Rabbi Susan Grossman: December 2007 Archives

I was in New York this week and actually bought a New York Post for the first time in my life. Why? Because it featured on it's Dec. 12 cover a photo of Walter Adler, a Jewish subway passenger, with his arm draped over Hassan Askari, a Muslim accounting student, over the title: “Peace Train: Muslim rescues Jew from subway thugs.”

According to the Post, when Adler and some friends boarded a Q train, someone wished them a “Merry Christmas,” and Adler responded with “Happy Hanukkah.” About 14 men and women then started shouting anti-Semitic slurs and others immediately began to pummel Adler. That is when Askari jumped in, taking some hits himself to save Adler.

Rabbis Stern and Rabbi Waxman are right that our Hanukkah rituals are multi-valanced, as is any ritual that has lasted thousands of years. As such, Hanukkah responds to the human needs for light and hope at this darkest time of year. However they miss the most significant point of the Hanukkah story, which also is the most important response to Christopher Hitchens.

For centuries, the lights of the Hanukkah menorah have inspired hope and courage. They may have also been responsible for inspiring then-General George Washington to forge on when everything looked bleak when his cold and hungry Continental Army camped at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777/8.

The story is told that Washington was walking among his troops when he saw one soldier sitting apart from the others, huddled over what looked like two tiny flames. Washington approached the soldier and asked him what he was doing. The soldier explained that he was a Jew and he had lit the candles celebrate Hanukkah, the festival commemorating the miraculous victory of his people so many centuries ago over the tyranny of a much better equipped and more powerful enemy who had sought to deny them their freedom. The soldier then expressed his confidence that just as, with the help of God, the Jews of ancient times were ultimately victorious, so too would they would be victorious in their just cause for freedom. Washington thanked the soldier and walked back to where the rest troops camped, warmed by the inspiration of those little flames and the knowledge that miracles are possible.

We Jews have our own WWJD: What Would Judah Maccabee Do?

Judah lived at a time much like our own. A large number of Jews spent their days enjoying the pleasures of modern (for them Hellenistic) society, not really caring about the decisions being made for them by politicians and the people ‘on the Hill,’ the power elite, somewhat like today’s big business, who had bribed their way to control over the Temple Mount.

But Judah and his family were not content just to sit back and let events unfold because they knew the dangers of silence. That is why they rose up not only against their Seleucid overlords, but the politicians and big business interests who had sold out their people. They fought not only to win the freedom to observe their ancestral traditions but so that future generations could flourish. Indeed, if not for the Maccabee uprising, Judaism, and the monotheism it introduced to the world, would have been snuffed out and we would not be celebrating Hanukkah today.