The Truth About Hanukkah

It’s Hanukkah and I am in hiding. I don’t want to see Facebook posts and news items about weird creative Hanukkah candelabras in which each flame stands for some new-fangled liberal cause. I don’t want to see the significance of potato pancakes explained to senators or read that Obama is Jewish in his soul.

I want to keep Hanukkah close to my heart, away from those who would tamper with its true meaning which is this:

The Jews fought a war against assimilation and won.

Those flickering Hanukkah lights have nothing to do with equality, integration, and multiculturalism. They have nothing to do with coexistence. They have nothing to do with charity. They have nothing to do with peace.

The candles, in fact, have everything to do with insulating the Jewish people from outside influences which might contaminate them and draw them away from their God.

The story of Hanukkah, the real story, and not the pretend stories that people tell you, begins in 174 BCE when Antiochus IV decided to consolidate his reign by imposing a single culture and religion on those who lived in the region of the Seleucid Empire. Seeing Judaism as a threat, Antiochus outlawed Jewish practice and installed Jews who had come under the influence of Greek culture (Hellenism) in positions of Jewish influence in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

Torah scrolls were burned. Many Jews were killed for refusing to give in to Antiochus’ decrees. They would die rather than give up their God and their faith in favor of Hellenism.

The altar of the Temple was defiled by a Hellenist Jew and that was the tipping point. Matthias killed this man with his sword and then it was all-out war. The Jews formed legions and fought back against those who would destroy their faith.

They fought against integration.

They fought against multiculturalism.

They fought against coexistence.

They fought assimilation—the outside influences that would drown out the voice and spark of the Jewish soul within.

And won.

On Hanukkah we light the candles to advertise the miracle with which our God graced us and this was a miracle having to do with religious practice and the Jewish Temple. After its defilement, the Temple had to be cleansed and restored. The golden candelabra known as the Eternal Light, meant to burn around the clock, needed to be kindled once more. But the candelabra had been stolen and there was no pure olive oil to be found.

1280px-Arc_de_Triumph_copy
Detail from the Arch of Titus.

 

A candelabrum was quickly fashioned from some other metal and miraculously, a small cruse of pure oil was found. It would take eight days to procure more olive oil. We are not talking about just any olive oil, but oil that bore the seal of the Jewish High Priest. The seal meant the oil was ritually pure. The small cruse of oil that had been found lasted the entire 8 days it took to obtain more of this ritually pure oil, the only type acceptable for kindling the Ner Tamid, the Temple candelabra.

The Hanukkah lights are thus kindled in a place where it can be seen from the street to advertise the religious miracle that God granted the Jewish people. This is the main religious observance connected to Hanukkah: advertising the miracle of the oil that lasted long after it should have burned out. The miracle revolves around the restoration of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The miracle is directly tied to the victory of the Jewish people over Hellenist culture, which threatened to destroy JEWISH culture.

What is Hellenist culture? The Greeks worshipped the beauty of the body, human form, and sports. They loved philosophy and just government and invented the concept of democracy.

There is some overlap between Greek thought and Jewish thought and it is for this reason that Hellenism attracted so many Jews during the time of the reign of Antiochus. Greek thought, like Jewish thought, was considered advanced, high level. But the similarities between Greek and Jewish thought were superficial. And insidious.

Today we hear that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. We hear Israeli leaders state that Israel is both Jewish and democratic. But Judaism and democracy bear only a cosmetic resemblance to each other. A close analysis of democracy shows the philosophy is antithetical to Judaism in myriad ways. By definition, a Jewish state cannot be democratic.

Democracy, unlike Judaism, has no natural built-in safeguards to protect it from subverting religious law, for example. According to democratic norms, for instance, if enough people want gay marriage legalized, gay marriage is legalized, despite prohibitions against homosexuality in all three major religions.

By the same token, if enough Israeli voters wish to give the Arabs a state on Jewish land, this is what will be done, since the majority rules. If the majority of UN member states say that Palestine must be created on Jewish land and Israel is a UN member state, so it shall be. This would happen in a democracy despite the religious narrative of the bible and despite the unequivocal historic and archaeological evidence that Israel is the indigenous land of the Jewish people.

