Light just one candle

IC XC
✙
NI KA

SOMETIME IN MIDDLE SCHOOL in the Catskill Mountains I learned that Hanukkah was not “Jewish Christmas” but something else. The local library had a book sale, I came across a little book called The Hannukah Book, by Mae Shafter Rockland, published in 1975 and influenced by the Peace Movement^TM. I still have it – although I have had to buy it used a couple of times (it’s still available). It has good recipes and good history in it. Plus some arts and crafts. OK, the “tin can menorah” doesn’t work now, because soda cans are just too squishy. But I digress. When I spent my first two years of High School in rural (at the time) Northern Georgia, where nary a Menorah had been kindled, I started to light candles because it seemed right. There are two festivals that Jesus is noted in the Gospels as celebrating: Passover and Hanukkah.

The book noted that according to the Books of the Maccabees, Hanukkah was a great military victory. There was no other story of the holiday: no miracle of the oil, etc. When the Temple was purified of the pagan sacrileges, there was an eight-day holiday. It’s the military victory that is, as the dreidle says, “a great miracle happened there.” And there was a lighting of lights to celebrate it. But… over time – perhaps because of Christian persecution – the story of the lights began to be told, covering up the military victory lest anyone take offense and, eventually, the oil became the “reason for the season”. They needed a surrogate miracle of the oil – because they couldn’t talk about the miracle of the victory caused by their faithfulness to the mitzvot and God’s faithfulness to Israel and his covenant. (One notes that the Gematria of “אורות” or “lights” is 613, the traditional number of the Mitzvot.) The sense of pride in a Triumphant Military Victory against the pre-imperial powers of the Mediterranean world was turned into a family gathering with a spiritual meaning. This was told in The Hanukkah Book without any sense of loss (because mid-70s). I wonder if they would comment on it in the same way now.

An email arrived from the local Chabad Rabbi as I was preparing to write this post. There was a story in it:

In 1974, one year after the Yom Kippur War, a US Army chaplain, befriended a Jewish American officer in the US army, named Stuart. Stuart shared that as part of his first-year studies at West Point, he was enrolled in a course called “History of Military Tactics and Field Strategies,” taught by a 3-Star Lieutenant General with a Ph.D. in military strategy.

The course surveyed the major battles of history, including those of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, the Middle Ages, down to the latest battles of the modern era. During the final two weeks of the course, which were devoted to reviewing the material, Cadet (meaning military student) Stuart raised his hand with a question, “Why didn’t we survey any of the battles fought by the Jews, either of ancient times (i.e., Roman-Jewish wars) or of modern times (i.e., Arab-Israeli wars)?”

The General responded: “Don’t think that the staff here at West Point has left the Jewish wars unnoticed. We have examined and analyzed them, and we decided not to teach them at West Point. Because according to military strategy and textbook tactics, the Jews should have lost nearly all of them. They should have been swept into the dustbin of history long ago. But, against all odds, they were not. We study wars to develop strategies and demonstrate patterns; but the wars won by Jews defy the patterns of military law. G-d is winning their wars.”

I had never been so humbled in my life, said Stuart. “Here I was a Jewish boy who grew up in a Jewish community; yet I would have to come to West Point and find out the secret of Jewish survival from a non-practicing Presbyterian three star general.”

I believe this to be true. humans are stupid and vengeful. We can destroy anything if we set our minds to it. Americans have wiped whole tribes off the planet. Nations have swallowed up each other and spat out the bones. But not Israel. Somehow, in the face of all odds, we have not be able to destroy this tiny people, this least significant of people, parked in an inconvenient place on the seashore – literally the crossroads of the world.

But there is something else here: a light that humanity did not enkindle and a light that we need. It is a light we cannot extinguish – so much so, that it is perhaps in our best interests not to try. We say, “somehow” but really we mean “Some Divine One”.

But some folks never learn.

I’ve been lighting candles forever and will do so again this year. There will also be latkes and sufganiyot because “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” I will not see it as something vaguely spiritualized about winter darkness: for I have friends in the IDF, loved ones in the Land. I have to answer to them – and to my Mother who worries about them! I will light the candles in celebration of an ancient military victory that should not have happened and in hope.

#Bringthemhomenow