Defining
Hanukkah: Part One
Hanukkah asks us
to reconcile the worldview of the Rabbis with that of the Maccabees.
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Reprinted with permission from Seasons
of Our Joy (Beacon Press).
The Rabbinic tradition was hostile to the
Maccabees; and modern Zionism, identifying with the Maccabees, was often
hostile to the Rabbis. Thus Hanukkah has been a kind of battlefield between
"the Rabbi" and "the Maccabee" as models of Jewish life. Is
there any way to integrate these conflicting orientations to Hanukkah?
From the standpoint
of the Rabbi, Hanukkah celebrated God's saving Spirit: "not by might and
not by power…" To the Rabbi, this spiritual enlightenment required a kind
of inwardness and contemplation that was contradictory to insurgent politics.
From the standpoint
of the Maccabee, Hanukkah celebrated human courage and doggedness, the human
ability to make history bend and change: The need to organize, to act, to
fight, to build might and use power, seemed in the aspect of the Maccabee to
contradict study, prayer, and contemplation.
Can a new generation
of Jews help to resolve this contradiction? If our forebears repressed and
ignored the sense of Hanukkah as a festival of the darkened moon and darkened
sun, what could we contribute by opening up to that aspect of the festival?
What could we add by seeing Hanukkah as part of the nature cycles of the year
and month?
Seen this way,
Hanukkah is the moment when light is born from darkness, hope from despair.
Both the Maccabeean and Rabbinic models fall into place. The Maccabean revolt
came at the darkest moment of Jewish history--when not only was a foreign king
imposing idolatry, but large members of Jews were choosing to
obey.
The miracle at the
Temple came at a moment of spiritual darkness--when even military victory had
proven useless because the Temple could not be rededicated in the absence of
the sacred oil. At the moment of utter darkness in Modin, Mattathias struck the
spark of rebellion--and fanned it into flame. At the moment of utter darkness
at the Temple when it would have been rational to wait for more oil to be
pressed and consecrated, the Jews ignored all reasonable reasons, and lit the
little oil they had.
The real conflict is
not between the Rabbi and the Maccabee, between spiritual and political,
but between apathy and hope, between a blind surrendering to darkness and an acting to light up new pathways. Sometimes
the arena will be in outward action, sometimes in inward meditation. But always
the question is whether to recognize the darkness--and transcend it.
The necessity of
recognizing the moment of darkness is what we learn from seeing Hanukkah in its
context of the sun and moon. There is no use pretending that the sun is always
bright; there is no use pretending that the moon is always full. It is only by
recognizing the season of darkness that we know it is time to light the
candles, to sow a seed of light that can sprout and spring forth later in the
year.
Seen this way, Hanukkah
can become a time for accepting both the Maccabee
and the Rabbi within us, seeing them as different expressions of the need to
experience despair and turn toward hope. Seen this way, Hanukkah can become a
resource to help us experience our moments of darkness whenever they occur
throughout the year--and strike new sparks.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow is a leader in the Jewish Renewal
movement. He is also the director of
the Shalom Center, and the author of numerous books including Godwrestling,
The Bush is Burning and These Holy Sparks.
From Seasons of Our Joy by Arthur Waskow. Copyright 1982 by Arthur Waskow. Reprinted
by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
