It's that time of year again

(In any case, it doesn't matter how you spell Chanukah just so long as it has eight letters. :o))

Thoughts on Chanukah

Every year for the past little while, as you're probably fed up of me saying by now, my conception of Chanukah has been completely overturned. First livredor did it. Then along came Rachel Elior at Limmud '05, then other people (whose identity I have forgotten, but whose teachings are summarised at the above link), then Stephen Rosenberg at Limmud '07, and most recently R. Shoshanna Boyd-Gelfand at the Moishe House Beit Midrash.

This year I'd tell you who the prize goes to... only in the few days it's taken me to get around to blogging this, I've forgotten. :-( It's not Rabbi Nathan Lopez Cardozo, in his fascinating essay about capel-wearing, nor R. Jeremy Rosen in his blog, nor the Reflections column in the AMS weekly sedra sheet. If you saw this information online recently, let me know, and I'll give its author credit. [ETA: It was Shoshanna Cohen in a mailshot from the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.]

Anyhow, what the insight was was to point out that that though we have this whole eight-day festival to celebrate the Hasmoneans' recapturing Jerusalem from the Seleucids and rededicating the Temple, what the history we are commonly taught does not mention (but Maccabees 1 and Josephus do) is that shortly after this happened, the Seleucid reconquered Jerusalem, and it was not until 13 Adar that the Jews finally liberated it for good, which was commemorated in the minor festival of Nicanor's Day, named after the defeated Seleucid general (and which was one of a number of minor commemorations of minor victories which have now been rolled together into the eight-day festival of Chanukah). The author of the article I read this in commented that maybe that by choosing the 25th of Kislev as the main celebration of the Hasmoneans' victory, not 13 Adar (or a nearby day so as not to clash with the Fast of Esther or Purim), maybe the Sages of that generation were making a deliberate point.

On a slightly different note, I was thinking back over what I learned from R. Boyd-Gelfand, about the reason for lighting candles (or oil lamps) on Chanukah. The reason we all know about is the story of the miracle of the single undefiled cruse of oil lasting for eight days, but that story is not attested until the Gemara was written down in the seventh odd century. It's not mentioned in the Mishna or anything earlier, even though the Mishna gives the laws about lighting the lights. This makes it a bit suspect given the generally poor "historical memory" of the Talmud of post-Biblical history. Maccabees 2, meanwhile, gives a completely different story but which doesn't tie into anything we know about Chanukah; which raises suspicions further on the general principle as enunciated by R. Chaim Weiner which is that when the Sages give one reason for why we do something, that's the reason, but when they give multiple reasons, they don't know what the reason is. And then there's Josephus, who tries to fob off his readers with a broken reed of an explanation; it's clear he knows more than he's letting on.

This put me vaguely in mind of the Druze, who practice a secret religion: The details are revealed only to their initiates, the `uqqāl, and even the majority of the Druze themselves don't know their own people's religion. It strikes me that in lighting lights on Chanukah we've gone one step further: We've got a religious practice which is central to one of our minor festivals, but the origin of which we've managed to completely forget!

One can't help but wonder, then, if the original reason for lighting lights on Chanukah might not be something completely different to the reasons which have come down to us—if the reason R. Boyd-Gelfand thought Josephus was hiding and not passing on to his readers was not actually the one about the miracle of the oil, but something completely different, which was so politically sensitive (that being the most likely reason, in a time of Roman suppression of Judaean revolts) that it could never be written down at all, and ultimately got forgotten.