Yeshayahu Leibowitz — the 20th-century Israel Prize-winning scientist, Jewish philosopher and public intellectual — liked to observe that Jewish tradition does not contain a single war holiday with the possible exception of Hanukkah, which, he underscored, actually marks a Jewish civil war. Leibowitz is right, but he fails to mention that Hanukkah also marks the establishment of a period of shaky Jewish political sovereignty within the borders of Judea, which had been incorporated into the vast empire of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE.
The Hanukkah story makes no appearance in the Hebrew Bible (the talmudic sages having excluded the Books of Maccabees from the emerging canon). It begins in 167 BCE, when the Hasmonean family of priests living in Modiin, a hilly town between Jerusalem and Jaffa, launched a guerrilla war against the weakening, post-Alexander, colonial regime. That war initially focused on regaining ritual control over the Temple in Jerusalem.
Once that goal had been achieved and celebrated, most of those who had joined ranks with the rebels returned home; but some, known as Maccabees and led by Judah, stayed to fight. Over the next century, different forms of quasi-autonomous Jewish rule were implemented. That included, finally, a theocracy established and maintained by the Hasmoneans, an armed regime that never earned the loyalty of all the Jews under its jurisdiction, was deemed illegitimate by the Pharisees, and eventually became a client state of Rome.
The Pharisees, we should note, were at that time an ascendant Jewish religio-political party. Their cultural descendants, the talmudic sages, would go on to shape a Judaism after Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE; that’s when they abandoned the goal of political sovereignty until after the Messiah’s arrival.
Our present-day celebration of Hanukkah, as laid out by the talmudic sages, still technically focuses on the Temple rededication — and is often referred to as the “Holiday of Lights,” because of its ritual reenactment of the miracle of the single cruse of sanctified olive oil that burned far longer than anyone had expected. Of course, there would never have been a Temple rededication had not a bold surprise attack against the garrison of colonial soldiers on the Temple Mount been flawlessly executed by Hasmonean guerrillas. But the Talmud lets the armed rebellion and its aftermath recede into background detail.
So we find the sages immersed in a legal discussion about the various oils and wicks that may be used to kindle Shabbat candles, when one sage casually observes that wicks and oils not permitted for Shabbat lighting are also not permitted for Hanukkah. Their conversation veers then to when, where and how to light Hanukkah candles, until, out of the blue, comes the question, “What exactly is Hanukkah?” As if they had been reviewing recipes for baking matzah for the Passover Seder and someone had asked, “But wait, what is Passover?”
And the answer goes, “On the 25th of the month of Kislev begin the eight days of Hanukkah during which neither eulogizing the dead nor fasting are permitted. For when the Greeks entered the holy precinct of the Temple, they defiled all the oils, so that when the Hasmonean regime, having prevailed against them, searched the Temple for sanctified oil they found only one uncontaminated cruse remained…”
Well, that surely is one way of telling the tale.
Curiously, a thousand years later, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204 CE), writing in Cairo where he served as head of the Jewish community and court physician to the Sultan, prefaced his codification of the laws of Hanukkah in his legal opus, Mishneh Torah, with a brief historical account that reveals a different perspective on Jews and politics:
“When the Greek kingdom issued decrees against the Jewish people, refused to allow them to observe their laws and commandments, attacked their property and their daughters, entered and defiled the Temple … and caused them much suffering, the God of our ancestors saved them: The Hasmonean high priests prevailed against the Greek enemy, killed them, saved Israel from them, and appointed a priest as king and thus restored sovereignty to Israel that lasted more than two hundred years until the Roman destruction of the Second Temple.”
Maimonides turns the Talmud’s miracle cruse into a detail, perhaps a sign of Divine intervention, and recognizes in the restoration of even a temporary and troubled Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel an event worthy of being remembered and celebrated.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who emigrated from Russia to British Mandatory Palestine in 1935, some 800 years after Maimonides was born in Cordoba, and went on to live in the sovereign Jewish State of Israel from its establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994, never wavered from his view that “For the Torah and prophets, sovereignty per se is irrelevant. Such an institution exists and under certain circumstances it may even be required. If it is required and exists, there are mitzvoth which pertain to it.”
In short, Leibowitz rejected the view that Jewish sovereignty in itself constitutes a religious obligation. To the contrary, as he reads in Deuteronomy 17:14–20, if the people tire of living under unfriendly Gentile regimes, they may establish a state of their own. The choice is optional. But there are mitzvot that limit a leader’s power. For Leibowitz, Jewish politics carry no religious significance; they merely establish a context within which a Jew is commanded to serve God.
I doubt that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), scion of Polish Hasidism who found refuge from the Nazis in the United States in 1940, would have dissented from Leibowitz’s view. But he did taste deep, personal religious significance in the existence of the State of Israel, especially in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. In his 1968 book, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, he wrote, “The existence of Israel reborn makes life less unendurable. It is a slight hinderer of the hindrances to believing in God … Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God’s radiance in the jungles of history. …”
I also doubt that Leibowitz would have denied Heschel his personal experience. But he would have voiced a cautionary warning to such poetic exuberance: “All of us, having no insight into the designs of Providence, must exercise utmost caution before proclaiming events of the nature of military victory or national political deliverance as ‘the dawn’ or ‘the sprouting of redemption.’”
So what is Hanukkah? Let’s just say, we’re still working on it.
