By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — The good-natured jostling about the uncommon calendar convergence this fall of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving leaves one with the taste of emotional leftovers. The Festival of Lights deserves more than being hyphenated every year with another holiday. Its themes and narrative are more powerful and redemptive than the commercial run that has robbed all the season’s now contiguous milestones (HalloweenThanksgivingChristmas) of anything but a biblical MasterCard statement in cold and dismal January.
Hanukkah does not coincide with anything, any year, but with the 25th day of Kislev on the Hebrew calendar. In the year 165 BCE, long before anybody recorded the birth of a Savior, and centuries prior to the arrival of some pilgrim refugees on these shores, a gritty group of rebellious Judeans fought against the Greek Syrian establishment—and among themselves—to establish the principle of religious liberty.
Hanukkah, like Rosh Hashanah, its more elite cousin of renewal and repentance, does not arrive early or late. It arrives exactly on time. It has its own clock, lunar and constant, and it is not telegraphed months before by the first subtle, then blaring, mercantile screeds on television and the Internet. Hanukkah is not about sales; it is about souls.
Nobody bought or sold anything on the original Hanukkah but freedom. The Greeks had defiled Jewish places of worship, burning scrolls and replacing Jewish symbols with stone pigs. They raped and pillaged and ravaged Torah study with their rampant gymnasium sexuality. They made the Jewish Sabbath illegal and killed children who did not denounce Yahweh in favor of their own quarreling and bellicose gods.
The grid of Hanukkah was not football (ironically derived from pigskin)—it was war. A guerrilla militia known as the Maccabees, outnumbered and desperate—managed to drive an organized foreign occupational force, replete with armor and elephants, out of Judea. They did not do this for the territory. They did it for the spirit.
And when they did it, they made the world safe for all freely expressed national and religious festivals. By saving the Jews, they saved the birth of Christianity sixteen decades later. By saving liberty, they saved the Constitution of the United States as well.
Now all we have to do—all of us Jews and Christians—is save our holidays from ourselves.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer and author based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com