What Is Chanuka All About?
What is this festival of Chanuka all about? Jewish tradition actually has very little to say about Chanuka. The earliest compendium of oral law, the Mishna, doesn’t even mention it. In Jewish tradition Chanuka first turns up in the Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud, where it’s mentioned in a rather off-handed way.
In tractate Shabbat 21b the rabbis are discussing what types of lamps are appropriate for Shabbat. Somebody asks if the rules for Chanuka are any different. Another rabbi, as if he’s never even heard the word before, asks, ‘What is this Chanuka?’ And this is the answer he receives.
“Our rabbis taught: On the 25th day of Kislev [begin] the eight days of Chanuka, on which lamentation for the dead and fasting are forbidden. For when the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils in it, and when the Chasmonean dynasty prevailed over them and defeated them, they searched and found only one bottle of oil sealed by the High Priest. It contained only enough for one day’s lighting. Yet a miracle was brought about with it, and they lit [with that oil] for eight days. The following year they were established as a festival, with hallel prayer and thanksgiving prayers.”
After this brief explanation, the rabbis go back to their discussion on proper Shabbat lamps, and that’s it for Chanuka. Nothing about resistance to religious coercion; nothing about the miraculous victory of Judah Maccabee over Antiochus Epiphanes. That little paragraph is all the Talmud has to say on the subject.
So where do we go to find more? The answer is to ancient documents which were preserved in Christian circles. If you want the Chanuka story, you read Christian books!
Why did rabbinic Judaism have so little interest in preserving the historical account of God’s deliverance in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes? Why was this miraculous story suppressed? What did the rabbis have against Mattityahu the priests and his five brave sons?
Quite a lot, actually. Number one, the descendants of Judah Maccabee, made a pact with Rome, which led to Roman interference in Jewish politics. In the rabbis’ opinion this family was responsible for the Roman occupation. In the eyes of the rabbis, the subsequence Hasmonean pact with Rome totally discredited the family’s earlier achievements.
Number two, the rabbis themselves survived two disastrous revolts against Rome. The rabbis learned a terribly hard lesson that Israel’s redemption wasn’t going to come by commandment-keepers taking up arms against their persecutors. The rabbis didn’t want Jews to ever entertain the thought of insurrection again. For this reason they suppressed the story of Maccabean success.
Fortunately for Jewish history, in antiquity there were Christians who thought these stories of Jewish heroism and God’s salvation were just too good to miss. The books of 1 & 2Maccabees are part of the collections you call either Apocrypha or Pseudepigrapha, depending on which branch of Christianity you ask. The other primary source for the history of the Maccabees are the writings of Yosef ben Mattityahu. These Jewish writings were also preserved in Christian circles, not among Jews.
Did you know that Chanuka also appears in the Apostolic Writings? John 10:19-23.
“Again there was a division among the Judeans because of these sayings. Many of them said, ‘He has a demon and is mad. Why do you listen to him?’ Others said, ‘These are not the words of one possessed of a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?’ Now it was the Chanuka ta. e’gkai,nia in Jerusalem, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple, in the stoa of Shlomo.”
Many Christians have missed the reference to Chanuka because not all translators pay attention to Jewish Greek. Your Bible may say something like “the feast of dedication” or some such vague expression. But in Jewish Greek, the term ta. e’gkai,nia “the rededication,” always refers to Chanuka. This is the usage in the books of Maccabees. So in John chapter 10 Jesus is in the temple on Chanuka, taking advantage of the festival of lights, to open the eyes of the blind. Jesus didn’t hesitate to participate in Israel’s festivals, even those not commanded in the Bible. Jesus recognized that God’s intervention in his people’s history didn’t stop just because the Hebrew Bible was finished. The Hebrew Bible was done, but God wasn’t done delivering Israel from her enemies.
So for Jewish people who aren’t into Christian writings what is Chanuka all about?
In Israel today the Maccabean heroes are remembered by association with sports. Half the pro soccer and basketball teams in Israel are named Maccabee this city or Maccabee that city. The Jewish olympiad is also known as the Maccabean games. It’s ironic that Jews who were martyred rather than take part in the games should be honored by having teams named after them. Probably not the sort of memorial they’d appreciate.
Under Zionist ideology, Chanuka is about military prowess. If commanders seize the initiative, a badly outnumbered unit can still pull off a win. A few brave men can defeat a numerically superior foe. The few must be prepared to take high risks to insure survival of the nation. This message is exactly what the rabbis in the Talmud were trying to play down.
What is Chanuka for the American Jewish community? The American version is that Jewish kids get presents in December just like other kids. Jewish people can have lights like Christians. Jewish people can overeat and overindulge like Christians. The message is clear: Jewish people can do everything everybody else does and still maintain their own identity so long as they just do it a wee bit differently. There’s no reason for Jewish kids to be jealous of the neighbors; American Chanuka is as crassly commercial as American Christmas. In America Chanuka has been redefined as Christmas with a twist. It’s ironic that the holiday which commemorates the struggle of the minority against the majority, should now be celebrated by aping majority religion as closely as possible.
