Chanukah is a celebration of us and our faith

The rabbis of the Talmud famously ask the question: “Mai Chanukah?” – what is Chanukah? (Shabbat 21b). They answer their question with a story that our sages taught: “on the 25th of Kislev – the days of Chanukkah… for when the Greeks entered the Temple, they polluted all the oils in the Temple, and when the Hasmonean dynasty overcame and defeated them, they checked and they found but one cruse of oil that was set in place with the seal of the High Priest, but there was in only [enough] to light a single day. A miracle happened and they lit from it for eight days. The following year [the sages] fixed those days, making them holidays for praise and thanksgiving.”

And with this story, the uprising and guerilla warfare against the occupying Seleucid empire was relegated to a footnote, the role and military might of the Hasmonean kings was neatly diminished, and in its place a Temple miracle took centre stage.

Chanukah is a festival rooted in history but wrought into something quite other – the celebration of our faith in God and God’s faith in us. Chanukah reminds us of the need to fight to retain our Jewish identity and way of life in the face of powerful imperatives to assimilate. We have to make and remake Judaism in every generation – if we don’t then Judaism will not survive.

The Talmudic rabbis chose to recalibrate the story, downplaying military prowess and inserting a divine miracle. There are other facets to the story that have emerged and submerged too – the story of Hannah, daughter of Mattathias, who challenged her family to rise up against the sexual violence committed against Jewish brides by the Seleucid governor, so causing the rebellion to begin. The story of Judith, who saved her people by beheading the enemy general Holofernes, echoing that of Judah Maccabee hanging the head of Nicanor in Jerusalem. These two women are the reason women are obligated to fulfil the mitzvah of lighting Chanukah candles – as Rashi comments, “the miracle happened through a woman”.

So when we make Judaism for our generation, we should be struggling not only with how much we must defend ourselves rather than expect divine intervention (a hot topic in Israel right now), not only with how to assert and live our Jewishness in the face of an increasingly difficult world, but also with remembering the stories and the people who get lost in transmission. Specifically the two heroines of Chanukah whose dramatic interventions changed the Jewish world, or the people who simply keep Judaism and Jewish peoplehood alive by the ordinary Jewish actions of Torah, prayer and acts of lovingkindness. Chanukah reminds us that the struggle for Judaism is also ours.