You’ve already
read that Chanukah is celebrated because oil that was meant to last for one
day, lasted for eight. The
backstory is rooted in one family, The Maccabees, and specifically one
Maccabee son, Judah.
The story goes
back to the 2nd Century BCE, when the Syrian-Greek army came to
conquer the Jewish people. They didn’t just want their land, they wanted to
destroy their very culture. They ordered Jewish people to eat pork, to
sacrifice pigs to Greek gods. If a Jewish mother wanted her infant son to be
circumcised both she and her baby were killed. The Syrian-Greeks wanted the
Jewish people to think like them, worship like them, to become exactly like
them. Jewish brides were forced to sleep with Syrian-Greek officers before they
could sleep with their husbands. And teaching the Torah, the very heart of the
Jewish religion, became a capital crime. The Greeks wanted total assimilation
of Jews. And there were “Hellenic Jews” who aligned themselves with them.
Sages and their
students went into hiding to preserve the Torah. The religious Jewish people did
everything they could to remain Jewish, including holding weddings in secret. Many
Jewish people were tortured and then murdered when they were discovered. There
was tremendous suffering for the Jewish people of Israel.
The
religious Jews would not give up their religion and their culture,
realizing that while Jewish people love peace, there comes a time when one must
fight and that time had come.
One Hasmonean
family of five sons stood up to the Syrian-Greeks. The Maccabees, led by the patriarch
Mattisyahu, started a rebellion but Mattisyahu died before he could see the
rebellion become a full out war.
Leadership passed
to his son, Judah, who changed the course of Jewish history. Brilliant as a
leader on the battlefield, as well as inspiring thousands of Jewish people to
take up arms and fight. Judah devised ways for the much smaller
band of Jews to outwit and out maneuver the much larger and better equipped Syrian-Greek
Army. One Jewish family is at the heart of saving the Jewish religion and
culture.
When the Jewish
people captured Jerusalem they had to rededicate the Temple, which had been
fouled. It was then that they lit a
wooden Menorah with the one small amount of untainted oil they could find. It
was enough oil to last for one day but it lasted for eight days. It was a great
miracle that happened in Jerusalem.
The name, Chanukah, comes from the Hebrew word for Education. The Jews who fought for their religion
were Torah scholars and to preserve the religion one must educate themselves and the children.
Interestingly,
there would be no Christianity or Islam if this war hadn’t happened because both
Religions came into being in the post-Greek period.
Today, as we
light our menorahs in our homes, we are not only united with Jewish people
around the world but with the seven branched golden menorah in the Holy Temple
in Jerusalem.
My Chanukah wish is that every dog and cat finds a loving home where he or she lives as a true member of the family.
My Chanukah wish is that every dog and cat finds a loving home where he or she lives as a true member of the family.
Happy Chanukah!
Please remember to surf over to Cat Wisdom 101 tomorrow for the final Chanukah Crawl Blog Post:
