A Dangerous Holiday

By Daniel Greenfield December 14, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Holidays are a calendar. They mark points in emotional and physical time. They remind of us who we are.  

Many celebrate Chanukah as nothing more than celebrations of 'celebration', the rituals and rites of entertainment, a special food, a symbol whose meaning they don't remember and a little family fun.

Chanukah is not a safe holiday. It is a victory celebration in a guerrilla war. It is a reminder that the most recent war on Jerusalem was preceded long before by Antiochus's war on Jerusalem. It is a brief light in a period of great darkness.

As we light the menorah, bringing light out of that darkness, we are called on to remember to treasure the price of that light. It is brought forth through the divine matter of heavenly miracles and the earthly matter of suffering and blood.

Chanukah exists today because a small family, the remnant of a faithful priesthood, saw darkness, where many were blinded by the light of prosperity and progress, and they saw the light in the past, where their Hellenistic cousins saw only darkness.

This most dangerous of holidays does not represent a final victory, but the challenge to see the darkness around us and understand what it will take to summon even a little light.

The trivialization of Chanukah into camp and comedy, an eye roll at the lameness of tradition and the repetitiveness of games and jokes intended for children is its own kind of darkness. Those who would strip away the historical and religious meaning of Chanukah today would have been fighting against the Maccabees. The battle to preserve the meaning of Chanukah is part of the struggle to preserve the Jewish traditions and culture from the universalism of Hellenism.

The Maccabees fought for freedom of religion. They fought against the tyranny of a universalistic mass culture. But they also fought to make faith meaningful again. That is why Chanukah is more than a celebration of victory over what they fought against, as important a component of the holiday as it is, but a celebration of what they fought for, to reach Jerusalem and feel the presence of G-d.

When we light the menorah, we are meant to do more than perform rote ritual, and then on to childish games, but to feel, at least for a moment, the darkness that surrounds us, and aspire to feel G-d.

Chanukah is a dangerous holiday because it asks us to question our comfort zones. Its overt militarism and its dangerous underlying message that a time comes when you must choose between the destruction of your culture and a war you can't win, is too frightening for a comfortable age. The children of a material age are unwilling to consider the dark days in which a doomed war must be fought if the soul of the nation is to survive. It is too alien a notion for most. It was an alien one for the descendants of the pioneers who had struggled and sacrificed to return from exile, only for their descendants to eagerly embrace the gymnasiums and baths, the stadiums and idols of a new empire.

There are worse things than death and slavery, the fate that waited for the Maccabees and their allies had they failed, the fates that came anyway when the last of the Maccabees were betrayed and murdered by Caesar's Edomite minister, whose sons went on to rule over Israel as the Herodian dynasty. Nations can survive the mass murder of their bodies, but not the death of their spirit. A nation does not die, until its soul dies, and the soul of a nation is in its culture and its faith.

The mystery of history is that peoples endure through their willingness to for their people.

Tonight that first candle, that first glimmer of flame over oil, marks the night that the Maccabee forces entered Jerusalem, driving out the enemy armies and their Jewish collaborators, and reclaiming their people's culture and religion.

The light of the flame was a powerful message sent across time that even in the darkest hour, hope was not lost. And G-d would not abandon the people. Time passed the Maccabees fell, Jerusalem was occupied and ethnically cleansed over and over again, and still the menorah burned on. A covert message that still all hope was not lost. That Israel would rise again.

Israel had used signal fires and torches held up on mountain tops to pass along important news. The lighting of the menorah was a miniature signal fire, a perpetuation of the temple light, its eight-day light a reminder that even the smallest light can burn beyond expectation and light beyond belief and that those who trust in G-d and fight for the freedom to believe in Him, should never abandon hope.

That divine signal fire first lit in the deserts by freed slaves has been passed on for thousands of years. Today the menorah is on the seal of the State of Israel, the product of a modern day Chanukah. The mark of a Jerusalem liberated in a miracle of six days, not eight. Six as in the number of the original temple Menorah. And the one on the seal as well.

For those liberals who believe that Jewish identity should be limited to donating to help Haiti, agitating for illegal aliens and promoting the environment; Chanukah is a threatening holiday. They have secularized it, dressed it up with teddy bears and toys, trimmed it with the ecology and civil rights of their new faith. Occasionally a Jewish liberal learns the history of it and writes an outraged essay about nationalism and militarism, but mostly they are content to bury it in the same dark cellar that they store the rest of the history of their people and the culture that they left behind.

