HANUKKAH - BEYOND CANDLES AND DONUTS

I tell you today, on the last candle of the Hanukkah holiday - the Kotel will stay in our hands.

Benjamin Netanyahu

The festival of Hanukkah/Chanukah/Hanukah celebrates the victory of Jewish forces over the Seleucids (Syrian Greeks) and the rededication of the Temple. The festival lasts for eight days from 25 Kislev.

The war for the freedom of Israel started in 168 BCE, when King Antiochus IV, who was called Epiphanes ('the glorious' or 'manifestation of god'), ruler of the Seleucid Empire desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem. Antiochus believed himself to be a god and to show his superiority as a 'god', he despoiled most religious sanctuaries of countries he conquered.

The despoiling is described in II Maccabees 6:

• To depart from the laws of their fathers
• Not to live after the laws of God
• To pollute also the Temple in Jerusalem
• To call it the temple of Jupiter Olympus
• The Temple was filled with riot and reveling
• The altar also was filled with profane things
• Neither was it lawful for a man to keep Sabbath
• Or to profess himself at all to be a Jew

A man called Judah Maccabee rose up against this and in 165 BCE, forces led by him and his brothers managed to defeat the Seleucids. They restored the Temple and this event was celebrated with a festival according to the ordination of II Maccabees 1: 9 - see that ye keep the Feast of Tabernacles in the month Kislev. Like the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), Hanukkah is kept for 8 days, festival-goers bare branches, and fair boughs, and palms also (II Maccabees 10: 7) and as is custom during Sukkot the Hallel prayers (Psalms 113 - 118) are said. Most importantly it is a rededication of the commitment Israel make at Sukkot - to keep the land safe and extend a welcoming hand to all visitors.

Note:

From Hallel comes the English word, 'hallelujah' as in Psalm 117:

O praise the Lord, all ye nations;

Laud Him, all ye peoples.

For His mercy is great towards us;

And the truth of the Lord endureth for ever.

Hallelujah!

The festival is supposed to be a happy time in accordance with I Maccabees 4: 59 - the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month Casleu, with mirth and gladness. Over time the festival got its own character and two hundred years later it was known as the Festival of Hanukkah meaning 'to dedicate' - It was winter, and the Festival of the Dedication of the Temple was being celebrated in Jerusalem.  Jesus was walking in Solomon's Porch in the Temple . . . (John 10: 22).  The Greek word used is enkainia meaning 'renewal' or 'consecration'.

Lights or candles only became part of the festival during the rule of Herod the Great (ruled 37 BCE to 4 BCE) who hated the Maccabees and prohibited the celebration of a festival dedicated to their victory. He was however quite happy for the Jews to observe the old folk custom (pagan?) of lighting festival candles at this time of the year and the two festivals became bound to each other. Later rabbis tried to get away from what was so obviously a 'folk custom' and adopted the Greek myth (they called it a miracle) of a lamp with only a little oil which had burnt in front of the goddess Athena for a year.

In the special Hanukkah prayer the (V'al Hanissim), the lights are mentioned: 

Then Your children entered the shrine of Your House, cleansed Your Temple, purified Your Sanctuary, kindled lights in Your holy courtyards, and instituted these eight days of Chanukah to give thanks and praise to Your great Name.

This was based on I Maccabees 4: 49 - 50, when the Maccabees made new holy vessels, and into the temple they brought the candlestick . . . and the lamps that were upon the candlestick they lighted, that they might give light in the temple. From this a variety of candle lighting ceremonies began and one of the most common is to light first one, then two the next night, then three candles. On the eighth day, the whole row burns, even the faithful ninth, the servant which on other nights is used only for the lighting of the others (Theodor Herzl). Maoz tzur ('Rock of Ages') is sung when the candles are lit:

Rock of Ages

Let our song

Praise Your saving power

By the time of Josephus, around 50 CE, lighting candles had become the most recognizable custom of Hanukkah - we celebrate this festival, and called it Lights. I suppose the reason was, because this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us; and that thence was the name given to that festival (Josephus).

