"Experience is that wonderful quality that lets you recognize a mistake when
you are making it again." - Anonymous

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - Santayana

    There is a joke that all Jewish holidays can be defined by the following three sentences. "They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat." Hanukkah is no exception. However, what makes Hanukkah different and distinct from the holidays celebrating Jewish physical survival is that Hanukkah marks a successful defense of our religious-cultural existence.  Purim reminds us each year that
Haman's attempt to eradicate the national existence of Israel was  supernaturally defeated. Hanukkah reminds us that Graeco-Seleucid culture's deliberate attempt to wipe us out by forcibly absorbing us also met with failure, despite overwhelming odds in their favor.
Assimilation
    That absorption, whether active or passive, is called "assimilation."    It is a serious word among those who care about Jewish survival.
    Since our Dispersion among the nations in the year seventy of this era  (C.E. or A.D.), the loss of Jewish identity by absorption into the cultures among which we have been scattered has always been a matter of utmost concern to the survival of the Jewish people -and remains so. At present, according to the Am Echad organization, among non-Orthodox Jewish families each one
hundred Jews diminishes across three generations to - at best - only twenty-five who even know they are Jewish! Assimilation is at present still the greatest single ongoing threat to Jewish survival since Nazism.
Hellenism
    At the time the events defining Hanukkah occurred, there was an attempt to legislate Jewishness out of existence, and to enforce that legal tack with military might. The Seleucid-Greek ruler Antiochus Epiphanes had developed as his personal goal the "hellenization" of the world. The Greek word for Greece is Hellas - and hellenization was the effort to make the entire world culturally Greek.
    Since the Hellenic civilization derives from a belief system of deities who behave in an almost entirely anthropic manner - human flaws included - embracing the Greek world-view did not merely mean adopting the architectural or stylistic or linguistic patterns of Greece; it meant
Absorbing its polytheism and intense humanism - as well as its devolution of
Deity to mere human frailty.
    Yet, we Jews live and die upon the "Shema."
    There is only One God - not many.
    He is our God - the God of Israel.
    There was no accommodation possible here: these two believe systems were on a collision course from the moment Antiochus had decided to wipe out the faith and culture of Israel.
Showdown
    Antiochus sought to propagate his effort at hellenization by proactively destroying every vestige of Jewish religion and national culture he could identify. He ruined the Temple in Jerusalem and sacrificed a pig on its altar in the Holy of Hollis. He tore down Jewish symbols and erected statues of himself and Greek gods inside the Sanctuary and all around Israel.
    He outlawed circumcision of Jewish sons, teaching of the Torah (Law of Moses), and practice of Jewish ethnic custom. (Please remember these three items, because they become very important later in this article.)
    Within Jerusalem and all through the Land, his campaign to eradicate Jewishness in every way was proceeding apace, and might have succeeded - if opposition did not arise from a very unexpected source: one man from an obscure family in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
    In the Jewish mountain-village of Modi'in (pronounced moe-dee-EEN), an Antiochan prelate convened a town gathering in the town's central plaza. A Levite - one of the official religious functionaries of our Jewish faith - had somehow been induced by the Antiochans to sacrifice a pig on a religious altar, thus defiling the town and making an open act of allegiance to the forces of Hellenism. Standing in the crowd was an old man named Mattityahu, along with a few of his sons. As the turncoat Levite was about to perform his traitorous act, old Mattityahu took a sword from beneath his tunic, strode up to the Levite, and in front of everyone in his town, killed him on the spot. He then raised his blood-soaked sword and cried out the exact words of Moses
to Israel at the incident of the golden calf - "All who are for the Lord, come to me!"
    That sentence was the rallying cry of what is known to historians as "The Hasmonean Revolt." Hasmonean is a battered English version of the term HaShem-eem (People of the Name). It is so called because "The Name" is the respectful term observant Jewish people use to refer to the revealed Name of God, the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter derivative of the verb "to be" with
which God referred to Himself to Moses at Sinai.
    The revolt also came to be called the Maccabean Revolt for the following reason. Mattityahu, like Moses, started his people on a journey it was not his destiny to complete. He died when the revolt was in progress, and one of his sons arose as leader in his place. His name was Yehuda, or Judah. In Hebrew, a word for a "blow" (impact, strike) is makah. Judah the Hammer - Yehuda Maccabbi - earned his moniker from his trademark guerrilla warfare tactics. Mr. "hit-and-run." Lightning fast strikes, followed by disappearance into the hills of Judea or Samaria. "Who was that masked man?"
    Impossibly - it worked.
    A small band of rebels defeated the strongest army on earth, and established an autonomous Jewish kingdom. The Temple was repurified - the one day's worth of holy oil allegedly allowed the eternal lamp to burn eight days until more holy oil could be made, thus engraving the "festival of lights" on the Jewish consciousness forever with the eight-branched "Menorah" that serves today as the very symbol of the modern State of Israel.
    The letters upon the spinning top (in Yiddish, dreydl and in Hebrew sivivon) proclaim to us annually, "A great miracle happened there."