Holidays aren't mere parties, they are messages. Knots of time that we tie around the fingers of our lives so that we remember what our ancestors meant us to never forget. That they lived and died for a reason. The party is a celebration, but if we forget what it celebrates, then it becomes a celebration of celebration. A hollow and soulless festival of the self. The Maccabees fought because they believed they had something worth fighting for. Not for their possessions, but for their traditions, their families and their G-d. The celebration of Chanukah is not just how we remember them, but how we remember that we are called upon to keep their watch. To take up their banner and carry their sword.

History is a wheel and as it turns, we see the old continents of time rising again, events revisiting themselves as the patterns of the past become new again. Ancient battles become new wars. And old struggles have to be re-fought again until we finally get them right.

Modiin, the rural center of the old Maccabee resistance, is a revived city today, larger than it ever was. Modiin-Maccabim has some 80,000 people living there. In the ancient days, this was where the Maccabee clan rose against the Seleucid conquerors over religious freedom. Today it is a place that the European Union labels an illegal settlement. A place that Jews have no right to live even though it is within sight of the Maccabees who lived and died there. Over two thousand years after Chanukah, Jews are still not allowed to live in peace in Modiin.

The new Maccabees are farmers and teachers, men and women who build families and homes in the lands of their ancestors, who brave the threats of terrorists and international tyrants to live their lives and raise their children. Knowing that they will not be allowed to live in peace, that everything they stand for is hated by the UN, in the capitals of great empires and even by their own government, they still put flame to wick and mark the first day of many days of the miracle that revived the spirit of a nation and inspires it to this day.

Not only may Jews not live in Modiin, but they may not live in Jerusalem either. And yet they do. They persist, to the eternal frustration of empires, in this quiet resistance of building a future with their buildings, their bodies and their lives. They persist in living where so many would like them to die. And they persist in lighting the menorah when so many would rather that it be forgotten.

The Jew today is called on to forget. To turn his children into bricks in order to construct the utopia of their new world order. To bend to the progressive wheel and wear the social justice chain, and cast his own offspring into the sea of zero population growth. To give up his  nation, his land, his faith and his future to toil in the shadow of the pyramids of socialism. To go down to labor in Egypt once more, in South America and Haitian slums, in barrios and villages, in ghettos and madinas, to give up who he is in order to serve others in the new slavery of social justice.

It takes courage to resist physical oppression, but it takes even greater courage to resist cultural oppression. The terms of physical resistance are easy to understand. Force is used against force. Cultural resistance is far more difficult, and by the time the necessity for it is apparent, it can often be too late.The Maccabees had to resist not only physical oppression and armed force, but the cultural oppression of a system that regarded their monotheism, their nationalism, their traditions and rituals as barbaric. A system that much of their own fellow Jews had already accepted as right and proper.

The Maccabees rose up not only against physical oppression, Israel had and would face that over and over again, they rose up against an assault on their religious and cultural  identity.  The lighting of the Menorah is the perpetuation of that cultural resistance and when it is performed properly then it reminds us that cultural oppression, like physical oppression, is ubiquitous, and that just as the forms of cultural oppression can often go unnoticed, so too the resistance to it can go unnoticed as well.

Every year that we celebrate Chanukah, the left makes another attempt to "desecrate the temple" by destroying its meaning and replacing it with the usual grab bag of social justice issues under the union label of "Tikkun Olam". And each time we push back against their ruthless assault on Jewish history and tradition the same way that the Maccabees did, by reclaiming our sacred places, cleaning away the filth left behind by the occupiers, and lighting the Menorah to remind us of who we are.

Chanukah marks the culmination of the Maccabee campaign for the liberation of Jerusalem. It is the time when we remember the men and women who refused to submit to the perversion of their values and the theft of their land. It reminds us that we must not allow our land to be stolen under any guise or allow our religion, history and culture to be perverted on any pretext. The light of the Menorah reminds us that the sacredness of a nation is in its spirit and that preserving that spirit is an eternal struggle against the conquerors of land and the tyrants of souls.

Chanukah is a Holiday of Resistance. It commemorates the physical and spiritual resistance that is required of us sooner or later in all times. Chanukah takes us back to the armed resistance and the moral awakening that liberated Jerusalem and connected the Jewish people with their G-d once again. And that reminds us to never give up, not in the face of an assault on our bodies or on our culture. The lights go out, but they are lit again, each day, for thousands of years, reminding us to hold on to our traditions and our faith, rather than trade them in for the trendy trinkets and cheap jewelry of progressive liberalism.

