating the Seleucid enemies – and so performed the Temple services for the Jewish nation in a time when we didn’t need rabbis to tell us what to believe and how to believe it.

The Hashmonaim dynasty, according to extant texts, started gloriously and ended shamefully. It’s not difficult to list their faults: they practiced forced conversions (viz, the Idumeans); they usurped the title King, which rightfully only belongs to the House of David; they quickly Hellenized and became disconnected from much of the common people; most awfully, they exhausted so much time and effort in succession struggles that they sowed the demise of their own regime and of the practicability of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel (it was a direct result of one such internal conflict that ascendant Rome, a regional power and traditional ally of Hashmonaim-led Judea against the Seleucid Empire, was invited to become a power broker in this country). Despite it all, I choose to celebrate the Hashmonaim during the week of Hanukah (and during the rest of the year) because, taken all together, I believe that their successes outweigh their failures.

In the time of the Hashmonaim, when the Temple functioned daily and kohanim performed sacrifices on behalf of all of us, the Jewish nation had a physical and spiritual center. As disgusting and as rotten to the core as the later Hashmonaim “kings” were, they knew what the mitzvot were and what the concept of mitzvot is all about (hint to Americans of the Mosaic extraction: mitzvah does not mean “good deed”). And although they didn’t follow some of the big ones (eg, don’t murder), they at least didn’t try to add any to the count.

So, people. Hanukah is not about giving and receiving gifts (duh). It’s also not about dreidels. It’s also not about candles or oil. It’s a holiday of rededicating the Temple to serve as a Jewish center and, in the absence of a Temple, it’s a holiday of rededicating ourselves to the cause of restoring Jewish sovereignty to the Temple Mount. Let us all, every single one of us, ask ourselves and each other, on this Hanukah and every Kislev until that goal is attained, what we have done to attain it.