    Miracles, Hanukkah reminds us, do still happen.
    Hanukkah reminds us the core-reasons for God's choice of Abraham hold force: that tzedek (righteousness, or correct vertical relationship to God) and mishpat (justice, or correct horizontal relationship between people) are what God desires to see people actively realize among all
mankind. (Gen. 18:19)
Messiah
    Around two hundred years after the Modi'in rebellion, from another lackluster town in the middle of a small province inside a vast empire, the son of a wood-worker made a career change. He went from artisan-apprentice to itinerant preacher; not an unknown, or even uncommon event for the Israel of His era. However, that man was Yeshua ben-Yosayf - Jesus, the son of Joseph - or, as we know him better, Jesus of Nazareth. He taught with an effectiveness not seen in Israel since Moses, and announced that He had come to fulfill the Scriptural promises for a Suffering Redeemer who would break down the barrier between God and all mankind. The Messiah-Son-of-Joseph-who-would-be-slain, Whom the Talmudic rabbis expected would at some time make His scripturally prophesied appearance. (Talmud Bavli: Sukkah 52a)
    He died, just as He told His followers He would, on a Roman execution stake.
    A mere few days later, His terrified followers were brazenly hawking the message of His salvific death and resurrection to anyone who would listen, and seemed not to care what was done to them in response. They were beaten -and they rejoiced at being worthy of it. Some were persecuted -and they answered by spreading the message to every place where they were scattered. Some were killed -the Movement increased the more ... and began to spread outside of Israel, Reaching all corners of the known world.
    Antiochan Virus
    When Rabbi Saul of Tarsus - also known as Paul - returned to Jerusalem from a journey spreading the faith of Israel and the news of the Redeeming Messiah among non-Jews outside of Israel, he was told by his fellow "shalikhim" (apostles or emissaries) that a rumor was circulating about him in Jerusalem. It was that he was teaching Jews outside of Israel that faith in this "Messiah”, Yeshua of Nazareth, meant that Jews who so believed were to:
    - Cease circumcising their sons
    - Forsake Moses (the Torah)
    - Forsake the customs (of the Jewish nation).
    Sound familiar?
    Antiochan Hellenization was not dead; it seemed - just sleeping.
    Just like any other virus, it was insidiously trying to worm its way into the healthy Body Yeshua of Nazareth had begun to build, and to get its bad codes into the cells that would reproduce the body from a small being into a large one. An attempt was made to make the faith in Yeshua, the Jewish Messiah, a force for the eradication of the Jewish nation, in opposition to the direct teachings of God (Jeremiah 31:35-37) and Yeshua, Himself (Matthew 5:17-19).
    Happily, the Book of Acts teaches us clearly that the Apostles -who called these false rumors about Paul's doctrines "nothing" - decided and published that for Jewish believers to "walk in order" they were not to abandon these three things Antiochus had so dearly wished to wipe from the face of the earth. Jewish believers were to remain Jews. (Acts 21:18-24). Non-Jews were not required to become Jews to enter relationship with God (Acts 21:25). Very simple - thank God.
    None of this had to do with how people receive "salvation" (rescue from the power and penalty of sin): Jew, non-Jew, male, female, master, worker - all receive salvation the same way (Psalm 2, Ephesians 2:8, Galatians 3:28). These matters have to do with how believers of differing stripe, whether Jew, non-Jew, male, female, master, or worker are to "walk in order" after they have
entered salvation-relationship to the One Living God. That is why the New Testament epistles give differing instructions to all of the people-groups described above.
    God's agenda is not the homogenization of the planet. His plans are not enacted by putting people into a blender and hitting the "puree" button. God is invested in the differing cultural identities of all people groups He has created (Eph. 3:15)
    Not Just A Jewish Christmas
    Hanukkah is not just a Jewish rebuttal to the ubiquity of Christmas in western culture. It is much more. It is a celebration of the intention of God wrapped up in the survival of the Jewish nation. It is a testimony to what Christian theologian R. Kendall Soulen teaches in his landmark book, "The God of Israel and Christian Theology" - the fact that the Creator cannot be understood apart from His ongoing relationship to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is not just some amorphous God who, for a brief season, had a brief and meaningless relationship with a people retaining no enduring significance.
    The God of Christians is the God of Israel.
    The Christ of Christians is the Messiah of Israel.
    The salvation of Christians is the salvation of Israel.
    The One God has made the One Messiah known among his ancient covenant
people, and to all the earth.
    So, Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! and...
    Am Yisrael chai. ("The nation Israel endures.")

Bruce L. Cohen is Messianic rabbi of Congregation Beth El of Manhattan in New
York City. He is an Associate Editor of this magazine as well as The
Messianic Times, and contributing columnist to other Messianic publications.
A member of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America since 1978, he has
served that organization in many official capacities during the past two
decades. ------- and ------
----Suggested reading ------
Ben Sasson, H.H. (ed.) 'A History of the Jewish People' (Ch. 14: The
Decrees Against the Jewish Religion and the Establishment of the Hasmonean
Revolt) pp.201ff , Harvard University Press 1976 Cambridge, Mass. USA
 

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