When I studied history at university forty years ago, the concept of the ‘invention of tradition’ was considered a novel idea. It was brought into mainstream historical consciousness at the end of my time there by a seminal book called The Invention of Tradition (ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, 1983). This collection of essays arose out of a conference at which historians had debunked such supposedly ancient ‘traditions’ as the clan tartans and kilts of the Scottish Highlanders and the lavish ceremonial of the British monarchy, both in fact relatively recent inventions.
In the past two generations, understanding of the concept of inventing traditions has spread from historical into popular consciousness, but one such invention of which most people appear to remain unaware is the Jewish festival of Chanukah (also spelt ‘Hanukkah’). Maybe it’s not thought of in this context because the invention occurred so long ago.
Also known as the ‘Festival of Lights’, Chanukah begins this year at sunset on Thursday 7th December and ends at sunset on Friday 15th December. I think the one thing everyone knows about Chanukah is its association with a special nine-branched menorah (candelabrum) which Jews light at a window of their home at dusk for eight nights in a row. Many Jews who do not otherwise practise Judaism light menorot in their windows. Giant public menorot are installed at strategic locations in cities across the world (including one at the bottom of my road in North London). The menorah is not just the image of Chanukah, it’s often used as the image of Judaism itself.
The menorah is the one thing everyone knows about Chanukah, but that’s the part that’s the invented tradition.
The way the Chanukah story is taught to Jewish children is that it’s about a group of Jews (the ‘Maccabees’) who in the second century BC fought back against their imperial Greek overlords because the latter had denied them their religious freedom and desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews defeated the Greeks and reclaimed and purified the Temple. They then needed to re-dedicate it, but only had enough holy oil to keep the Temple lamp burning for one day, rather than the requisite eight. The miracle of Chanukah was that the oil lasted for the whole eight days.
So the Chanukah story as it is taught is about the re-dedication of the Temple (‘Chanukah’ means ‘dedication’) and the miracle of the oil. It’s to commemorate this story that Jews light candles for eight nights in a row and cook food in plenteous quantities of oil: families of Ashkenazi origin fry potato latkes in olive oil; the Sephardic (and Israeli) tradition is to eat deep-fried doughnuts (sufganiot) filled with jam. (In our family we make latkes.)
The story of the miracle of the oil is an invention designed to deflect attention from the real message of Chanukah.
The part of the Chanukah story that’s true is the account of the Maccabees fighting back against their imperial Greek overlords and defeating them, in the face of overwhelming odds. This is the real Chanukah message.
The principal historical sources for the story of the Maccabees are the First and Second Books of Maccabees. They were written a generation or so after the events they described. To write this article, I looked for them in my Hebrew Bible. They weren’t there. I found them instead in a Catholic Bible. It’s likely they were excluded from the Hebrew Bible deliberately, as part of the official rewriting of the Chanukah story.
The Books of Maccabees begin with the story of Alexander the Great’s conquest of Judea in the fourth century BC. For the first century and a half of Greek imperial rule, the Jews were allowed to practise their culture and rituals without much hindrance, but that changed in the reign of Antiochus IV (175-164 BC), who took over Jerusalem and banned the practice of Judaism. He forbade observance of the Sabbath and possession of the Torah. He installed pagan idols in the Temple and forced Jewish leaders to worship them. He ordered the sacrifice of pigs (which Jews considered ‘unclean’ animals) upon the altar of the Temple.
When news of the suppression of their religion reached a priestly family living in the village of Modi’in, twenty miles outside the city, they gathered an army of country farmers to fight back. The leader of the resistance was one of the sons of this family – Judah – who came to be known as ‘Maccabee’. It’s usually said that this description comes from the Aramaic word for ‘hammer’, referring to Judah’s ferocity in battle, but it could also have been an acronym from the verse of the Bible that served as their battle cry (Exodus 15:11, in English ‘Who is like Thee, O Lord, among the gods?’) If so, this serves to emphasise that the trigger for their rebellion was the attack upon their religion. They had not rebelled against Greek imperialism itself; what had led them to take up arms was the challenge to their culture and traditions.
Writing in the middle of the 20th century, the British historian of Judaism Cecil Roth described the Maccabean revolt as ‘one of the decisive events in human history. Never before had men been convinced that an idea was something to fight for and die for.’
It wasn’t simply that the Maccabees took up arms to defend Judaism, but that they fought back against the might of the entire Greek empire. They did so because they were inspired by their religious faith.
As the First Book of Maccabees tells the story, when they saw the Greek army coming towards them, Judah’s men asked him: ‘How can we, few as we are, fight against so great and so strong a multitude?’ Judah replied: ‘It is not on the size of the army that victory in battle depends, but strength comes from Heaven. We fight for our lives and our laws. He himself will crush them before us; as for you, do not be afraid of them.’ (1 Maccabees 3:17-22.)