So how do we get past the competing agendas, the politics of Chanuka? Whose version of this holiday is right anyway?
More than ever Jews and Christians need one another to help recover the lost truth that the other’s tradition has preserved. Christians need Jewish help to recover their biblical roots. And Israel in turn needs Christians to recover her own history. We have to make a conscious resolve to set prejudice aside as best we can, and get back to the historical sources.
Tradition doesn’t present us with a clear-cut message of what this holiday is about. As rich as Jewish and Christian tradition is, here it is inadequate. The record has huge gaps. More than anything else, the survivors of persecution wished to pass their hard-won lessons on.
We’re reluctant to talk about it, but Chanuka commemorates a kulturkampf that turned into an ugly civil war. Foreigners were involved, but most of the bloodletting was between Jew and Jew. The cultural conflict was over to what extent Jews should participate in the wider world, and to what extent Jews should preserve their God-given distinctiveness. Thankfully, the party of capitulation to outside influence lost, but that wasn’t the end of outside influence.
During the time of the 2nd temple all Jews were participants in the wider culture, whether they acknowledged it or not. Greek manners and Greek ideas penetrated every area of Jewish life. The scribes who copied the sacred Torah scrolls adopted the scribal conventions of their Greek colleagues. Every Torah scroll in existence has those Greek scribal markings. The Pharisees, who nurtured Torah observance and brought it up-to-date, did so by deploying Greek legal concepts. Hundreds of Greek words made their way into the Hebrew language, and are still with us today. Jewish preachers addressing Aramaic-speaking audiences peppered their exhortations with Greek proverbs, which even uneducated people were familiar with. To top it off, the historical record of how the Maccabees resisted the Greek foreigners was written down in Greek!
Not even the most conservative Jew could totally avoid foreign influence. There was no question of escaping the outside world. The real question was, How to deal intelligently with outside influence so as not to lose Israel’s calling to serve the world as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation? On the one hand, sharing a common culture with non-Jews enabled Israel’s mission — it’s what made communication possible. On the other hand, sharing a common culture endangered the mission — it constantly threatened Israel’s uniqueness.
The best solution has proven to be multiculturalism, bilingualism and dual citizenship. Jews have participated in two worlds and contributed to both. Common culture has ensured that Israel is able to share her experience of God with the non-Jewish world. Nurturing Jewish culture has ensured that Israel has something worth sharing. This is why Israel has continued to hope and pray and study in her own language. Jewish religious law permits worship in foreign languages, and in some circumstances it has been done, but if worship is conducted exclusively in foreign terms we forfeit Israel’s unique experience, Israel’s unique perspective, and Israel’s unique message. It would be as though the Maccabees were the losers.
Missionaries have to straddle two worlds. You lose either your uniqueness or your ability to communicate with outsiders, and your mission is scrubbed. Israel’s mission has largely succeeded because Jews have creatively engaged the larger world, without being seduced by it. The world has certainly left its mark on Judaism, and Jews have left their mark on the world, yet for all their interaction Judaism and the world remain distinct. To put it in familiar Christian terms, Jews have been in the world, but not of the world.
I believe there’s lesson here for the survival of Seventh-day Adventist identity and the continuation of our mission. We peer out at the big bad world and we flinch. Flinching is a actually a health reflex — the big world has the brawn, it has the brains. The big bad world has the wealth and the talent. The big bad world offers endless opportunity. But the big bad world can rob you of your God-given identity. The big bad world can swallow you up in an ocean of relativity. The big bad world doesn’t recognize the true Creator or that the hour of his judgment has come.
The key to the world’s survival is not with the big bad world. The key to the world’s survival is with the minority who keep the commandments of God and have the faithfulness of Jesus. The majority are clueless.
Seventh-day Adventists must exercise the rights of dual citizenship. We must fully engage the unredeemed world with the realization that we ourselves will be changed by the exchange. We cannot pretend our distinctiveness is static. Interaction with the world is not a one-way street. Yet we must also operate as citizens of the world-to-come. We are the vanguard of God’s kingdom. We have different values, different priorities, different loyalties. We do a lot of the same stuff, but we don’t work for the same boss. We must engage the big bad world without selling out to it. God loves the world too much to have us sell out to it.
The message of Chanuka is that light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome the light. The light shines not because Jewish guys make terrific soldiers, or because Jewish consumers spend their fair share to keep the US economy moving. When I see that little flame of the chanukia lampstand shining bravely against all odds I understand why the darkness has not overcome the light.
There is a God in heaven who has declared, “Let there be light.” It is him who does not let the light go out. The bush burns, but the bush is not consumed. The Jewish people have survived outside pressure thanks to their God. Chanuka celebrates this minority God who loves the whole world. Happy Chanuka!