This is the light of 'hope' for all Jews in the Diaspora - the hope, Ha-Tikvah, of returning to Israel:

The two-thousand year old hope will not be lost

To be free people in our land

The land of Zion and Jerusalem

As with the lights and candles, the few other Hanukkah customs are of extremely dubious origins:

• Oil fried foods - to celebrate the oil lasting for 8 days.
• Other fattening Hanukkah foods - goose stuffed with dumplings, potato pudding, cheese dishes, pancakes, potato pancakes, cheese pancakes and all sorts of donuts especially jam/jelly stuffed ones.
• Hanukkah money (or presents) is given to children on the 5th day.
• Children gamble with four sided spinning tops called dreidel and lose their money to the sharp kids - this custom was adopted from the Germans in the Middle Ages and has nothing to do with the study of Torah - it was an early introduction to gambling.
• Adults play (gamble) cards and lose their money to the sharp guys.

Note:

Eating starchy oily fatty foods in winter is a survival mechanism and eating cheese dishes during Hanukkah is a very old tradition. In the Middle-Ages it was explained by making Hanukkah a celebration of Judith as well. She supposedly gave Holofernes salty cheese dishes which made him so thirsty he drank much more wine than he had drunk at any time in one day since he was born (Judith 12: 20).

It is clear that over time, Hanukkah has undergone dramatic changes with religion taking the place of nationalism. The novelist Irving Fineman notices this loss of the warrior Maccabees in How Many Angels:

There were still the candles after all;

though the hard-fisted Maccabees, I perceived,

were indeed hopelessly lost.

The nationalistic, and in a sense Zionistic, meaning of Hanukkah glorifying fierce warriors was deliberately obscured and turned into the celebration of the fake miracle of the oil. This 'miracle' was the fabrication of the school of the scholar Rabbi Judah the Prince (135 CE to 217 CE). He and the other rabbis and Jewish leaders did not want their followers to know they were once a great warrior nation - their message was, not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit (Zechariah 4: 6). This removed all fight from the Jews for two-thousand years while they waited for God to save them. The result was a worse disaster than anything they might have prevented with their 'be spiritual and wear funny hats' message.

NOTES ON THE DATE

The date, 25 Kislev, became 25 December in the Julian calendar and is of particular importance in the Greek and later Roman calendars - and in the calendars of many of the ancient civilizations.

The star Sirius (the brightest of all stars) flies directly behind the earth in its path around the Milky Way.  On or roundabout this day, it is right overhead at midnight.  This by sheer coincidence is when the sun is at its furthest south - it is midwinter in the northern hemisphere. After this the days get longer and life is reborn and returns to earth. For this reason the date was associated in many ancient religions with the birth of a god or a new period of a religion - some of the kings were gods.

It was therefore no accident for Antiochus Epiphanes to offer the first sacrifice to Zeus in the Temple on this date in 167 BCE. He intended to make it clear a new period of rule by the Greek gods (himself) had begun. To make sure this was understood; on the 25th of every month - on the day of the king's birth every month they were brought by bitter constraint to eat of the sacrifices . . . (II Maccabees 6: 7).

Judah Maccabeus would have been fully aware of this and would have made sure the rededication was also on the 25 Kislev 164 BCE to cancel out the Greek claim.  Now upon the same day that the strangers profaned the Temple, on the very same day it was cleansed again, even the five and twentieth day of the same month, which is Kislev. (II Maccabees 10: 5).

Persia was different from the other countries in their beliefs about Sirius, and used the star to make predictions.  This is based either on changes in color (white, blue, emerald) the star undergoes (in the past there were times when it has appeared red) or on the positional shift in relation to the background stars due to the gravitational influence of a white dwarf companion star.  Because these changes are small and dependent on great knowledge, it is no surprise nobody but the magoi noticed them.  This would explain why Herod and the scribes were caught unawares. If a huge big comet hung over Bethlehem, millions of people would have turned up, as they were strong believers in the magic of stars.