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Candle lighting is at 4:30 pm on Friday, November 21. This week's Torah portion is Parashat Chayei Sara. Havdalah starts 60 minutes after sundown, at 5:47 pm on Saturday, November 22. Courtesy of hebcal.com |
What is Hannukah?By Rabbi Alan Yuter Our tradition preserves two rather different memories of Hanukkah. Both are fiction and both are founded on fact. The Talmud speaks of a cruse of oil lasting eight days, and I Maccabees speaks of a war against the Greeks, who wanted Israel to become Greek. When Rabbi David Berger, a specialist in Medieval Jewish history under the Church and Messianism, now famous for challenging the Messiahship of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Lubavitch, was a young rabbi, he taught students at Yeshiva University that the Talmudic report or Hanukkah's origins was a legend. The outcry was great and students and rabbis were offended. Now, we know that almost all Jewish scholars, Maimonides and Nahmanides included, were not literalists. In our time, R. Noson Slifkin was banned because he does not accept the Bible account of creation literally to be natural history. The Agudath Israel journal, Jewish Observer, contends that he, and the modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, are outside of "Tradition" or masorah. Pure faith and intellectual honesty are, for Rabbi Berger and our community, critical elements of our Tradition. The Israeli Haaretz, not known for its sympathy to conventional Jewish religious sensibilities, reports that Steven Weitzman of Indiana University claims that the Hanukah story was a literary invention that legitimated the Hasmonean monarchy. These kings were also priests, violating the Torah's "federalist" separation of powers policy. Furthermore, the Greeks tended to be tolerant of ancestral cults—this culture conservatism made for steady tax revenues. Some attributed Antiochus' IV policy to madness, [hence Epimenes] others to an aggressive Hellenization policy, and it is most likely that the Hasmonean rebellion was at first a conflict between Jews who wanted to be faithful to its ancestral religion, and others who wished to go Greek. The revolt was actually a civil war between Jews who were faithful to their ancestral ways, and called Hassidim, and those who were Mityavvenim, literally, those who made themselves into Ionians, or Greeks. Prof. Joshua Efron argues that the Maccabees were popular, because the people supported them in their revolt. We note that in the Hanukkah al ha Nisim prayer there is no mention of any miracle. Hanukkah was an eight day festival, like the Biblical Sukkot on which it is modeled. Weitzman's theory is plausible, it does not violate Tradition because the Tradition espouses values that are remembered in narrative and lived in ritual. The unifying ritual pluralizes our intellectual options. Those who debate what the Tradition means are unified in discourse regarding the fact that Torah has seventy faces, if not more. |