For thousands of years people have struggled for the right to practice their faith freely. Not surprisingly, the story of Hanukkah as the celebration of religious freedom became particularly popular in America where we have been conducting the single most successful experiment in religious freedom ever conducted in human history.
But the history of Hellenism is really not a story of the restriction of religious freedom. It is a story of the celebration of religious syncretism. Ironically, the Maccabees were probably more religiously restrictive than the Seleucids against who they fought. Upon winning the war, the Maccabess forcibly circumcised members of the Jewish community and later forced entire gentile ethnic groups to convert to Judaism.
The ancient version of fighting for religious freedom was fighting for the freedom of your people and the opportunity to make others just like you. But freedom of America has changed that story.
In contemporary America, the version of the Hanukkkah story told by everyone from best-selling author Herman Wouk to comedian Adam Sandler, is actually a tale in which we are invited to imagine the importance not only of fighting for the freedom to practice our own religion, but the importance of fighting for the freedom of others’ to practice theirs, include no religion at all. That has been the American spin on this ancient story.
Where do you wish you could be more spiritually free? For what other group’s religious freedom are you concerned?