What is right and just, does not, in a democracy, much matter. What matters is what the majority of the people, at a given time, have decided. In a democracy, the desire and will of the people supersede and trump God’s will every time. Hellenist Jews, multicultural Jews, integrated and assimilated Jews accept this as the natural course of things. What is popular at this point in time, shall rule.

Hanukkah stands for the rejection of these populist Hellenist values in favor of eternal norms created by God.

If we are to succeed as a Jewish State, we will need to stop pretending about the meaning of Hanukkah. It has nothing to do with coexistence or adopting the values of a world gone mad. Hanukkah is about cherishing our own Jewish religion and bringing it close. It is about understanding that we are the Chosen People and that our land is our land, our religion our religion, our beliefs our own forever.

Hanukkah is about nothing more and nothing less. And shall remain so for the ages.

Forever.

78 thoughts on “The Truth About Hanukkah”

  1. WOW!!! What a brilliant article. Hits the nail on the head!!! Have never commented before on this site, but couldn’t resist giving our congratulations on a beautiful, well argued point of view. Fabulous!

    1. Well, that’s a valid perspective. The rabbis did frown on emphasizing the military victory. That is the reason I did not emphasize it in my piece, but stressed the issues of Hellenization and religious observance.

  2. On the other hand, there is evidence for the importance of the rule of the majority in determining Halakhah, for example :

    http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0013_0_13065.html

    https://www.ou.org/torah/mitzvot/taryag/mitzvah78/

    So I don’t think it would be true to say that Judaism and democracy are necessarily completely mutually exclusive.
    Not that the ancient Greek model of democracy was what we, today, understand as democracy, anyway – excluding, as it did, women and slaves.

      1. Isn’t there a midrash about how the Sanhedrin overruled a position (because it wasn’t based on Torah) argued by a member who performed miracles (acts by God, and accepted by the rest as such) to prove God’s endorsement of his position?

          1. He is talking about the aggada on Bava Metziah 59b about Rabbi Eliezer versus the Sages about the impure oven. Although Rabbi Eliezer performed miracles to gain G-dly endorsement for his opinion on the law, the Sages said “halacha states the majority rules, and we are the majority”. Ultimately, G-d agrees and says, ‘laughing’, “my children have defeated me”.
            This is, however, a story about how Torah jurisprudence works, as commanded by G-d. It only superficially resembles the democratic notion of majority rule.
            That said…as I understand things, as long as Torah law was enshrined as the “constitution” I don’t see why our “king” couldn’t be a democratic body with a Prime Minister or President at the helm.
            But, yes, your main point stands about the conflict between secular, hefkerveldt, assimilationist culture and values versus remaining true to the Torah’s cultures (yes, plural) and values.

        1. Rabbi Eliezer’s position was *completely* based on Torah, but so was that of the Sages, and halacha states that the majority opinion wins.

      2. But the majority – at least of the Sanhedrin – could, and did, determine the interpretation of that law.
        Come to think of it, when that law became the law of the Jewish People, it was because the people accepted it, at Mt. Sinai, when they agreed ???? ?????.

          1. True. But obviously even that was open to interpretation. The existence of the different opinions in the Talmud prove that.

            1. Not really. The mesora is handed down from rabbi to rabbi. It’s why books written by rabbis are forwarded by letters of approbation from widely accepted scholars. There has to be a chain. There has to be a mesora and wide acceptance for a view to become mainstream, valid.

                    1. I think we are rather at cross purposes here, Varda. My point is merely that the opinion of the majority DOES have a force, in Halakhah. Of course the law has many faces, and the opinion had to stay within the boundaries of the law. But someone had to decide what those boundaries were. And that’s where majority opinion plays its part, because in almost every case, we are told that the Halakhah is in accordance with the majority opinion.

