Year 5, Piece Forty-Three: 19. Yellow Blue

Hanukkah, Uncut

Hanukkah is an otherwise minor Jewish holiday, commemorating a military victory that happened after biblical times. Hanukkah has become more notable in recent years for its proximity to Christmas, both holidays celebrating light in the darkness that have taken on some troubling consumerist customs that perhaps have little to do with the original holiday. But this year, Hanukkah actually falls closer to a different holiday that it may have more in common with:

Hanukkah and Thanksgiving are both holidays based on old stories celebrating religious freedom fighters while glossing over some inconvenient bloodshed. 

In the case of the Hanukkah story, bloodshed is certainly front and center if you tell the part leading up to the oil that lasted eight days. It’s just easy to miss exactly who was involved in that bloodshed. It’s a story of some heinous persecution to be sure, but with some questionable methods to overcome it.

In the 2nd Century BCE, a king from the Greek empire named Antiochus came to the land of Judea and violently prohibited the practice of Judaism on pain of death. He did it pretty ruthlessly, burning all sacred texts, installing statues of other gods in the deeply monotheistic Temple, sacrificing pigs on the altars, and hanging circumcised infants and killing their mothers. 

Like I said, heinous stuff. Stuff that would convince most anyone to assimilate to Hellenistic culture as a matter of survival. 

After years of being cut off from their religion and culture, many forced from their homes, many losing family, many Jews did just that: assimilate. Apparently some even tried to uncircumcise themselves so they could exercise naked in the new gymnasium in Jerusalem without shame. Yes, this is detailed in the Book of Maccabees. The Book of Maccabees talks a lot about circumcision. 

So where do the Maccabees come into the story? Eventually officers from King Antiochus make it to a town called Modin, where they seek out a Jewish priest and community leader named Mattityahu. Mattityahu had five sons, including one named Judah who had the nickname Maccabee, which means “hammer” in Hebrew. These officers appeal to Mattityahu to step up as the first in his town to fulfill the King’s decree of making a public sacrifice, thereby disavowing his faith. They tell Mattityahu that all of the Jews left in Jerusalem have done it, and that if he and his sons do it, they will be rewarded handsomely. 

Mattityahu refused. He shouted in a booming voice to all assembled that he and his sons would never, ever abandon their faith or heed the King’s words. He dropped the figurative mic and started to walk away. But then he saw someone coming up to make a public sacrifice. A fellow Jew.

And that is when Mattityahu snapped.  

Mattityahu became “inflamed with zeal” and killed that Jew on the spot, slaying him on the altar no less. He also killed one of the King’s officers and pulled down the altar.  Then he cried for whoever else is “zealous of the law” and still maintains the covenant to follow him. He and his sons and his followers abandoned everything they ever had in the city and fled to the mountains, seeking out others who had also fled persecution to band together as an army and become the Maccabees.

And so in that version of the story, the uprising that would save a religion began with the spontaneous murder of a member of that religion on an altar.

I can see how a priest might be irate at his fellow Jews for adopting Hellenistic practices. How after years of oppression and violence, and hopped up on the adrenaline of his own refusal, Mattityahu might be overcome with aggression. But if that was the first Jew killed by another Jew in this uprising, it wasn’t the last. This newly forming army went on a rampage, as detailed in the Book of Maccabees 1:2:46-49: 

So they joined their forces, and smote sinful men in their anger, and wicked men in their wrath: but the rest fled to the heathen for succour. Then Mattathias and his friends went round about, and pulled down the altars: And what children soever they found within the coast of Israel uncircumcised, those they circumcised valiantly. They pursued also after the proud men, and the work prospered in their hand.

Maybe smiting “sinful” and “wicked” people sounds justified, but it also sounds like a way to describe assimilated Jews. Can you imagine being a Jew that has taken on new practices from a state oppressor, whether on fear of death or even personal preference, and then to have bands of zealots from your own people come after you? Or to “valiantly” circumcise you or your children? The courage and might that the Maccabees summoned to fight the power and ultimately take back their way of life is perhaps miraculous. But it’s hard to dismiss this violence against other Jews as mere collateral damage. 

I had never actually taken a close look at this text before. Written by an anonymous Jewish author some fifty years after the events it details around 100 BCE, the original Hebrew of the Book of Maccabees has not survived. It is not considered part of the Tanach, which means it is not “canonical” in Judaism, though it is a canonical text in Catholicism and some Orthodox traditions (Christian Orthodox, that is). There is also a second Book of Maccabees written a bit later by a different author that details some of the same events. Of course like any book, the Book of Maccabees has a point of view. It’s hard to tell from reading it whether that point of view is in admiration, condemnation, or strict narration. And we can’t know that every part of the story is historical fact. But while the Book of Maccabees isn’t considered canon, the Maccabean Revolt is historically corroborated. So it gives the Book of Maccabees a different kind of authority. 

But here is a funny thing about the Book of Maccabees: the reason this book detailing Greek oppression still exists today is because it was translated into Greek for the Septuigent, a compendium of all the sacred Jewish texts at the time.

Which means that a huge part of why we have this story about not assimilating is because living among other cultures got this text translated and preserved.

