Judging by advertisements in newspapers, including the Jewish press with its special pull-out sections featuring gifts for Chanuka, you would think this holiday is a Jewish version of Christmas. The Christmas tree has even been known as the Chanuka bush.
In truth, Chanuka is a Jewish holiday, whose origin has been obscured by the fact that it frequently occurs close to Christmas. Moreover, the Festival of Lights, as it often is called, refers to what believers call the miracle of a single container of oil, which was to burn in the Temple in Jerusalem for just one night, yet lasted for eight.
Chanuka is down-played by Jewish people themselves, who do not consider it a major holiday of the caliber of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, or Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, or Passover, celebrating the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.
In Israel as well as in the US and other places where Jews live, Chanuka is marked by lighting candelabras, gift giving and eating special sweet desert-type foods. In recent years, Israeli youngsters have been participating in a singing contest of holiday songs.
Yet had it not been for the events that the holiday celebrates, it is likely that there would be no Judaism today, and Jesus of Nazareth would have faced a much harder battle in the early days of Christianity.
Chanuka is about religious freedom. Forget the latkes and the other yummies. Religious freedom in the Jewish homeland was won some 2,200 years ago, when a Jewish priest and his sons, joined by another group of worshipers, overthrew the Greek ruler of their little country and declared independence, religious and political.
Alexander the Great expanded the Greek empire by conquering Syria, the province of Palestine, and Egypt. He was a benevolent ruler, who permitted those under his rule to observe their religions without interference from their conquerors. Ironically, Hellenic culture attracted the Jews or Judeans, many of whom adopted its philosophy, language, even Greek fashion. Freedom to worship, as we also have learned in modern times, produces assimilation.
Eventually, Alexander divided the empire among his generals. Decades later, Antiochus IV, who ruled Palestine, adopted a different policy. He forbade Jews to observe their religion. In the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, of which today only the Western Wall remains, he installed a Hellenistic high priest, brought in pigs - a non-kosher animal - to desecrate the temple, and banished the Judean priests.
Jews were forced to observe their religion in hiding. When word came that Greek soldiers were on the way, the Jews would pretend to gamble. This is observed today through the game of spinning the dreidel, a small wooden object, and making bets with chocolate money wrapped in golden paper - a joyous occasion for children.
A Judean priest named Matethias, or Matityahu in Hebrew, Matthew in English, of the Chashmonaim family, rose against the Greeks with the help of his sons, led by his eldest, Juda. In time Juda, or Yehuda in Hebrew, became known as The Maccabee. Yet it was not his family name. It contains the initials of a declaration in Hebrew, the language of the land, stating, “Who is like you among the gods, Jehova?” In all likelihood it was a war cry to arouse the people to fight for their cause of religious freedom and independence.
The small band of Judeans won the war. The Greeks withdrew in defeat. The Judeans cleaned the Temple of the filth and debris left by the conquerors and restored it to its position as the home of their faith. Eventually the Chashmonaim established a dynasty of kings who ruled the land.
But freedom did not last. The Romans conquered the Greek empire, as well as Judea. They destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the Judeans to the far corners of the Roman empire.
The Jews had been exiled before by conquerors, such as the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Of the twelve tribes of the Israelites, ten were lost. The Roman exile was the final one. But for a trickle of Jews now and then, they did not return to that little land by the Mediterranean for some 1,800 years.
The holiday of Chanuka and the memory of those it celebrates deserve better than they are getting.
