Chanukah… The War Still Rages
The occurrence of Chanukah – coming on the 24th day of the month of Kislev – corresponds with approach of the winter solstice. The holiday brings a reminder that no matter how immersed in darkness we are, light will always return. As such, we need not merely wait on the return of a light outside of our control – whether the light of dawn or the light of those warmer months – but we can engage the darkness through co-creation, deliberately acting to create light within the darkness.
The significance of the holiday goes even deeper than this. The mystical teachings of Chassidut relay that the lights of Chanukah represent the regenerative power of the spirit. The Chanukah menorah, or Chanukiyah, is to be lit around nightfall. It is to be placed on the left side of the doorway, no more that 10 handbreadths (tefachim) high. The placement is an invitation to the Divine Presence, (Shekhinah), to descend and meet us at whatever our level of comprehension may be. The significance of the “left” side of the doorway lies in the concept that the left side, or pillar of the Kabbalistic Etz Chayyimis mystically associated with sitra achra.
Every detail of this ritual symbolizes the spiritual power to illuminate the sitra achra or “dark side.” When we count up the number of lights lit throughout the whole holiday, we find that number is 44, the number by which all base materialism is defined. We thus see that in Chinese the sound of the number four (四) is a homophone with the word for “death” (死), both pronounced sǐ. Thus, the Chanukiyah alights 44 protections against the sitra achra.
This protection is borne, however, from our intentionality of tiqqun `olam. If we merely go through the motions of the ritual, with empty form then we derive little benefit. The purpose of the ritual is to cement the intention towards hashlamah. By shining this light into the streets one symbolizes their individual commitment to bring about positive change in a world where light often grows dim. This is because each Jew is to be an aur l’goyyim, a light unto the nations. That is what it means to be a praiser of Yah – a Yehudi. The cosmological battle of light over darkness, which occurs as we approach the solstice, bears a strong parallel to the uprising of the Jewish people over two millennia ago. Of course, it is well known that herein the ritual of Chanukah originated.
The Roots of the Tradition
With the victory of Alexander in 333 BCE two states that succeeded under a series of Hellenistic kings, descended from his generals. These were known primarily as the Seleucids in Syria and the Ptolemies in Alexandria, Egypt. The region of the Levant swung back and forth between the control first of the Seleucids, and second of the Ptolemies. As a general tendency, relations with the latter were more cordial than those with the former. The War for Independence, erupting in 167 BCE, was waged because of, and against, not only Seleucid Hellenization but their religious intolerance towards monotheism.
The war against the Seleucids was primarily led by Judah Maccabee and his father Mattathias, Matityahu ben Yochanan Ha’Kohen. The Greeks had invaded the Land of Israel, desecrating the Temple and persecuting the Jewish people. The spiritual leaders of the day feared, or perhaps recognized, that the extreme egocentrism and disproportionately materialistic outlook of the Greek culture would be a negative influence upon the captive people. And yet, it was not merely a battle to throw off foreign influence, but influence of a culture which took monotheism itself to effectively be treasonous. In the mindset of the ruling power, and the Romans who followed, if you refused to honor the gods of other nations, and give a sacrificial tribute to them, even customarily, this was regarded much the same way that refusing to salute the flag or participate in Fourth of July celebrations would be in the United States today.
“The Abomination That Causes Desolation”
Chanukah is the Hebrew word for dedication. Accordingly, this holiday represents and commemorates the dedication of the Temple to Ha’Shem after it had been completely desecrated. The prophet Daniel refers to the “Holy Ones,” (Qedoshim) as making war on an evil adversary or foreign invader who has violated the Temple and pillaged it.
This foreigner who had “abolished perpetual sacrifice,” is undeniably Antiochus “Epiphanes” (Dan. 7:13-8:12). Antiochus has been the villain in Chanukah festivals ever since. What does this mean though? Isn’t sacrifice barbaric? Weren’t the Greek’s “enlightened” for abolishing it?