And that is the Power of Communication, the Power of Words: Yellow Blue. Hanukkah is in many ways a holiday about power. And like most Jewish holidays, it is also about words, like the blessings we sing over the candles that we have sung for millenia. But the fact that we still celebrate this holiday is its own miracle of words. Words meticulously passed down by rabbis and scholars in the oral tradition, and also preserved by scholars in the other cultures we lived among. The Power of the Word is a power from people in diaspora. It is a power developed out of necessity after being forced from the land again and again, to forge a connection that could not be broken by geography or even extinguished by murder. It is a profound power, and one that would come to be horribly abused. In the land once called Judea, the Power of the Word still has people who would otherwise be brothers fighting, killing each other with state sponsorship. 

In some ways the bloodshed around Thanksgiving can also be linked back to that power. 165 years after the Maccabees took back the Temple, Jesus would be born to a Jewish family and spark another religion with so much beauty that would also come to inspire so much bloodshed. A religion that 1600 years later would come to the shores of Turtle Island along with Christians who were being persecuted by fellow Christians at home, who would then use the Power of the Word to extinguish the people indigenous to that land and take it from them. 

I don’t have a solution. I am not proposing to cancel Hanukkah or even Thanksgiving for that matter. But if this is to be a holiday about celebrating light in the darkness, we have to look at the darkness too. Jews have been celebrating Hanukkah for 2,185 years. That is its own miracle, that people could tell stories and have discussions that were recorded and debated by rabbis and celebrated for so many years. I have so much love for that tradition, for the true magic in that transmission. And like everything in life, it is not without shadow, without pain. 

And so I light Hanukkah candles. Not to celebrate or repudiate the Maccabees, but to stand in an unbroken chain with my ancestors, to link light to light. I make this choice to honor my own Judaism, even while making other painful choices to break tradition and physical links with those ancestors in ways that the Maccabees might have valiantly tried to correct. 

Whatever the story, the text we have is the text that was written down, that was spoken by the people who were allowed to be at the table. The Book of Maccabees would not pass the Bechdel Test, which means there is so much more to the story. And so if we are to maintain a real connection with these or any traditions, and if we are to repair and transcend the violence around them, we have to bring in the perspective of the women, witches, and queers, to intuit them where they haven’t been recorded. 

In the context of ritual, we can take symbolic acts to honor tradition while subverting it, or at least to complicate it. Acknowledging that there is always another way, another perspective.

How to perform any Jewish ritual is always the source of much rabbinic discussion. The way we light Hanukkah candles was actually settled two thousand years ago as a debate between two schools of thought, Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. 

Beit Hillel lit one candle on the first night and added an additional candle each subsequent night, arguing that sanctity increases. Beit Shammai started with eight candles and lit one fewer candle each night, corresponding to the dwindling number of remaining days. As with most talmudic debates, the way of the optimistic followers of Hillel won and has become the tradition.

For the last couple of years in my home, we have done both. Tonight will be the last night of Hanukkah, so the full chanukiah you see in the animation above was actually from the first night of Hanukkah (“chanukiah” is the technical term for what we put the candles in, since it is commemorating the original menorah which had seven branches). 

This year I find myself favoring Shammai, decreasing the light. There is plenty to be pessimistic about, to be sure. But what I like is that it feels more in tune with the story of the miracle of the menorah. This story doesn’t even show up in either of the Book of Maccabees, but in Talmudic description of the holiday centuries later. 

The story goes that after a few years of fighting, the Maccabees finally reclaimed Jerusalem and the Temple. Of course they found it totally desecrated, with only one intact cruse of oil left, enough to light the menorah for only one day. It would take eight days to produce more oil to light it again. This was a problem, since the menorah was supposed to be constantly lit, a living symbol of eternal light. Then a miracle: the light lasted for eight days.  

But what did it feel like each of those days? It probably didn’t feel like the menorah would burn forever, but more like it was almost always about to go out. Eight nights to go until we have new oil. Seven, six, five. Are we going to make it? Four, three, two, one, and the oil is ready.

Starting with eight and decreasing reminds us to appreciate what we have and to sanctify it, not to take it for granted. That making and consecrating olive oil takes land and trees and labor and time, and these are not infinite resources. To really appreciate each candle, down to the last one. To feel with that candle the precarity of tradition, maybe even the precarity of compassion, and to feel the responsibility to steward it. To know that that one light is still enough to light so many more.

So this year we are doing both: one chanukiah with an additional candle each night, and another chanukiah with one fewer candle each night to honor the light diminishing but not disappearing.  And to celebrate a plurality of opinions, ideas. To remember that there are as many perspectives as there are Jews, or as the saying goes, even more: ask two Jews, get three opinions. I have a multitude of opinions just inside myself.

So for this holiday that is a powerful and complicated testament to the Power of Words, I offer my own words. They are not perfect, as none ever are. There is perhaps another longer essay here than I can manage to write in a week, or maybe even a more succinct one. Or maybe it is a series of essays, or a whole book. Hanukkah will come around again, and maybe I will write it. And my words will join with all the other words written and spoken and preserved and lost and intuited about this and every other human story, a story we are all still writing together, passing flame to flame.