                    2. ahad_ha_amoratsim

                      The indisputable fact was that the differing schools disagreed over who had the correct mesorah, and the majority vote was over which school, based on its scholarship, reasoning, and ability to trace its mesorah, was most likely to be reporting the correct mesorah.

    1. ahad_ha_amoratsim

      Democracy means everyone gets a vote. Halacha is and was determined by consensus among the qualified Sages of the generation, not by majority vote of Jews, even free Jewish men, who did not know or did not care, or who had the Torah equivalent of a third grade education.

  3. Jews were free to choose Greek culture for 150+ years (ever since Alexander the Great), and in all that time the Maccabees never decided to revolt. Only when Antiochus brutally suppressed any practice of Judaism did they revolt. Sounds to me like the revolt was perfectly compatible with the ideas of tolerance and multiculturalism.

    1. Shlomo to say they didn’t revolt is not exactly true and uses the same type of argument used to condemn Jews who died in the Holocaust like “sheep to slaughter”. The history of the times show that as long as the assimilation war was fought on the educational front, that is where the Jewish religious leaders fought. The history is full of manipulations over who would be high priest, the authority of the Sanhedrin, etc. There were also local events over the excesses of individual Greek or Hellenist leaders. When the Greeks raised the ante and began institutionalized religious oppression and forced assimilation then the Chashmonaim led the people in the only possible path, physical revolt. It is insulting to the spiritual fortitude of our ancestors, whether 2000 years ago or one generation ago to make light of their spiritual acts of resistence. To the believing Jew, this is the real battlefield and the physical is only an indicator.

  4. Varda it was a simply case of resistance of a culture which wanted to suppress the culture of the Jews. That is not a resistance of multiculturalism………or even integration.

    I sense youre conflating resistance of the Greeks with the current defence of Israel against the Arabs in your piece, with the irony being that the Arabs don’t want multiculturalism of integration with the Jews either!

    1. You sense wrong. I am thinking more of Jews who have been influenced overmuch by non-Jewish culture to the point where they don’t even remember the real meaning of Hanukkah and make it up as they go along.

      Also, you are speaking of cultures that occupied Jewish land by force. We had no desire for these people to come in and mess with our culture. We were happy as we were. They imposed their cultures on us.

      1. Do any religious festivals have their original real meaning anymore? Particularly in western, secular democracies. I’m not qualified to discuss Hanukkah in depth but in the UK Christmas has become essentially a secular festival. As Israel is rightly attributed to be the only true democracy with universal suffrage in the Middle East, maybe Hanukkah is undergoing a similar morphing as Xmas in the west.

        As an atheist/agnostic I celebrate christmas but give little thought to the rabbi from Nazareth. I mean, what do Xmas trees, mistletoe and holly have to do with celebrating the supposed son of god..?…that’s right nothing 🙂 Xmas in the pre Christian Era was a midwinter festival in which the Romans transplanted a Christian holiday onto an existing feast day.

          1. But halakhah has always adapted itself to changing conditions. After all – nobody would claim we are living today according to the way the Mosaic law was interpreted in the time of Moses. The Rabbinic tradition evolved in accordance with changing circumstances. And the takkanot, also.

            1. The law remains the same. The difference is only in the application. For instance, understanding which melacha electricity represents. But the number of melachot doesn’t change. And the relevance of melachot to Shabbat doesn’t change.

          2. An example of a change is Shavuot that went from a harvest festival and was turned into a festival for the giving of the torah. To say that things don’t change in Judaism. If king David were to return now he would hardly recognize Judaism.

              1. Actually you’re wrong. If you look in the tanch you’ll see that Shavuoth is no where associated with the giving of the torah. It is simply the end of the counting of the Omer and a pilgrimage holiday. After the destruction of the temple there were no more pilgrimages and the rabbis tacked on the giving of the torah part of the holiday so that it wouldn’t completely lose its meaning.

                1. offhand I recall from the Pentateuch (Torah) that on one of the holy days, the Torah was to be read to everyone. that’s everyone men women children and resident strangers. I don’t know if it was Shavuoth or not, but ONE of those holy seasons definitely as per Moses was to include “giving the Torah” and this by the way goes against the later rabbinical teaching that a woman should not learn Torah (except as it applied to her as a woman of course, but perhaps not even that just rely on men who knew what the rules were and could lie about it with impugnity perhaps because she didn’t know better).