To light the menorah on Chanukah is to pass on a signal fire that has been kept lit for thousands of years. From the first holiday of Passover, after which the freed slaves kindled the first Menorah, to the final holiday of Chanukah, that light burns on. The historical cycle of Jewish holidays begins with Moshe confronting Pharaoh and demanding the freedom of the Jewish people. It ends with the Maccabees standing up to the tyranny of Antiochus and fighting for the right of the Jewish people to live under their own rule on their own land.

The lights of the menorah embody the spirit of the Jewish people. A spirit that has outlived the atrocities of every tyrant. In the heart of the flame that has burned for a thousand years lives the soul of a people.

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Chanukah in Israel Upholds Light Against Darkness

By Daniel Greenfield December 10, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

A week before Chanukah, Israeli soldiers set up a 15-foot tall menorah in Gaza. As the holiday arrives, menorahs large and small will be lit in enemy territory. Lights will flicker along tanks and from across rubble-strewn battlefields. Out of the darkness of the Jihad, there will be light.

The Jewish holiday commemorating the resistance of the Maccabees, a conservative religious family from the hinterlands of Israel, has always had a special resonance in Israel. In the northern parts of Israel that have often come under Hamas rocket attacks, the shells and debris of the rockets have been repurposed into menorahs symbolizing darkness becoming light.

As public menorah lightings in America and Europe are canceled to avoid triggering the rage of Islamists and leftist allies, preparations are underway for a bigger Chanukah than ever in Israel.

300,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes because of the war that began with the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct 7. The war brought an end to tourism and hotel rooms around the country are full of refugees from the war who are living out of the contents of their suitcases. Children who have spent two months in wartime and horror need something to celebrate.

In city squares, voices will ring with the classic Chanukah children’s song, “Banu hosech legaresh” or “We came to drive back the darkness” in defiance of the long solstice night.

In Modiin, the hometown of the Maccabees where the revolt against the Syrian-Greek Empire’s war on Judaism originated, people have been forced to head for shelters after rocket warnings sounded, but it’s not stopping them from preparing menorahs in every home and square. Or from continuing to donate supplies, everything from toothbrushes to cans of tuna, for the hundreds of thousands of refugees and the soldiers mobilized to fight the Islamic terrorists.

According to the European Union, the Maccabean city is actually an “illegal settlement” on land that belongs to the Muslim invaders, and not to the Jews who had fought an empire to free it over 2,000 years ago. Chanukah reaffirms the history of Modiin and the rest of Israel.

History hits differently in Israel.

This is where King Antiochus IV Epiphanes dispatched his armies from Emmaus or Hama, a West Bank city favored by the invaders because of its hot baths, where the Romans would later settle and rename the country “Palestine” and the city “Nicopolis” or “City of Victory”. The thousands of invaders, according to the Book of Maccabees, brought along slave traders and chains expecting to capture and sell the Jewish population around Jerusalem into slavery.

The historical echoes of Hamas taking hostages are not hard to find, and they’re not just symbolic. The Maccabean uprising proved incomplete. Its leaders were betrayed and killed. The man behind the scenes, Antipater, was rewarded by Rome with a kingship for his son Herod.

Herod, the son of Antipater, an Edomite, and his mother, a Nabbatean Arab, became the first Arab ruler of Israel. The last Jewish king of Israel, a grandson of Simon the Maccabee, was dispatched by Herod to be crucified in Rome. The Herodians and Rome turned to Arab mercenaries to maintain their rule. After Herod died, the foreign Arab mercenaries were unleashed to eradicate entire Jewish villages. And during the Jewish Revolt against Rome, the Arab fighters took a special delight in disemboweling Jewish refugees fleeing from the fighting.

Chanukah is a reminder that history isn’t a progressive arrow leading ever upward, but a circle which comes around again and again. Israeli soldiers are fighting battles on the same plains and hills, sometimes along roads, where the ancient kings struggled with the Philistines, the ancient European colonists whose name was given to this place by Rome, and which was adopted much later by the Arab Islamic settlers. Here, past, present and future blend together.

Zionism was the assertion that history was not a one-way street. It’s an idea central to Judaism. That is why Jews celebrate Chanukah, to commemorate a revolt that briefly brought freedom before being ground under by Roman and Herodian tyranny, and the miracle of a flask of oil that lasted for eight days as a reminder that G-d and His will are unbounded by the confines of time.

