Many of us grew up with a straightforward Hanukkah story. It is a parable of resilience, told and retold throughout the ages, and a powerful metaphor for the Jewish people: We endure despite repeated, often brutal efforts to snuff us out.
This retelling represents a choice ancient rabbis made about what to emphasize about our identity and values.
The narrative is this: In the second century B.C.E., the practice of Judaism was outlawed and punished by a cruel Syrian Greek king, Antiochus IV. Under his rule, Jews were put to death if they studied Torah, kept kosher or observed the Sabbath. The king and his army desecrated Jerusalem’s holy temple — then the locus of Jewish life — building an altar to the Greek god Zeus and sacrificing a pig on it.
In response, an intrepid Jewish family, the Maccabees, formed a small rebel army, rose up against the king and, using scrappy guerrilla tactics, managed to vanquish the enemy.
To this history, the ancient rabbis added the miracle of the oil. When the temple was reclaimed and rededicated by the Maccabees — “Hanukkah” means “dedication” — they could find only a single container of oil to light the menorah that was supposed to burn with an “eternal light.” Miraculously, the flames lasted eight days, long enough to find more oil to keep the candelabra glowing.
The Talmud teaches us to place the menorah in the window to “publicize the miracle.” Those burning candles have come to represent fearlessness in the face of anti-Jewish hatred.
What the ancient rabbis downplayed in this account was a complicated truth about the Maccabean wars: The battles were not just Jew versus oppressor but Jew versus Jew, religious extremist against Hellenizing assimilationist. “This was a war about philosophy and ideology,” the scholar and rabbi Adin Steinsaltz once explained in an interview with one of us.
The Maccabees were the zealots of their day, insisting on strict adherence to Jewish practice in the face of Greek secularism. They attacked their brethren whether they had been seduced by Greek culture or embraced it out of fear. Not simple saviors of Jewish life, the Maccabees forced circumcisions on Jewish boys and tyrannized those who abandoned traditional ways.
As study partners, we have spent hours discussing Jewish texts together. Though we are both Jews of faith, we sit on different ends of the spectrum of observance. This year we are paying closer attention to the less celebrated aspect of the Hanukkah narrative: that of the struggle inside our own people. And we are embracing the idea that the story we tell about ourselves can help shape who we strive to be.
The ideological war that Rabbi Steinsaltz identified is not simply a story of the ancient world, but one we also might tell today. Those modern divisions intensified in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, the war in Gaza and in this era of hardening partisan discord. The internecine rifts of the moment feel especially distressing at a time of escalating antisemitism. All the more reason to revisit the wisdom of our ancient sages, who pointedly decided not to make Jewish civil war the core narrative of Hanukkah.
Shlomo Yosef Zevin, the Russian-born 20th-century rabbinical authority, wrote in a 1979 book that the rabbis had a choice to make regarding the message of Hanukkah: Should the eight flames represent fire — the destruction of our enemies — or light, working together toward a better world? The rabbis chose light.
They did not want future generations to glorify extremism or the vilification of ideological opponents. As moderate voices writing after centuries of sectarian discord, the rabbis sought a more inclusive form of Jewish life.
We are not suggesting that we hide from historical facts or bury evidence of divisions. But the glue of the Jewish people for 3,000 years — indeed, the key to our survival despite all those who tried to destroy us — has been the beauty, joy and rituals of Judaism. We can all benefit from the study of Torah, the mandates to visit the sick, feed the poor, pursue justice, welcome the stranger. There is a yearning for this beauty, this rooted history. We see it in a post-Oct. 7 surge in synagogue attendance, Jewish learning and communal connection. We can lean into our shared tradition and values as a beacon for what we aspire to, or we can highlight the fractures in America over Israel, campus protests and whether Donald Trump is good for the Jews.
Denigrating one another is a decision, not an inevitability. Could we opt for inquiry over invective? How might we sit in a hevruta, or group study, and debate our texts, our principles, our future, without shutting down conversation?
Debate is part of our inheritance. Jewish tradition was built on robust, respectful disputation — what is known as machloket l’shem shamayim, or arguments for the sake of heaven. In other words, we verbally spar not to win, but to arrive at a greater truth or understanding. The two of us do not think it is utopian or naïve to believe that such a model remains within reach.
This Hanukkah, whose first night falls on Christmas for the first time in two decades, we must decide: Will we increase the light or stoke the fire?
In their shaping of this holiday our ancient rabbis’ answer to this question is clear: Choose the light.
The post This Hanukkah, Choose Light Over Heat appeared first on New York Times.