                  So whoever is right or wrong on Shavuoth itself, Torah was supposed to be read in its entirety to the assembled people on one of the High Holy Days.

                  1. In the Bible Shavuoth was established for 2 reasons: 1) Bringing the first fruits to the the temple 2) The end of the counting of the Omer. It is never associated with the giving of the Torah. That was added later. Anyone who claims that Judiasm hasn’t changed over the past 3000 years is simply wrong.

                  2. ahad_ha_amoratsim

                    Given your confusion of Sukkos with Shavuos, I can understand your confusion about what women are and are not permitted to learn, and your willingness to impugn the integrity of Chazal. “A little learning is a dangerous thing” is not a caveat against learning; it is a caveat against not learning more.

                    1. like i said, I don’t remember which event it was so I looked it up, Deut. 31:10-12 it is at the feast of tabernacles in the year that is the seventh year of release that the Torah was to be read to all. My error, not once a year.

                    2. ahad_ha_amoratsim

                      And now what is your source that the Sages encouraged or permitted men to blatantly lie to women about what the rules were?

                    3. ahad_ha_amoratsim

                      infowolf, I have been trying to figure out why I’m so bothered by your casual assumption that men learned in G*d’s Torah would deliberately mislead women about what the Torah requires. I think now I know why.
                      Learning, especially then, took a lot more than running a Google search or opening a King James Bible, an Artscroll translation of the Gemara, or sitting down with the Shulchan Aruch. Even for someone fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic (and you needed to be fluent in both), learning the law involved hours of daily study with a qualified teacher, for years on end. The debates of the Sages are not easily understood, and following those debates requires commitment, effort and Divine aid.
                      So who would invest that time and effort, especially with a family to support and a liveliehood to earn? Only someone with a profound religious motivation, who loves G*d and feels a profound obligation to serve G*d as a loving and humble servant serves a great king — not out of hope of reward, but because the king by virtue of his position and greatness deserves to be served and loved in that fashion. (I am nowhere near that level of service, lest you be under any misconception.)
                      Now, would that man who is so devoted to the king, who wants to see the king served and the king’s laws obeyed, trick another servant into breaking the king’s laws? Even if he is only serving the king out of fear (and again, I fall far short of that level as well), won’t he realize the king will be even more angry at the servant who tricked another servant into violating the king’s decreee than he would be with the servant who broke the decree in the mistaken belief that she was doing what the king wanted? And having devoted all those hours and years to studying the law, would the man be so stupid as to think that G*d was like a king of flesh and blood, who does not know what every one of his servants is doing and thinking at all times?
                      If your kid deliberately tricked his younger sister into breaking a house rule by telling her the rule was the opposite, who would you be angry with once you found out?
                      And in a word, that’s what bothered me about your assumption — it assumes that the men who learned the law were no different than pagans, serving idols who were merely more powerful versions of human beings, immortal but not infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, instead of people who knew their obligation to serve the All Knowing, All Powerful King of kings, Who knows our thoughts and our actions.

                    4. and how many fit the description of the last paragraph, especially given the conditions that repeatedly developed as Judges and all the prophets reported?

                    5. ahad_ha_amoratsim

                      And how many of those whom you mentioned would have been learned enough to advise anyone about the law? I’d say none. And by citing to the actions of those who worshipped idols, and not those who were learned in the law, it seems to me you are proving my point. You are talking about people who did not know Torah and did not care. Those who cared enough about Torah to study it would not deliberately mislead someone as to what was permitted and what was forbidden.

                    6. sigh, the point is that precisely those who don’t care much or who want to weasle, would address those who cared but didn’t know. I think you have an idealist view.

                      Things like the hellenization of some Jews do not happen overnight in a vaccuum. There has to be a drift somehow. The first generation that went into the promised land with Joshua, for instance, wouldn’t have tolerated such an effort not one of them.