In fact, the reality is much different that it seems on the surface. The Greeks were well know to eat any animal they craved and to kill any animal, anywhere, in any quantity they desired. The Jewish people were told in the Torah that in our Edenic state, the ideal was to live in peace with the natural world, to not kill any. Eventually permission was given to those who persisted in their desire for animals, as the nations. Everyone from the Rambam to Rashi understood this to be a concession to existing polytheistic customs, and never the ideal. When sacrifice is first mentioned in the mitzvot, the Radak points out that the Torah uses the word “ki” to mean “if any of you brings a sacrifice” (Lev. 1.2)
There were always examples throughout the Tanakh against this. The prophets tell us that Ha’Shem does not desire sacrifice and finds it abhorrent (Isaiah 66.3-4, Jeremiah 7.21-23, Hosea 8.11-13; Amos 5.21-25) The Nazirite ideal maintained that one would not consume animals until the expiration of that oath. Many who have not examined the sources on Nazirut have this backwards and believe that the oath entailed sacrificing animals. Indeed, many believe that when the Temple stood, animal consumption was required, even though the Talmud clearly says otherwise (Tosafot, Yoma 3a, and Rabbenu Nissim, Sukkah 42b).
After the expiration of the Nazirite oath, or if it was terminated early, one would bring an animal to the Temple to be sacrificed. Why? Because eating an animal was only permitted in Judaism if one brought an animal of the rigorous specifications laid out in the Torah, and brought it to the Temple to be killed. This was the only way that meat could be eaten. If you stopped being a Nazirite, the assumption was that you returned to consuming animals. The notion of only eating an animal killed at a certain spot, in a certain way was a strange idea to the hedonism of the Seleucid barbarians. Far from spreading Greek “Enlightenment”, the Seleucids spread intolerance of carnal restraint.
In practice, the Torah greatly reduced meat consumption. One could not simply say, as the nations, that they were going to sacrifice their weak and sickly animals to their gods. If their was their excuse, they would have to take the best of their animals, ones that could otherwise be used. They would have to do this, travel, wait, and have the animal killed in just such a way, in just such a place. How few animals must have died, comparatively to the those in the other nations! Indeed, Rav Kook felt that based on the prophecy of Isaiah – that “the lion will lay down with the lamb” – that there will only be sacrifices involving vegetarian foods during the Messianic Era!
What the Greeks opposed then, were these rules and regulations that sought to restrain the human hedonistic impulses. We see this epitomized in the act of Antiochus’s sacrifice of a pig in the Temple. The Greek culture could not relate to a path which would tell them to show regard even for animals, which would tell them that the ideal, original state of humankind was living primitively in a state of harmony with animals. They could not relate to a path where even as a bare minimum, there were certain meats that no one could eat. They could not see the point to restricting intercourse during niddah as the Jewish people observed in common with Eastern cultures who had realized the energetic benefit of the same thing. They could not relate to a people who held the Supreme Name and conceptualization of Divinity to be a verb, rather than a noun describing an anthropomorphic deity. Worse still, the gods worshiped by the Greeks, and before them the Babylonians, were simply nefilim to the Jewish people. They were “mighty men of old” in tales of demi-gods raping humans, but they were regarded as nothing more than created beings in the Torah.
That is to say, the Torah is an insult to dualism and divisionism of the polytheism, and pantheons of the nations. For the Torah, there is no “god” there is a VERB – “YHVH” – which is to be worshipped and revered as though it were the One and Only “God” in existence. But It IS Existence. For this reason, the Greeks and Romans considered the Jewish religion to be atheistic in nature.
With the advent of “the Abomination That Causes Desolation”, from the perspective of Judah, the Temple had been polluted. This pollution symbolizes the pollution of the Jewish people by the thinking of the nations. So though we were told that the Exile, the Galut was for us to gain Jews from amongst the nations, we find that the oppressions of the nations caused us to believe what they told us about ourselves. Rabbi Johanan was confirmed by Rabbi Eleazar ben Pedat, in asserting that Ha’Shem exiled the Jewish people for only one reason, to increase the number of people from the nations who would become Jews (Pesachim 87b)
The nations however, told us that to be a Jew was not a spiritual practice, but a secular identity, a race. Why did they tell us this? Because like Esau, they were shown the Torah and they rejected it. Like Esau, they regarded the Torah as death and rejected it when offered it as their birthright. Instead, they sold it for a pitiful price; the price of barbarism, hunting down wild animals as if we were some blood thirsty predatory, craving “red-red” stew; barely human, more a cave-man than anything yosher or yashar.
