What's not to enjoy, right? The aesthetics are fab -- lighting candles, eating yummy fried food, eight nights to celebrate and exchange presents. All is good.
But there are two things about Hanukkah that have always troubled me.
First, the fact that American Jews celebrate it in the ways that we do...doesn't sit well. It's a minor holiday, which barely merits a mention in the Gemarah and doesn't event appear in the Tanakh. It was only late in the game that I came to realize how minor in the broad scope of things Hanukkah really is. Growing up, it felt like a big deal, maybe in the number three position after Pesach and Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur in my book. These were the three Jewish occasions in the year when the family would get together, so they loomed larger. And, of course, we got presents, which didn't hurt either. Christmas, though, always lurked in the background: The commercials, the songs, the talk of retail sales, the proliferation of "holiday" (i.e., Christmas) images and symbols...and let's not forget Rudolph! All these things start to sprout up right after Thanksgiving, so no matter how early Hanukkah falls, Christmas beats it to the popular culture punch. On top of all this were the obligatory nods to Hanukkah by these same promoters of Christmas Culture, ostensibly to even things out, to make it "okay" to push Christmas: The creepy public service announcements ("To all our Jewish friends, Channel 2 wishes you a Happy Hanukkah"), big hanukkiot in office buildings, and bags of chocolate gelt at the supermarket checkout lines. All pure afterthought, IMHO. In the end, we know Hanukkah isn't as big a deal as Christmas, but we can't seem to just let it go and celebrate our own things in our own time. (How else to explain the glee with which Adam Sandler's Hanukkah Song was -- and continutes to be -- received by so many American Jews? It speaks at some level to the tacit Christmas envy so many of us seem to have.)
Clearly Hanukkah can't but be affected by the Christmas juggernaut (a fact driven home to me the first time I lived in Israel, during high school, where the total absence of Hanukkah schlock was, in a way, rather jarring). But it makes me feel kind of cheap in a way, when that line between our holiday and their culture start to blur. Why can't Hanukkah be it's own dog? Why can't we be all right with having a minor holiday at the same time that our non-Jewish friends have a major one? Or, alternatively, why not do like the Jews of Britain do and just celebrate Christmas as a kind of secular/national holiday with tree and all? There's a lot to like about the non-religious aspects Christmas, after all. It's the juxtaposition that irks me -- the aggrandizement of our holiday because of the crasser, commercialized aspects of Christmas. (Christmas, of course, is in itself neither a crass nor a commercial holiday. It's quite lovely, actually, and has nothing whatsoever to do with gift-giving. I can get on board with that part of it.) Which leads to...
The second, and more important, thing is that Hanukkah itself, what the holiday is all about, is, well, kind of troubling. Growing up, it was all about the eight-days-of-oil miracle; the Maccabee's short-lived guerilla warfare victory over Antiochus's forces, on the other hand...well I don't quite remember that part being mentioned too much in Sunday School. But seriously: The foreign Seleucid power comes to the Holy Land, defiles the Temple, and is "defeated" a couple of years later by a popular guerrilla campaign. (Some scholars believe, in fact, that the Selecuid's interposed themselves into a Jewish civil confict over the extent of Hellenization among the Temple priests.) So what's the take-home message here? That a small band of guerrilla fighters can take down a larger, conventionally armed occupying power? That religious zealots should be appeased lest they declare open warfare against more assimilationist elements? That it's a bad idea to deny people their religious freedoms because it leads them to violent acts?
Hmmm.
I thought a lot about Hanukkah, actually in December 2001. While everyone was calling for the invasion of Afghanistan, it seemed kind of ironic that our and the Soviets' intervention over there in the 1970s spurred the creation of a force of religiously-motivated guerrilla fighters that, eventually, expelled them from the country. Of course, when the Mujjahidin do it, it's Bad, "against Islam" and needs to be stopped. When we did it, it was a "miracle" worth celebrating for all time.
But I digress.
The point, I suppose, is that the more I look at Hanukkah, the more I'm not really sure what it is we're celebrating. Yes, I know, we're celebrating "miracles," but let's be honest: We're celebrating a military victory. We're thanking God for a can of whoop-ass we opened up 2,000 years ago. We're thanking God for helping us smite our enemies. (What's interesting, though, is that the Hanukkah story doesn't involve any direct divine intervention. One day of oil burns for eight days, but at least as I read the story, God doesn't stick his finger in the pot to make it happen.) All this is fine, but (a) it kind of goes against the grain of holidays being about "peace and light" or what have you; (b) it certianly mitigates the universalism of the holiday (hard to see, for instance, how the Greeks can get on board with us at this time of year); and (c) it kind of irks me that it gets pushed under the carpet. Dreidles, gelt, menorahs, latkes and presents don't exactly say "Boo-yah Jihad."
So in the spirit of the holiday, I'm going to try to think about some new things this year:
- the importance of seeing the dark side of military victories - what one gains today may be lost tomorrow, or may cause the loss of other things tomorrow
- how easy it is to underestimate the power of one's enemies
- occupying powers walk a thin tightrope between doing what they must to maintain control, and oppressing the population to the extent that they threaten that control
- and that it is a miracle that Jews are still around!
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