                      Meanwhile, you find among those who DID care, the rabbis in the Talmud, serious disagreements about The Law, the Talmud is essentially the record of their fights about it. Some of the disagreements make no sense as having occurred at all, unless someone had been previously interpreting it in a way allowing a drift, and the student of that person then becomes a rabbi and gets in an argument with a better student of someone better, who also became a rabbi. I read the Talmud about 20 years ago so don’t expect me to remember much of details. One that stands out, is the decision that private apostasy at order of a slave master or something like that is okay, but public, never. Not even to change the way of fastening shoes if that is about abandoning a judaism honoring or Jewish identity claiming thing.

                      Now how the hell do you allow private apostasy if you are a rabbi who really does care about God instead of mere survival, comfort, etc. And if you have enough private apostasy going on, eventually it will contaminate everything, or at least enough other Jews to become an apostate or at least sloppy undercurrent.

                    7. ahad_ha_amoratsim

                      You read the Talmud about 20 years ago? In one sitting? Learning one daf (double sided page) a day takes over 7 years, and that’s a pretty rapid pace for most people, if you are actually engaging the material and absorbing anything.

                      I agree with you about development of differences in the mesorah as we got further and further from Sinai. Where I continue to disagree is your assertion that the Sages were acting from the motivations you ascribe.

                      I would have to look at the section you mention that “the decision that private apostasy at order of a slave master or something like that is okay, but public, never.” That ruling sounds odd to me, and I have no idea where in the 22 some volumes it appears. It is vaguely reminiscent about the discussion in “Let hims be killed and not transgress” vs. “Let hims transgress but not be killed”, which applies to situatiion when a Jew is being threatened with death if he does not transgress. It does NOT deal with apostasy, and turns on the verse “You shall live by them [the commandments], which implies live with them but not die with them. The outcome of that discussion is that ther are three situations when a Jew must give his life rather than violate a commandment:

                      (a) A Jew must die rather than committing murder, sexual immorality (that’s a grossly simplified description, but this is a family web site), or idol worship, which includes worshipping anything other than G*d. Even privately.

                      (b) If it is a time of general persecution.

                      (c) If ten other Jews are present. (This must be where you came up with the public/private distinction.)

                      In situation (b), yes, it goes so far as accepting death rather than obey an order to lace your shoes in a manner distinctive to idol worshippers.

                      “Now how the hell do you allow private apostasy if you are a rabbi who really does care about God.” Because you look at the mesorah for the verse “V’chai bahem — you shall live by them (the mitzvot)” as intyerprested and transmitted by the Sages, instead of adopting an absolutist Christianized viewpoint based on denial of the oral Torah or on ignorance of how the oral Torah operates.

                      As to the heretical opinions of the Tzadukim (Sadducees, as the Christians call them), or the minim (Christians, as the Christians call them), Boetusim, or one of the other heretical sects: even those sects were not acting out of mere survival, comfort, etc. as you put it. They were acting out of profound misunderstandings of written texts, or mistransmission of oral teachings, or denial that an Oral Torah existed.

                      Mistaken belief is very different from deliberately misleading someone less learned into doing something that you believe violates Torah. Only someone who denies G*d’s omniscience would see any benefit to the latter. To do that, you would need to believe in a god that is finite, which of course is a non-god. This is exactly the worldview that Browning attributed to some monk in a poem I read some 50 years ago, the name of which I have forgotten. (I just googled “scrofulous french novel”, and the poem is Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.)

                    8. “”Now how the hell do you allow private apostasy if you are a rabbi who really does care about God.” Because you look at the mesorah for the verse “V’chai bahem — you shall live by them (the mitzvot)” as intyerprested and transmitted by the Sages, instead of adopting an absolutist Christianized viewpoint based on denial of the oral Torah or on ignorance of how the oral Torah operates.”