Just as Esau craved the red-red stew, the Christian church speaks endlessly of Mithraic blood-rites, in ways that make it scarcely possible to imagine that their religion’s roots were in Judaism. Because they rejected the Torah, because Paul regarded it as death, just as did Esau, then they had to have some way to explain the Jewishness of a Messiah which they taught had come to abolish the Torah and Mitzvot. If his Jewishness was not defined by what he did, it had to be an ethnic Jewishness, a Jewishness that the Europeans could only identify as a look of being foreign to them. They could not conceive of a Torah-based definition of Jewishness. They could not wrap their minds around the story of Esther, that “many Persians” simply “became Jews” (Esther 8.17 מִתְיַהֲדִים) by implementing Jewish practice.
So they told us that to be a Jew meant to be a look, a race, that was different, that looked like this stereotype or that. They didn’t know that Jews resided in all parts of the world, even then. So the Temple was polluted by the ideas and worship of Antiochus, but over the years of the Galut, the idea of Jewishness amongst Israel has been polluted by the false worship of nationalism and racial identity held by Esau.
“Rededication”
Chanukah marks the triumphant and miraculous victory of the Hebrew people, led by the Maccabees, against the oppression of the Seleucid Greeks, on a continuum of oppression, religious persecution and suppression that culminated in the Romans. This victory was miraculous, not only in the sense that the revolutionary forces were greatly out numbered by their adversaries, but in another spiritual sense as well. The “rededication,” or Chanukah of the Temple, rebuilt by Zerubbabel, was performed by the revolutionary leader Judah Maccabee, in conjunction with its cleaning from impure hands. When the Maccabees came to rededicate the Temple, they found only one unopened cruise, or flask, of oil with which to light the Menorah. Despite the fact that this amount of oil was clearly insignificant to last for more than one day, it did. In fact, this seemingly insignificant amount of oil lasted for eight days. After this period of eight days the Temple was restored and purified; accordingly new oil was then able to be obtained.
The miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days tells us that we do not need to wait for the Messianic Era to initiate and inaugurate it. It tells us that we do not need to wait for Mashiach to save us from the problems the Jewish people face today, or the problems sometimes created in our name by those who have forgotten the meaning of being Jews. It tells us that if we will take the spark and light the fire, the light will burn for as long as it needs to so long as we set the process into motion and put the Torah into action.
The miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days reawakens the children of the Most High to an appreciation of the Holy Mystery and the Infinite One, symbolized by the number 8, symbolizing the underlying spiritual current which flow throughout the material universe, (which is generally associated with the number seven). Interestingly, perhaps synchronically, an eight turned on its side is the mathematical symbol for infinity.
One candle is lit every evening after sundown until the menorah shines fully on the final night of the festival. These candles are sanctified and not used for any other purpose than for this. Why? To remind us that we have but one purpose here. It is not for us to become intoxicated by our jobs, wealth, women, men, politics, nationalism, identifications with false boundaries of political or physical, biological borders. We are here to be an aur l’goyyim, a light in the darkness, a light which does not light itself, but a light lit from the source of all light, symbolized by the shamash. The Talmud teaches us that we were given the Torah in order to bring it to the nations (Tanhuma Dt. 2).
The Chanukiyah candles are placed on the menorah from right to left, indicating the order of emanation. However, conversely, they are lit in order from left to right thus symbolizing the reality that we embrace holiness with increasing devotion as we progress through life, and that our later deeds will receive light more quickly than our earlier ones, due to the nature of increasing, exponential perfection as we journey on.
Though this holiday is also celebrated in synagogues, Chanukah is first and foremost a celebration of the people in their homes, for it is there that liberation truly begins. In living Chanukah, each of us transforms our places of dwelling into Holy Temples; wherein our actions towards bringing about actuation of the Divine Will creates a light that shines into the very core of our Creator’s being. As we act in partnership with our Creator, in bringing back the light and “raising the sparks,” we pray that the inextinguishable human spirit of righteousness and holiness banish the overwhelming forces of darkness and oppression in this world. Though at times this battle may seem overwhelming, we learn from and ritualistically symbolize in Chanukah, that even a small amount of light can illuminate a mass of darkness, and even though it seems impossible, if we will light that light, it will keep burning even when it seems impossible for it to be maintained.