Beyond all the children’s parties and gatherings, in Jerusalem, Zedekiah’s Cave, which King Solomon used as the quarries for the building of the First Temple and later used by Jews fleeing the Babylonian invasion, will have extended hours. Among its advantages, it’s underground. And it also showcases the thousands of years of Jewish history that Islamists and leftists deny.

Two thousand years later, they are once again preparing for war in Modiin. But Israel is not just living for war. The city, like all Israeli cities, is busy with blood drives and relief efforts. Some have opened their homes to the refugees from cities under fire. Families that have never met each other before are sleeping under one roof. People are cutting back on their shopping to be able to buy food and clothes for those in need. Others go to hospitals to cheer up the wounded.

While we so often dwell on the darkness, this is a season in which light drives out the darkness.

Politics is all too often a study of evil. And it is vitally important to know evil in order to fight it. But we must not forget that while soldiers fight on in Gaza, the lights of life are being lit across Israel and the world.

Over 2,000 years ago, the Maccabees entered a ruined temple and found nothing clean or pure in it. The Syrian-Greek invaders and their Jewish collaborators had made a point of defiling it. Much as Hamas had made a point of blowing up the synagogues of Gaza and defiling the corpses of the dead. Instead of despairing, they lit the one flask of oil they found and watched it burn, miraculously, for eight days in a menorah of wood that they had cobbled together.

In that light among the darkness, they felt the presence and the love of G-d.

In opposition to the cult of death that governs in Gaza and across the Muslim world, the essence of Jewish resilience is to be found in that hope and faith. After the October 7 massacres, there has been an unprecedented outpouring of charity and a renewed interest in religion by many secular Israelis who had previously dismissed it as backward nonsense.

The Chanukah lights will come after tens of thousands more have taken to lighting Sabbath candles every Friday night. They come after a nation that had been torn between the religious and the secular, over judicial reform and politics, remembered it had a common enemy.

No one knows what the future will bring. We light a candle not because we know, but because we hope. Israel is the place where Jews were massacred and nearly exterminated by Babylon and Rome, but it’s also the place where lights were lit for thousands of years, sometimes in homes and sometimes in hidden caves, always remembering that miracles can always happen.

Some miracles are obvious, while others are hidden. Survival is itself a miracle.

Whether you see the fact that over two thousand years later Jews in Israel are still fighting for their survival as a tragedy or a miracle is a matter of perspective. Only the dead know peace. Life is struggle. The gift of life is not freedom from evil, but the opportunity to fight against it.

Chanukah carries forward the light of a two-thousand year old fight against evil. It is a reminder that even out of the worst possible darkness and despair, light will still come.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.  

Tags: history, Israel, Jewish, recent

The Light of Chanukah

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 5 Comments Tuesday, December 04, 2018 @ Sultan Knish Blog

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee.

And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were living in the backwaters of Israel, a nation that had not been independently ruled since the armies of Babylon had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path.

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Macabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own.

Seron, General of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together his soldiers, along with renegade Jewish mercenaries, and was broken at Beit Haran. The Governor of Syria dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to conquer Judea, destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “O my fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God.

"Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.

"Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning."

Though the Macabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands. Worn from battle, the Macabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they went on to Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God, only to find the Temple and the capital in ruins.

The Macabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire armies to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on.

The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on.

For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of Rome's Arab governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom had been a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

The fall of the Roman Republic and the civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by rewarding the Arab-Idumean murderers of Jewish kings, and his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome's tax collector, Herod.

The promises made by Senate to the Maccabees ceased to matter. Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, but ended instead in massacre and atrocity. The exiles went forth once again, some on foot and some in slave ships. Israel became Palestine. Jerusalem was renamed and resettled. The long night had begun.

But no darkness lasts forever.

Two thousand years after the Jews had come to believe that wars were for other people and miracles meant escaping alive, Jewish armies stood and held the line against an empire and the would be empires of the region.

And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Sixty-eight years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light.

But that old light is still the light of possibilities. It burns to remind us of the extraordinary things that our ancestors did and of the extraordinary assistance that they received. We cannot always expect oil to burn for eight days, just as we cannot always expect the bullet to miss or the rocket to fall short. And yet even in those moments of darkness the reminder of the flame is with us for no darkness lasts forever and no exile, whether of the body of the spirit, endures. Sooner or later the spark flares to life again and the oil burns again. Sooner or later the light returns.

It is the miracle that we commemorate because it is a reminder of possibilities. Each time we light a candle or dip a wick in oil, we release a flare of light from the darkness comes to remind us of what was, is and can still be.