By Sandra Kessler
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The Festival of Lights is nearly upon us. As every Jewish child in my generation was taught, we light candles over a period of eight nights to commemorate the Maccabees’ defeat of the Greeks, the rededication of the Temple, and the miracle of a small flask of oil that unexpectedly lasted 8 days. A joyful holiday filled with symbolic fried foods, sweets, dreidel games, and a present for each candle lit. A Jewish child’s delight.
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What most people, Jews included, don’t really know about Hanukkah is that it is the ultimate Zionist holiday. It commemorates the historic triumph of Judaism itself, in Judea, over an empire of overwhelming force determined that every one it ruled adopted its “universal” religion and culture. This was Hellenism, the way of life in the empire created by the Greek Macedonian Alexander the Great more than a century earlier. When Alexander died in 323 BCE without a designated heir. His four closest generals divided his empire into four realms and fought for dominance. A common story of the age.
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Judea, the nation of the Jews, and the entire surrounding region (Syria and Mesopotamia) came under the control of the general who established the Seleucid dynasty.
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When the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes ascended the throne 150 years later, in 175 BCE, he was determined to eradicate Judaism once and for all. Among his many cruel and eliminationist actions was installing a Hellenist High Priest in the Temple. He desecrated the Temple by requiring the sacrifice of swine on the altar, forbidding the circumcision of male newborns, and massacring Jews who refused to comply.
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Sadly, many of the Jews of Judea chose to accept the Greek way of life for personal advancement or just to get along with the majority. Many of these former Jews assisted in persecuting those Jews who refused to abandon the Torah. One brave Jew stood up in defiance. Mattathias, of the Priestly class. He refused a direct order from the King’s emissary to sacrifice an unclean animal on a pagan altar. To demonstrate his resolve, he slew the Jew who agreed to carry out the order and the King’s emissary. o
He and his five sons, one of whom became the most famous, the brilliant military leader Judah the Maccabee (The Hammer), fled to the hills and gathered an army of the faithful that fought an unconventional guerrilla war and eventually defeated their Greek persecutors.
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It took three years of fighting for them to reach the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been thoroughly defiled by the Hellenists. They cleaned, purified, and rededicated the temple with a newly constructed altar on which they made a proper sacrifice. The legend of that day, the 25th day of the month of Kislev in 165 BCE, has primarily focused on finding enough pure oil to light the Temple Menorah for one day. Miraculously, that one day’s amount of oil lasted the eight days necessary to ready the pure oil needed for the Temple Menorah. And so it has come down through the ages to today.
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One of the oldest jokes we Jews tell to each other is that our people’s holidays can be summed up: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat!”
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Yes, this is true, but there is so much more depth and significance to the story of the first Hanukkah in 2024 resonates in a way that cannot be overstated. Since the Hamas Massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, Israel has been fighting a brutal ongoing war that is not only a physical test of our military and political capacity and resolve but also testing what the Maccabees faced 2200 years ago: what Judaism means to us now and forever.
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This is the thesis of a new book by Israeli Journalist Gol Kalev, an expert in long-term geopolitical shifts and how they impact Israel, Jews, and Judaism. In “The Assault on Judaism,” Galev chronicles the many attempts throughout the ages to literally eliminate Judaism from the face of the earth.
But each time, even as the Jewish population was nearly wiped out and whoever survived was forced to move on, Judaism itself never succumbed. It rekindled somewhere new to triumph once again.
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For nearly 15 months after that fateful October day, Israel has fought valiantly and with great success to eliminate its terrorist enemies, achieving what most military experts have declared the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratio ever in urban warfare. The military experts agree that Israel has created the most moral fighting force in history. Yet, once again, Israel is being accused of all manner of “war crimes” based on nothing but lies by those who are intent on destroying the one Jewish nation on the planet and once again wiping out Judaism for all time.
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Kalev posits that our most dangerous enemy is not the terror regimes Israel faces in combat. According to his analysis, the true danger is the Western nations, primarily European, that have once again turned on the Jews, this time in the form of Israel, to distract from the very
serious problems they are failing to deal with at home. Rather than coming to terms with the immigration crisis that has fueled a true culture clash and potential destruction of their own national identity, they have found it far easier to resurrect “the Eternal Jew” to shift the blame.
It’s Easier still to let someone else solve the new “Jewish Question” by passing it along to an amorphous international body with no actual jurisdiction and no real power except to shape “world opinion.” This is why Kalev subtitled his book: “The Existential Threat is Coming from the West.”
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The examples Kalev provides of how Western nations are undermining Israel are way too many to include here. Among the worst actors he identifies are the dishonest media that spews an anti-Israel narrative, no matter what the actual news, the corrupted academic community that shapes young minds by teaching antipathy to Western values and singles out Israel and the United States as the worst oppressors on the planet, the well-chronicled dystopia called the United Nations that purports to uphold International human rights standards but never misses an opportunity to
sanction Israel while ignoring real genocide and persecution by so many others and the repeated attempts by the various tentacles of the UN, especially the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, to pursue absurd claims of genocide against Israel and issue arrest warrants for Israel’s democratically elected Prime Minister and Minister of Defense.
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As we light our Hanukkah candles this year, we should reflect on the real story of why the Maccabees stood up and said “No!” when confronted with an overwhelming power that demanded the Jews give up what truly makes us Jewish: Judaism itself. They had to engage in a brutal war to ensure that Judaism continued. Today, we are faced with an even more significant global threat to our nation, our Peoplehood, our indigenous relationship to the land of Israel, and our essence. As Modern Maccabees, we are as determined as our forebears to stand up and say: We are not going anywhere. Golda Meir was once asked why Israel keeps fighting. She explained, “We have a secret weapon; we have nowhere else to go.”
That’s a lesson of Hanukkah. Jews in Israel and the Diaspora must keep on fighting. We may live in other countries, but Israel is our home. We have no other place to go.