                      Absolutism was adopted by Christians for several reasons, one of which was things in the Prophets and Torah and Maccabees denouncing private secret sin and secret apostasy going on. Moses called them out on it, God Himself called Achan out on it by letting a battle be lost because of his VERY SECRET disobedience and Joshua had to use a lot system to locate the miscreant. The Prophets denounce not only public but secret sins.

                      So obviously that determination that in private a Jew could under command from his pagan owner or boss do an act of idolatry but not the slightest thing in public, is not consistent with Moses or the prophets.

                      Daniel had only to not ask anything of YHWH or of Nebuchadnezzar could conduct himself secretly not doing his daily prayers, no one would know he had obeyed Nebuchadnezzar’s command to not ask of any god but only of the king. Daniel didn’t have to ask of the king, just keep a low profile and not pray to YHWH either.

                      But he didn’t, he did his usual probably secret daily prayers and someone noticed and ratted him off and he went into the lion’s den, from which God delivered him.

                      Talmud doesn’t always square with Torah or Prophets. the sages were too wrapped up in themselves and each other, plus baggage of assumptions and adaptations from Babylonia and later.

                      I think Judas Maccabeus would have kicked that sage’s ass if they had been in the same time and place and heard that nonsense from him.

                      oral Torah operates the same way some bullshit in protestantism operates, over a period of time various people with status make interpretations or applications, and when someone makes a wrong call and has status and it gets repeated and repeated and established. Like the pre tribulation rapture bullshit.

                    9. ahad_ha_amoratsim

                      Your reply overlooks any number of things. First, idol worship is NEVER permitted — not in private, not in public, and not if someone is threatening to kill you over it. So much for your examples of Achan (who took possession of an idol) and Daniel (who refused even privately to honor the king’s command to be worshipped).

                      Second, I am still chuckling over your claim that you “read” the Talmud a few decades ago. You do not mention where you achieved your fluency in Aramaic and Hebrew, nor how you managed to read a 20+ volume work that demands close and exacting study to understand, even for those who are fluent. To claim that what you read in English was Talmud is absurd, as the translator and publisher would be the first to tell you. And to think that you can read it and understand it without close study is the height of arrogance.

                      Finally your estimation of the Sages and the Talmud, bing so consistent with Christian anti-nominianism, frankly disqualifies your opinions on that topic. To make an inapt comparison, the opinion of a member of America’s posse comitatus movement would be worth very little in evaluating the validity of a tax shelter under US law, or my opinion as to whether Nestorius was right and the Council of Ephesus was wrong or vice versa. I simply have no dogma in that fight.

                      But your facile dismissal does help me understand how you can so misapprehend the words of our Sages, whom Christianity denigrates as the detestable Pharisees, and why you so easily assume that someone knowledgable in the law would deliberately mislead someone into violating the law. A law partner of mine was born again and believed with every fiber of his being that the rabbis were deliberatly misleading Jews as to what the Jewish religion requires.

                2. ahad_ha_amoratsim

                  If you look in Tanach there are a lot of things you will miss, including, just for starters, how to slaugher animals to make them kosher, how to rinse and salt the meat so that it stays kosher, which activities are permitted on Shabbos and which are not, and what tefillin look and like. That’s why G*d gave us the oral Torah, as well as the written Torah. Those who reject the oral Torah are not following Judaism, they are following Karaism or Christianity.

                  1. I realize what the Oral law. But there is no evidence that Shavuoth was observed as a hag matan toratenu until the destruction of th temple.

        1. ahad_ha_amoratsim

          That certain man from Nazareth was a rabbi like Michael Lerner was a rabbi. You can’t just start calling yourself rabbi. Having your followers address you as one (and I plead both ignorance and apathy as to whether they did) does not make you one either, any more than a publishing house can confer a PhD on its authors. You do not become a rabbi until qualifed rabbis decide that you have. And demi-gods are a pagan invention, not a Jewish concept.

