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Drash for Shabbat Vayishlach By Bert Landau - December 8, 2006 Hanukah has been with us since about 165 BCE. It's a celebration of retaking the Temple [there was a main Temple back then ~ now we're highly decentralized but were very centralized back then], a 'miracle' and the end of a war. Mostly it celebrates an historical event. In 165 B.C.E., a group of Jews successfully rebelled against King Antiochus. Although the holiday focuses on the specific victory against King Antiochus's army, the story of Chanukah begins long before that specific event. In 334 B.C.E., Alexander the Great conquered Judea and brought to it Greek Culture. He didn't force anyone to participate, but he lowered taxes for any group willing to accept this way of life. When Alexander died, his Middle Eastern kingdom divided into two groups: the eastern kingdom (including modern-day Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon) was called the Seleucid kingdom; the western kingdom (including Egypt) was the Ptolemaic kingdom. These two groups fought one another for political control, and Judea was caught between them. The Jews of Judea didn't care which group ruled them. They had their Temple and their High Priest. It didn't matter to whom they had to pay taxes; the taxes were always too high anyway. Sound familiar? In 169 B.C.E. the Seleucid King Antiochus attacked the Ptolemies. He lost. Word got back to Jerusalem that he was dead. A former High Priest, Jason, set up a revolution in Jerusalem. Antiochus, of course, was still alive. Furious, he slaughtered a large number of Jews, declared martial law, and banned certain practices of Judaism as capital crimes, specifically Shabbat and circumcision. In addition, he profaned the Temple by introducing foreign worship. This was intolerable. Jews fought against these decrees Mattathias came on the scene. The First Book of Maccabees says he was a priest who moved from Jerusalem more than thirty miles to Modi'in. Therefore, he probably was not part of the in-crowd of the priesthood. When a Seleucid ordered Mattathias to participate in a sacrifice, he refused. After slaying a Greek officer as well, Mattathias and his followers fled to the hills, and thus began the revolt. He successfully united the people under his authority. Judah, called Maccabee, the Hammer, was one of Mattathias's five sons. Antiochus sent an army to wipe out the revolt. Judah and his revolutionaries defeated that army in the mountains surrounding Jerusalem using guerrilla tactics. Antiochus sent another, larger army, but Judah and the revolutionaries defeated his army as well and entered Jerusalem. After winning, the Jews cleaned the defiled Temple in Jerusalem; it apparently took almost a year. Judah declared a great holiday to celebrate the fact that the Temple was again in Jewish hands. In order to make this dedication a big event, they declared that the ceremony should serve as a reminder of Sukkot, which lasts eight days. The Jews had been unable to celebrate Sukkot for three years because of their guerrilla fighting, so they celebrated Sukkot at the time of the Temple dedication. The dedication of the Temple and, like Sukkot, lasted for eight days. The Hebrew word for dedication is Chanukah. The story we always tell the children [and sometimes the adults, too] was that cleaning the Temple for the rededication would take 8 days but there was only a small amount of lamp oil available - maybe a day's worth or less. The lamps lasted all eight days, hence the miracle of the lights. Temples weren't built with lights or windows then so lights were pretty important the deeper into the Temple you went - and it was a pretty big building. The story didn't end there with a happily-ever-after ending. After all, they were all Jews. Remember the line: if there are 3 Jews in a discussion, there are at least 5 wildly different opinions? There were probably a few thousand Jews in town for the next hundred years or so. Civil strife was unavoidable. Things haven’t changed very much. Shabbat Shalom. |
