RELIGION / JOHN DART : Rabbis Replaced Strength With Spirit in Hanukkah Tradition

Hanukkah, which Jews begin observing Sunday night, might have remained solely a celebration of a military victory except for the disillusionment of Judaism’s early rabbis with religious nationalism, says a Jewish scholar.

The eight-day festival still inspires sermons about religious liberty, but Hanukkah also has spiritual elements that balance militancy as the key to Jewish survival with reliance on God, said Zev Garber, a Jewish studies instructor at Valley College in Van Nuys.

Just as militancy and spirituality were in tension in antiquity, so they are today, said Garber, author of a recent book on the Holocaust, “Shoah: The Paradigmatic Genocide.”

“We probably need both,” Garber said in an interview, expanding upon an article on Hanukkah in the journal Jewish Spectator.

Hanukkah recalls the overthrow of Hellenistic Syrian forces occupying Jerusalem in 164 B.C. by Jewish troops led by Judas Maccabaeus. The Maccabees rededicated the originally Jewish temple where idol worship had recently been introduced. According to 2 Maccabees 10:3, the rebels purified the sanctuary and, striking flint to get fire, again offered burnt animal sacrifices at the temple.

The Maccabees, as Garber noted, “relied on the alliance of a foreign power, Rome, to bring victory, and ensured internal power by perpetuating a holiday for their accomplishment and usurping the high priesthood to their family line.”

But about two centuries later, after the disastrous Jewish War with Rome from 66 to 70 A.D. when Roman troops destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and set off a massive exile of Jews from their homeland, the new movement of rabbis, who supplanted the dispossessed temple priests, reassessed “what Maccabean religio-nationalism did to a nation,” Garber said.

When deciding which books would be included in the Hebrew Bible, the rabbis left out 14 books, including those bearing the name Maccabeans. (The so-called Apocrypha, including Ruth, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach and the Maccabeans, nevertheless were preserved by the early churches and are found in ecumenical Christian Bibles.)

Garber said he believes that the rabbis’ exclusion of 1 and 2 Maccabees was quite purposeful, given their religious significance.

“Of the 14 books, only those two deal with the preservation or celebration of an established holiday,” he said.

The festival was retained, but the rabbis gave it a more spiritual cast, Garber said.

On the first Sabbath of Hanukkah, a verse from the 4th chapter of Zechariah is read in the synagogue: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”

The pointed use of this verse, noted the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, was an example of the pronounced tendency on the rabbis’ part “to diminish the military aspect of the festival and concentrate instead on the aspect of the survival of religious values in the face of pagan and idolatrous opposition.”

As is well known in Judaic studies, Rabbinic writings collectively known as the Talmud said the festival was held for eight days because pure oil found in the temple by the Maccabeans, although sufficient only for one day, miraculously burned for eight days until new supplies could be found.

The main feature of Hanukkah today is the progressive kindling of eight candles on the Hanukkah menorah, one each night, from the light on a ninth socket. The story of the miraculous oil is not told, however, in the books of the Maccabees, but was added by the rabbis later as part of a move to minimize the importance of the military actions.

Garber said the pious harmonizing of the story by the rabbis was reflected in a later, 9th-Century Palestinian commentary. Explaining why menorahs are lit on Hanukkah, the rabbinical commentary said that when the Maccabeans re-entered the temple, they hollowed out eight rods of iron and poured lighted oil into them.

“Clearly, for the rabbis, weapons of the spirit and not war are the way for the Jewish people,” Garber said.

However, in recent centuries, anti-Semitic pogroms and the Holocaust have raised questions about making Jewish survival overly dependent on piety and passivity, Garber said.

“Jews need both--strength in physical terms and in spiritual ways,” he said.

Harvey Fields, senior rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, said Garber’s interpretation of Hanukkah’s history may have underplayed the broader struggle between the rabbis of the Pharisee movement and the Sadducees, who inherited the Maccabean tradition.

“The Pharisees basically did not want the Maccabeans or the Sadducees to get any credit for their victory,” Fields said.

Also, Fields indicated that Hanukkah as observed today has gone beyond an argument over militarism versus pacifism to become primarily a “celebration of human liberation and ultimately a victory to retain religious freedom.”