The Real Miracle of Hanuka

During our past two weekday sessions, we focused on the "real" miracle of Hanuka. We've all grown up with the "miracle of the oil" story, which explains the purpose of the Hanukiya and the 8 candles of Hanuka, as well as the custom of Jews all over the world to prepare foods fried in oil. But this is a story that doesn't appear in the ancient Jewish texts we have that describe the events leading to the creation of this holiday - the two Books of the Maccabees - which were not even included in the canonized version of the Hebrew Bible.

Instead, we find a description of this miracle of the oil that lasted for 8 days when it only should have lasted for one, in the Shabbat Tractate of the Gemara portion of the Talmud (page 21b), in a few short sentences written down by the Rabbis of that era about 600 years after the events of the Hanuka story took place.

Why would our Rabbis want to erase the national memory of the bloody civil war that was waged for almost a decade between the followers of the Maccabees and those Jews (mostly the priests and nobles) who admired the Greek culture of the Syrian-Greek empire surrounding them, and wanted to curry favor in the eyes of those who ruled Judea (ancient Israel) in those days? Why would they want to create a new national memory that "not by might and not by power, but by spirit alone will we live in peace?" The questions themselves make it fairly obvious.

By the time the "miracle of the oil" was created and written down, the Jewish People had been invaded by Rome (about 100 years following the Maccabean Revolt), and again we fought bloody wars against ourselves as well as against our enemy. But this time the ending was very different than in the Maccabean era. The Romans defeated us, destroyed the Second Temple, and ultimately exiled us from our land. And this time, unlike after the Babylonian Exile about 500 years before, there would be no king who conquered our enemy and allowed us to return to our homeland.

The lesson the Talmudic era Rabbis took from these historic events, as well as from the fact that we had become a Diaspora nation following the Roman conquest, was that we should never resort to violence and war to preserve our national identity. Instead, the "real miracle" is that we learned that we can preserve our national identity and culture even as we live peacefully within majority cultures all over the world.

This is the very reason why the edot (the Jewish Diaspora communities) survived and even thrived as they borrowed much from the majority cultures around them. And this is why the Rabbis insisted that we "make famous the miracle" by putting our hanukiyot (Hanuka menorahs) on a window sill or other setting where as many people as possible can see it. The burning oil or candles symbolize the fact that as long as we educate our coming generations of who we are, where we came from, and what our national purpose is (to become partners with God to create a just world), we will continue to be the oldest surviving nation on Earth. The Jewish People are the ultimate optimists. As RAMBAM (Moses Ben Maimon, a/k/a Maimonides) wrote about a thousand years ago, "I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah. And though he tarry, even so I believe." Naomi Shemer, a famous Israeli poet and songwriter wrote, "Tomorrow...every person will build with his two hands what he dreamed of today."

So when we light the first Hanuka candle this coming Tuesday evening and watch the flame as it burns bright, it's OK to think about the "miracle of the oil" (and certainly to share it with younger children), but only if we never forget the "real miracle of Hanuka," and teach it to our children when they're old enough to understand.

In order to share all of the above with my edot students, we watched parts of an A&E "Mysteries of the Bible" episode, titled "The Maccabees: Revolution and Redemption." I showed the beginning up to minute 9:32 which provides the background history leading up to the Maccabean Revolt, then skipped ahead to where they described the actual events of the Hanuka story - minutes 17:43 to 21:00, and finally ended with minutes 36:38 to the end, which discusses the "real miracle of Hanuka."