Michael Lerner is a left-wing American rabbi based in Berkeley, California, whose mission has long been to win non-practising ‘progressive’ Jews back to their religion by persuading them that the message of Judaism is a revolutionary one. He sees the true message of the Chanukah story as central to his argument.
In his book Jewish Renewal Lerner argues that the real miracle of Chanukah had nothing to do with the story of the oil that was supposed to be enough only for one day yet lasted for eight. The real miracle, he says, was that the Jewish people had found the courage to fight against apparently insuperable odds: ‘When large numbers of people become aware of G_d’s presence in the universe, the power of the people becomes greater than all the technology and the manipulations of the most sophisticated forms of oppression. It is this message that should become the centre of Chanukah observance – that we must not get discouraged even though the craziness and evil in the world seem overwhelming at times.’
This remains true, adds Lerner, even if people who do not believe in G_d, so long as they are able to develop the consciousness that there is a force in the universe that makes liberation possible.
So why did this Chanukah story get lost? Well, partly because of the Maccabees themselves. Once they were running their own country, the Maccabees and their successors abandoned the principles that had got them there. Once they controlled the government in Judea, they became corrupt and tyrannical, and a state that had been born out of resistance against oppression became the very thing it had fought against. (Some readers here will identify a plausible correspondence with the history of the modern State of Israel.)
Eventually, the Judean state collapsed altogether. Having been part of the Greek empire, it was subsequently incorporated into the Roman one. From 70 AD until 1948 no independent Jewish state existed in the Holy Land. The Jewish story became that of the diaspora (the scattering of the population in exile), living in countries controlled by others. Jews had no choice but to make whatever accommodation they could with the governments of the countries in which they lived. A Chanukah story commemorating the capacity of ordinary people to band together and rise up to resist their overlords was no longer helpful in the circumstances in which the Jews were required to exist.
This explains why the Books of the Maccabees weren’t included when the Hebrew Bible was completed in the early centuries AD. The scholars who determined which books were included in the Hebrew Bible chose deliberately to downplay the political significance of the Chanukah story.
The tale of the miracle of the oil doesn’t appear in the Hebrew Bible, either. Nor in the Books of Maccabees in the Catholic Bible. The story didn’t exist when the Books of Maccabees were written in the latter part of the second century BC. The tale of the oil was invented several hundred years later, in the fifth or sixth century AD, when it was incorporated in the Talmud, the collection of learned commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.
The Jewish authorities excluded the First Book of Maccabees from their Bible because it attributed the victory over the Greek empire to military heroism (albeit inspired by religious faith). Instead, they came up with the story of the oil which emphasised the miraculous nature of the victory and suggested that it had been decreed by G_d and had nothing to do with military heroism at all.
The story of the oil shows the rabbis taking ownership of Jewish history and bending it to what they saw as the best means of surviving in the diaspora. And that’s the Chanukah story that is retold within the Jewish diaspora to this day.
Michael Lerner is very good on the message the Chanukah story teaches about the workings of imperialism. As he explains, ‘The imperialists set a choice for the peoples they conquer: If you want our science, literature and culture, then you must embrace our political, economic and cultural domination over you.’
The Maccabees rebelled because they valued the principles of Judaism more highly than the benefits of Greek culture. In another rousing speech to his men recorded in the First Book of Maccabees, Judah declared that he’d been inspired by the Exodus narrative, the foundational story of Judaism, the tale of the first successful slave rebellion, by a group of people who valued their freedom more highly than the trappings of Egyptian civilisation. (1 Maccabees 4:8-11.)
(The Exodus story isn’t history, it’s legend, but that doesn’t matter: what’s important is that it has inspired revolutionary movements throughout recorded history – beginning with the Maccabees. I’ll be writing about the political significance of the Exodus story at Passover next year.)
What Lerner fails to understand is that his perspective on the benefits and drawbacks of imperialism applies equally to the principal form of oppression confronting us today, which is not imperialism but globalism. Lerner’s description of the imperialist message can equally well be transferred to the globalist one: If you want to benefit from the advantages of our technology, you’ve got to sign up to be our slave.
Unfortunately, Lerner – like so many on the so-called ‘progressive’ Left – has a complete blind spot when contemplating the technocratic tyranny inherent in the modern globalist system. Lerner failed to understand that the official COVID narrative was a ruse to wield an instrument of oppression that should have been – and could have been – resisted. He couldn’t see how governments were using COVID as an excuse to deprive us of our liberties by atomising us in front of our smartphones and computers, and by bringing in vaccine passports and other forms of digital identity control. Instead, he criticised the US federal government for not doing enough to protect its citizens against ‘this killer virus’. I suspect fear triumphed over principle (which is exactly what it was intended to do).