  5. Such a bruhaha Varda over the truth of Hanukkah. Oy.

    Years ago the principal of my boys’ Hebrew school said that Hanukkah gave her trouble because of the actions of the Maccabees towards other Jews and forced gentile conversions to Judaism (not certain about the forced conversion issue, never heard that one before). But we do know that the part of the Hanukkah story noone really talks about is the actual civil war among the Jews themselves. Truth is I dismissed her as being a leftist crybaby. But as I studied the real history she wasn’t far off. The reality is that in today’ day and age, most Jews embrace a form of tolerance of different types of Judaism and are happy to embrace life outside of a strict view of Judaism.

    Quite frankly I think it is much better to view Hanukkah overall as the first fight for religious freedom, which it really was. Whether you want to discuss the concept of democracy, halacha and how to join the two is a modern discussion. The historical record is that the Maccabees were working within a different world than we live, with different political and religious realities. The ancient concepts of human rights and freedom are not what we think of today. So to try to equate what the Maccabees were up against and how they reacted to today’s modern world is not only unfair to Jewish history it is rewriting ancient history itself.

    1. I think it’s enough for us to understand that values were imposed on our people and we didn’t take it lying down. We fought back because it was important to preserve what we had. It would have been much easier to go with the flow, but instead, we did the right thing and were blessed with a miracle as a result of our steadfastness and our efforts.

      It is very easy to parrot the norms that are popular, that most people share. It is much more difficult to defend and be true to an ancient values system, especially when the world hates us.

    2. ahad_ha_amoratsim

      I have found that those Jews who chant the loudest mantras about tolerance are the least likely to be tolerant of observant ‘Orthodox’ Jews. Certainly in my city, the second group tends to be marginalized by the Jewish Federation, ADL, the reform and conservative establishment, and the Jewish Community Relations Council. I know of other US cities where this also occurs. Your experiences may differ.

  6. It is nothing new. Passover is usually the “go to” holiday in which people inject their own views over what the holiday “means”. In that case, they believe that Passover is about freedom in of itself thus inject their own freedom themed cause celebre.

    The reality is that Passover is about freedom to serve G-d.

      1. ahad_ha_amoratsim

        But it’s another thing to change the text of the halacha, replacing the words of the Baal Hagaddah (is he the same person as the Bes Maksvell, or was the Bes Maksvell merely a perush?) with dissertations about racial inequality in America, the male sex’s crimes against womankind, or the need to end the brutal occupation of former Ottoman lands so as to stop obstructing peace loving indigenous people from Egypyt, Jordan and Syria who merely want to commit genocide.

          1. ahad_ha_amoratsim

            You should see some of the stuff that gets published in the US under the name of haggadah. It started with a guy named Waskow in the late 60’s and has gotten nothing but worse.

    1. ahad_ha_amoratsim

      As it says in Avos [excuse my paraphrase, I’m working from faulty memory here], “The letters were engraved [charus] on the tablets. Don’t read charus but cherus [freedom]. There is no free person except one who subjects himself to Torah.”

  7. The Maccabees did fight against assimilation, as you say but I do not think it would be true to say that they fought against co-existence, if only for the reason that co-existence was never offered them by the Greeks.
    But in any case, I don’t agree with the implication that co-existence necessarily means assimilation. Co-existence means two entities or peoples or cultures living side-by-side, each side respecting the other and not interfering with, or trying to impose one’s own culture on the other. Assimilation implies one side being swallowed up or engulfed by the other.

  8. and that is why the American founding fathers choose a Constitutional Republic as the basis of our country….. and they hated democracy….

  9. I’m a Catholic so 1 and 2 Maccabees is in our bible. I’ve always loved that story for exactly the reasons stated by the author.

    I am disgusted with how Christmas has been perverted by secularists. I have made it a point of keeping the real meaning of Christmas alive for my family. So I say to all the Jews here: keep Hanukkah’s real reason alive and fight
    against it’s being commercialized, sanitized, or taken over by liberals.

    What is remembered at Hanukkah is perhaps even more important today. There may not be some gentile king desecrating the Temple, but liberalism and secularism are doing the same thing: trying to strip you of your Jewishness. Cuz if they can do that, they can start writing you out of history. Then it’s only a matter of time till they try to write you out in other ways.

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