Of Hanukah

Hanukah is an interesting holiday.

It is the only Rabbinic holiday without reference -- or justification -- in scripture. It is a holiday for exile -- only briefly celebrated when the Temple stood and not to be celebrated in messianic times.

We celebrate two roughly co-existing stories.

In the first, the Maccabees, facing the Great Satan of their day, invented Jihad and asymetric warfare, terrorised the population of collaborators, and eventually liberated the Holy Land from colonialist oppression. (If only then -- as seems to be the nature of such liberations -- to subject the Land to brutal and short-lived, mis-rule.)

In the second, the priests, returning to the defiled temple, found only a small, large enough for one day, flask of still-pure ritual oil preserved which miraculously sufficed the full eight days required to produce fresh ritual oil.

The observed activities -- the timing, the Menorah, etc -- largely, reference the latter story. One can get the sense that we celebrate the former only as a pre-requisite for celebrating the latter.

The liturgy to some degree connects the two stories thematially. The few defeated the many. The small amount of oil out-burnt itself. What Levinas calls the miracle of surpassing.

But, in the end, the true call of the Hanukah -- much needed today -- is, perhaps, to stewardship. Towards simply preserving what little we have as best we can. The promise of the holiday is, then, that our resources, however problematic and limited, will suffice. And perhaps the fufillment of that promise begins with the obligation to light our individual Menorahs in public view.