Lerner provides another example of an author who hasn’t read his own book – just like Naomi Klein, Dorian Lynskey and Laura Dodsworth, whom I’ve discussed in previous Substack articles. (I’ve got plenty more examples of this phenomenon lined up for the future.)
I’ve already cited Lerner as arguing that the real miracle of Chanukah was that ordinary people were inspired to fight against an oppressor that had all the instruments of power in its hands. In the second century BC, the Greek empire represented scientific and technological progress. The Maccabees rejected the benefits of Greek civilisation, because of the strings attached to it.
This is precisely the message that people should have understood in the spring of 2020, when governments told everyone to ‘follow the science’ and to abandon the public acts of worship that were fundamental to the practice of religion. It’s not by chance that the churches and synagogues (and mosques) were forcibly closed as part of the COVID ‘lockdowns’. What clergy and rabbis failed to appreciate was that the COVID regime wasn’t intended to complement their religions, but to compete with them: it came complete with its own rituals (masks, social distancing, testing, vaccination) and its own false idols. It constituted a deliberate attack on existing religions in the name of the new religion of ‘scientism’.
The Chanukah story serves as a message for our times because it contradicts the mechanistic view of the universe that underlay the abuses perpetrated in the cause of scientism. It’s no accident that many people have returned to their religious faith, or have found a religious faith they hadn’t known they possessed, since the COVID lockdowns in the spring of 2020. One doesn’t have to believe in G_d oneself to understand this process: the point is that many people have responded to what they see as a deliberately adversarial denial of the existence of a higher power by moving in the opposite direction.
At the same time as many of the public have returned to faith, or discovered faith, the supposed standard-bearers of faith have abandoned it. The leaders of the Church of England, and other Christian churches, all folded in the face of state oppression. Some Christian clergy did understand that their calling required them to stand up against tyranny and fight to keep their churches open, but not rabbis. Not only did rabbis close their synagogues in 2020 and take their services on-line (technically forbidden by Jewish Halachah religious law), but when they eventually re-opened, they enforced masks and social distancing and even in many cases vaccination.
(There’s a divide here between mainstream Liberal, Reform and conservative/orthodox rabbis, all of whom closed their synagogues, and ultra-orthodox ‘Haredi’ rabbis, some of whom persisted with religious services. They weren’t consciously standing up against tyranny, but they were determined to practise their religion, regardless.)
I started the Jews For Justice campaign group in 2021 in order to speak out about the failure of British Jews and British rabbis to follow the principles of Judaism by standing up against the COVID regime, and in order to provide a support group for those of us who felt alienated from our synagogues (if we attended them) and from our ‘community’ as a result of their having succumbed to the anti-religious and antisemitic COVID narrative.
If the majority of British Jews had paid more attention to the original Chanukah message, rather than simply regarding the holiday as a Jewish alternative to Christmas with a nice story about a miracle involving a pot of oil, then maybe they would not have been so submissive to the dictates of the regime.
Furthermore, the Chanukah message – that if people band together and believe in their cause, then they do have the power to resist their would-be oppressors – is exactly the argument that many of us in the ‘freedom movement’ have been trying to promulgate these past three and a half years: that people did not have to submit to lockdown and masking and testing and vaccination and ‘vaccine passports’ and digital currency and all the other steps along the road to pharmaceutical and technocratic tyranny; that if we band together then miraculously the forces arrayed against us are not quite so strong as they pretend to be, since much of their supposed strength is based on bluster. We saw this demonstrated by the freedom marches in London in the spring of 2021 (replicated in other cities across Europe), which the police were unable to prevent because they involved hundreds of thousands of people.
We’ve had endless discussions within the freedom movement as to how best to resist the apparently unstoppable march of totalitarianism in the West, and the one approach on which everyone appears to agree is the principle of ‘mass non-compliance’ – simply saying ‘No’. The problem lies in persuading enough people to put this principle into practice, rather than in convincing them that this is the best means of addressing the attack on their liberties.
The Chanukah story provides an inspirational tale of a group of ordinary people who put their principles into practice and fought back against oppression when the odds seemed stacked against them. The Chanukah story is entirely relevant for our times.
TODA RABA, dear Maccabean of 2023! This is a stupendous work of journalism about a festival which has become an obvious TOOL of fake philosemitism all over the world and which makes the theological/historical verve of the real story a hostage of the NEO ANTIOCHIANS.
Bravo, Brilliant, Sagacious! I used to be on the progressive left, no longer! I was a fan of Michael Lerner, and I appreciate your critique.
I’m proud to be a subscriber, and will earnestly consider upgrading to paid. Chag Sameach!Steven