'M ai Chanucah? - What is Chanucah?", asked the rabbis of the Talmud. They asked the question, not because they didn't know, but because they had a problem with it. Chanucah earns just three pages in Tractate Shabbat (21b-24a), most of which are concerned with rituals relating to the kindling of the lights and the place of this minor festival in the liturgy.
Virtually no mention is made of the history surrounding the festival. There is only a brief reference to the Greeks entering the Temple and defiling all the oil, leading to the well-known eight-day story.
The books of Maccabees tell a rather different story. Without mentioning anything about oil, they recount the historical events of the time, and record the victories of Judah and his brothers over the troops of Antiochus IV. The man who ruled Judea at the time (167 BCE) called himself "Epiphanes" ("the god manifest") but was regarded by many as "Epimanes" ("the madman").
In a fit of rage he sent an army to Jerusalem, banned Jewish worship and installed an altar to Zeus in the Temple, on which pigs were sacrificed. Jewish outrage ensued and the rest, as they say, is history.
Except that there is rather more to it. There had been a battle taking place in Jerusalem and Judea for many years before Antiochus's actions ignited the Jewish rebellion. Ever since the arrival of Alexander the Great almost two centuries earlier, Greek culture had oozed into the life of the people of Judea. This process, known as Hellenisation, had been taking place throughout the lands under Greek rule, and the Jews were intrigued by their hosts' dedication to science, philosophy, art and culture. In Jerusalem itself the ruling elite - the Temple priests - actively encouraged the Hellenisation of the city, even selling off Temple vessels to bolster the Greek ruler's ailing finances.
It's conceivable that Greek and Jewish culture could have co-existed comfortably
It is conceivable that the Greek and Jewish cultures could have co-existed comfortably, each benefiting from the other, combining the best elements of each to produce an even richer synthesis of spiritual and intellectual achievement. The behaviour of the Jerusalem priesthood put paid to that possibility, however. The people of Judea were unimpressed by their rulers' deference to their Greek masters, and the defiling of the Temple proved to be the tipping point.
The books of Maccabees tell us that a priest in the little town of Modi'in, named Mattathias, started the rebellion, killing a Greek soldier who was forcing him to sacrifice a pig. Mattathias and his five sons, led by Judah (the third of those sons), took it on themselves to tour Judea, enforcing a strict interpretation of Jewish law on their less observant, Hellenised fellow Jews and then spearheaded a three-year guerrilla war against the Greek forces in Jerusalem, eventually forcing Antiochus's troops to withdraw.
Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. In true Jewish fashion, the reaction to Antiochus's actions was fragmented and filled with dispute between the various factions. A Jerusalem group called the Chasidim, for example, as their name suggests, adhered rigidly to every Jewish law and refused to fight on Shabbat. Needless to say, this strategy made them very vulnerable. The Maccabees took a decision that it was permitted to fight the enemy on the Sabbath and eventually victory was theirs.
Perhaps the rabbis' ambivalence towards Chanucah is based on that Maccabean decision to waive a crucial Jewish law in order to achieve their military aims. The violence of Judah and his followers troubled them, and they were concerned about the absence of God from the story. That is why the "miracle" of the oil was introduced in the Talmud to explain the eight-day festival, even though it is described in II Maccabees 10 as a belated Succot celebration, with no mention of oil.
The struggle that lies behind the festival of Chanucah is, to use a modern cliché, a clash of civilisations. It was a battle between the pervasive secularising force of the prevailing culture and a determined attempt by zealots to resist that force. That struggle was filled with brutal extremism and callous disregard for human life on both sides. No wonder the rabbis had so much difficulty with Chanucah.
As chanuciot are lit across the land that was wrested from Greek control over 2,000 years ago, its citizens and their co-religionists in the diaspora might do well to contemplate the vicious consequences of that struggle between the secular and the religious. It could be argued that something similar is currently playing out in modern-day Israel, as the descendants of those who lived in Greek times find new reasons to disagree and tear one another apart. Something to think about, perhaps, when we light our chanuciot and, like the rabbis, ask ourselves what, exactly, is the meaning of Chanucah.
