Light over Might

Hanukkah 5783

Rabbi Paul Saul, Shuvah Yisrael, West Hartford, CT

One of the primary messages of Hanukkah is to avoid assimilation at all costs. But how often do we hear that the Hanukkah story is about religious freedom? As if any religion would have been OK, so long as everyone got to choose for him or herself. Is that really true? Can we possibly imagine old Mattathias, leader of the Maccabees, accepting a compromise whereby the east wing of the temple would have offered kosher sacrifice, while, in the spirit of pluralism, the Hellenistic Syrians were featuring pork barbeque on the west side?

Let’s make no mistake; the Maccabees did not fight for religious freedom, but to cleanse the land for the worship of the one true God of Israel. While they fought to end the Greek cultic practices imposed through the military tyranny of Antiochus, the Syrian Greek ruler, they also fought to end the long-felt effects of assimilation. The hard-to-swallow truth is that many Jews then, as today, envied the freedom and fanfare of the nations, and were all too happy to put off the yoke of Torah. The war opposed the attractive popular spectacle of uncircumcised Jewish athletes in public sport as much as it did the forced sacrifices to Zeus in the Great Temple. It should not surprise us then that the greatest miracle of Hanukkah is not the immediacy of military triumph, but the sustenance of the divine light.

Perhaps the tradition surrounding how we light the Hanukkah menorah, or hanukkiah, can illuminate (pun intended) this point. One candle is lit the first night with the number of candles increasing each successive night. This is the tradition handed down from the School of Hillel (Shabbat 21b) and accepted by most practicing Jews in the world today. The School of Shammai, in contrast, held that all eight candles should be lit on the first night, and the number of candles should diminish by one each successive night. This view seems logical since each night the sanctified oil used to light the menorah in the Temple would have diminished. But then this would assume that there was enough oil to light the menorah in the first place.

Hillel argues that each night more oil was necessary to light the lamp, so the magnitude of the miracle increased. This follows the Jewish concept of the ascendancy of holiness. Since lighting the Hanukkah candles is a holy act, each night the holiness increases and so therefore should the number of candles.

The two schools of thought punctuate the two-pronged nature of the Hanukkah miracle as identified in the prayer Haneirot Halelu, recited after lighting the menorah each night. The first part states, “these lights we kindle to recall the wondrous triumphs and the miraculous victories wrought through your holy priests for our ancestors in ancient days at this season.” At Hanukkah we acknowledge that God, as is often his style, “gave the strong over into the hands of the weak.” The second part of the prayer goes on to say, “these lights are sacred through all eight days of Hanukkah. We may not put them to ordinary use but are to look upon them and thus be reminded to thank and praise you for the wondrous miracle of our deliverance.”  It encourages us to look upon the miracle of maintaining the Jewish people in the face of ongoing assimilationist influences. The real miracle of the lights is that they do not end in eight days; rather, we are encouraged to become participants with God in our own spiritual deliverance by directing our attention to praising him and remembering him as he remembers us.

We might infer that the school of Shammai emphasizes the military victory. Though important, however, the effects of physical victory quickly fade, leaving few lasting results. We have seen this in our own times. How often has the U.S. military machine removed a rogue dictator only to fight the “democratic regime” that succeeds him within a quarter of a century? In the same way, history records that the Maccabees, the so-called champions of religious freedom, became strong-armed dictators of religious oppression in Israel during the century that followed. So by lighting eight candles on the first night and decreasing the number each night after, we observe the diminishing power of military might.

Spiritual power, on the other hand, begins modestly and is often barely noticed, then increases over time and slowly displays its lasting effects. By lighting the candles in ascending order as Hillel suggests, we illuminate (there I go again) the more efficacious nature of the spiritual miracle—the power of the spirit grows day by day.

As it was for the Maccabees, so it is for us. We have a culture that continually attempts to seduce us into believing that true power is in wealth and influence. We American Jews try our hardest to look and act like our neighbors. We crowd the malls this time of year with the same deliberate worship of consumerism as our neighbors, losing the true spiritual meaning of Hanukkah. 

But let me not just pick on our Jewish people. What of the Christians across the country who advocate boycotting retail stores unless they put the name Christmas back in their holiday advertisements? I think I missed something here. Shouldn’t believers in Yeshua boycott stores that even imply any connection between the Christ Child and consumerism? After all, wasn’t Yeshua the greatest counter-culturist of them all? When the exuberant crowds called out for a military hero like Judah Maccabee, didn’t he respond by laying down his own life? When Caesar, like Antiochus, sought to grasp divinity and make himself the object of worship, didn’t Yeshua selflessly empty himself into the form of a servant, only to be exalted to the right hand of God on high?

Shouldn’t we then as Messianic Jews during this season become imitators of Yeshua, separating ourselves from the basest tendencies of our culture? Can’t we suffer the indignation of being different from our neighbors for the sake of God’s kingdom? Do we seek after the fading victories of military might and conspicuous wealth, or will we seek God’s higher standards? 

This year as we light the menorah on the eighth night of Hanukkah, let’s remember the greatest miracle of the season, that God has sustained his light among his people Israel despite the best efforts of both militant tyrants and seductive assimilationists, recalling the words from the traditional reading for Chanukah: “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).