Of all the vacations on the Jewish calendar, Hanukkah, which started final Sunday night, has at all times been one in every of my favorites. Even after I was youthful and much much less observant, I appreciated the vacation’s well-known rituals and customs: lighting the menorah, spinning the dreidel, consuming potato latkes and so forth. My given Hebrew identify — “Maccabee,” as a result of Judah Maccabee was nicknamed “the hammer” — can be synonymous with the hero of the vacation’s story.
Due to the vacation’s timing and the overall want by company America and elected officers to incorporate Jewish People in annual Christmastime festivity, Hanukkah is probably the most commercialized and among the many most steadily mentioned of all of the Jewish holidays. The commercialization of Hanukkah is anodyne, if a little bit of a distraction. Extra problematic is the time-tested custom of American politicians distorting the vacation’s that means — usually, for self-serving causes.
For so long as I can bear in mind, liberal politicians have taken pains to invoke the imagery of the Hanukkah menorah’s mild so as to preach about summary universalist ideas similar to justice and freedom and, as President Obama put it two years after leaving office, about an event to “recommit ourselves to constructing a brighter future for our households, our communities and our world.” Generally they even get probably the most fundamental info of the Hanukkah story egregiously mistaken, because the Jewish then-second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, did two years ago.
I’ve at all times discovered this recurring humiliating ritual to be worse than embarrassing. It’s offensive.
Hanukkah, I’ve at all times thought, is the Jewish individuals’s quintessential particularist and nationalist vacation. It’s a story in regards to the Maccabean revolt towards the Greek-Syrian Seleucid Empire, which occupied Judea and tried to Hellenize the Jews — to crush them bodily and subdue them spiritually. Many are accustomed to the miracle that adopted the Maccabees’ victory: The scant oil discovered within the courtyard, upon repurifying and rededicating the Temple, lasted eight nights. However the extra spectacular miracle was the army victory over the Seleucids and the Hellenized Jews who joined them.
The core message of Hanukkah, then, is one in every of traditionalism and cultural preservation within the face of menacing and assimilationist forces, each inside and with out. That’s the actual that means of the vacation — not exchanging presents or waxing poetic about universalist platitudes.
But paradoxically, particularly in mild of tragic recent events, one thing occurred to me for the primary time: This stridently particularist Jewish vacation does have broader — certainly, world — relevance. It’s simply not the relevance liberal politicians have ascribed to Hanukkah. Certainly, it’s the precise reverse.
The Maccabees had been in a position to prevail and thereby protect Judaism, towards the percentages, as a result of that they had function and conviction. They believed that Judaism stood for one thing vital: They believed that moral monotheism was vital, the Hebrew Scriptures had been true, and the Land of Israel belonged to the Kids of Israel. In brief, the Maccabees had nationwide and civilizational delight, and it was due to that delight that they fought so valiantly and refused to bend the knee to Hellenistic assimilation. They rejected the universalist cri de coeur that every one cultures and peoples are equal — and maybe interchangeable.
In current many years, and much more acutely lately, Western civilization has needed to be taught that lesson anew. Human beings, whereas all made in God’s picture and thus all deserving of dignity and ethical value, are immensely difficult. We’re not reducible to widgets on an economics chalkboard. Our inherited cultural traditions and discovered customs and mannerisms are sometimes very completely different from each other. We don’t all worth the identical issues, pursue the identical objectives, maintain the identical social requirements or consider in the identical political establishments.
We’re, briefly, completely different. The Maccabees understood that there was one thing particular in regards to the truths, values and ideas that Judaism launched to the world. They weren’t prepared to sacrifice these truths, values and ideas to the siren tune of Hellenistic universalism. Western nations in the present day should be taught that very same lesson anew. The trendy Maccabees senselessly slain final Sunday at Sydney’s Bondi Seaside seem like but the newest victims of contemporary Hellenism, as one tradition tries to erase one other.
It doesn’t must be this fashion. A tradition might be proud with out being chauvinistic. And a individuals might be self-confident with out being imperious. If there are going to be fewer Bondi Seaside-style massacres, transferring ahead, Western cultures and nations are going to must rediscover and reprioritize what made them nice within the first place. They’re going to must keep in mind that human beings, and the particular societies they represent, are distinctive. They can’t, and shouldn’t, be swapped or frivolously bartered like items in a market. We’ve our traditions, values and methods of life which can be value cherishing and preserving from one technology to the subsequent.
It won’t be politically appropriate, however that’s how we will apply the true lesson of Hanukkah.
Josh Hammer’s newest e-book is “Israel and Civilization: The Destiny of the Jewish Nation and the Future of the West.” This text was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer
