Another day brings yet another Hanukkah story. But, in case you missed them, check out yesterday’s and previous days’ Hanukkah stories too. Worth doing so for the comments alone! But now, on to today’s telling of the the Hanukkah tale.
For the last hundred years, Hanukkah has also been observed as a national holiday celebrating the Jewish people’s building up of the land and State of Israel. Without getting too political, this version of Hanukkah recalls how the ancient warriors reclaimed their rightful land and made it safe for all Jews to live in. It was a holiday of homecoming and home building, celebrating a people’s ability to make a place for itself in the world.
This version of Hanukkah celebrates the body as much as the soul of a nation. It celebrates connection to the land, to the Maccabees as rural priests who yearned not only for a pure Temple, but for the freedom to work their land in peace, and to be free of the urban priests who they felt did little more than cater to the idle rich. Like most of the early Zionist thinkers, this story of Hanukkah is essentially a socialist narrative.
This is not a God-focused holiday at all. It not only eschews miracles, but actually replaces God with people, as the saviors of the Jewish people. An early Zionist folk song, Mi Yimalel, plays off of the words of Psalms 106, and instead of asking rhetorically, “who can tell the might acts of God (El, in Hebrew)”, asks instead, “who can tell the mighty acts of the Jewish people (Yisrael, in Hebrew)”. What the song preserves from the Psalms is the notion that mighty things are happening in the world, but it leaves the accomplishment of those things to us.
What has been your greatest accomplishment this year? Did God play a role in that accomplishment, or not?