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Chag Chanukkah Sameach, DailyKOS: Why Chanukkah Is Important In 2022 America--For Us All [1]
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Date: 2022-12-18
I can't find my picture of my cat staring meaningfully at the chanukkiyah, so you get somebody else's cats staring at the chanukkiyah, instead.
Chag Chanukkah sameach, DailyKOS! If you’re Jewish, I hope your latkes are great. Depending on your timezone it may be just about time to light up for First Night. If you’re not Jewish but you clicked anyway, hello, welcome, thank you for being the kind of person who says “hm, interesting title, might be worth a click.”
(A simple note before we move on, because otherwise people are gonna ask in the comments I can feel it in my bones: the correct way to spell Chanukkah is חֲנֻכָּה and technically it should absolutely start with a “ch” because there are two “h” sounds in Hebrew, the chaf and the hay, and Chanukkah starts with a chaf—the one that sounds kind of like you’re clearing your throat. With that said, there is no easy way to transliterate Hebrew into English and I just about had a stroke last year when somebody on Tumblr successfully defended the transliteration “Xanike,” so the “correct” transliteraton is more or less “the way it sounds to you.”)
If you don’t know the story of Chanukkah, you should. Let’s recap.
In the 300s BCE, Alexander the Great conquered Judea (modern day southern Israel) and began slowly turning it into a Greek state. This basically consisted of “hey, we have these gods and these foods and this language, but you do you. It’s a free country, metaphorically speaking.” A slow creep of assimilation, as it were. In 332 BCE, he died, and Judea fell under the auspices of the Selucid Greek empire and, eventually, a king called Antiochus. Antiochus immediately said “screw your G-d, screw your Torah, screw your culture, I’m installing a statue of Zeus in your Temple and you’re going to eat nonkosher food and worship my god whether you like it or not, and if you don’t, you can get wrecked. By which I mean executed.”
(You might be starting to see where the title of this diary came from.)
A lot of the ancient Jews just went along with it. They didn’t want to die, and who does? Others had started absorbing the Greek culture and assimilating, and they didn’t really see a problem with any of this.
(Sounds familiar, ne?)
Enter Mattathias and his son Judah Maccabee—“the hammer.” And his other four sons, but we remember Judah as being the one leading the charge in all this, so he’s the one who usually gets mentioned. (The others, if you’d like to know, were Eleazer, Simon, John, and Johnathan.) Mattathias was a priest who was deeply unhappy with the whole “my way or the highway, and by highway I mean death” attitude Antiochus brought to Judea, and he staged a revolt in 167 BCE. He fought for over a year until his death, and in 166 Judah took up the mantle and continued the fight until, in 164, the Selucids were driven out of the Temple and it was repurified and rededicated—the meaning of the word “chanukkah” is “dedication.” Judah wouldn’t live to see the end of the revolt, but in the 150s the Selucids were entirely driven out, and religious and cultural liberty was restored. But first—let’s get back to that rededication.
So Judah and his relatively tiny band of fighters, who absolutely should not have been able to pull this off, get into the Temple and prepare to get rid of the idols and statues and relight the menorah, the Eternal Light. Unfortunately, what they find is the place is an absolute mess—there are nonkosher animals running free, there have been orgies in honor of the Greek gods the Temple was repurposed for, the sacrificial altar has been smashed and the menorah hasn’t been lit in years. This is a very big deal because the menorah was never, ever supposed to go out, ever, for anything. Thing is, it had to be lit with extra-pure olive oil, and there was no ready supply to hand thanks to the Selucids. Here’s where the Chanukkah miracle comes in: hidden in the ruins of the altar, they found a cruse containing a single day’s supply of oil. So Judah basically said “G-d has gotten us this far, let’s light the menorah and trust Him to see us through as we clean up, and send messengers for oil” and so they did.
And the oil burned. And burned. And burned. For eight days. Friendly reminder, not only was this enough oil for only one day, but the menorah had been completely empty. There wasn’t even any old oil residue in there to give it a boost. And the oil continued to burn until a fresh supply could be brought, and that is the miracle of Chanukkah.
So why am I posting this on DKos, which is rather pointedly a political site, not a religious one?
Because in 2022, as both a Jew and a democratic socialist, I feel a whole hell of a lot like Judah Maccabee.
My right to worship freely is under attack by a group that wants me to do it their way, and only their way, or else. My right to live my life as a queer person is being legislated out of existence by that group. My right to vote is under siege. Antisemitic hate crimes have reached their highest-ever recorded number in the US, and just today a Jewish man was attacked in Central Park by someone screaming “Kanye 2024.” Some of the people who should be on my side in this, upholding freedom and democracy, instead long ago assimilated into that toxic tyrannical group and are fighting with, instead of against, them. What can I do? Isn’t it hopeless? What’s the point?
The point is, the point is, the oil would have remained in the altar forever if a tiny, statistically-all-but-impossible-to-win group hadn’t stood up and said “not today, not on my watch.” The point is, without years of hard work and creativity, the rights of Judea to religious and cultural freedom would never have been restored. The point is history doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme. We had swastikas and Confederate flags in the Capitol building rather than idols in the Temple and Donald Trump rather than Antiochus, but if you read this story and went “irrelevant, no parallels here,” I have to question how good a job your English teachers did at teaching you themes.
The point is, we’re living the Maccabean revolt all over again.
The point is, that means we can win.
Because here’s the thing I didn’t mention before. That teeny-tiny band of Maccabees?
After a few wins, they started peeling away the assimilated Jews, the ones who were quietly keeping their heads down and hoping to survive. The five Maccabees became an entire army.
Fight. Vote. Make the phone calls, look for the Democratic challengers in every possible race (don’t run, can’t win). Take the victories we can, and keep going.
I look forward to the year when we can say we’ve won—when it’s not just a matter of having held the Senate (much as the Maccabees held the Temple), but of having successfully defended the Constitution and moved forward into a new era of liberty.
In the meantime, DailyKOS:
Happy Chanukkah. May your lights burn bright.
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