Posts Tagged → maccabee
The real Hanuka needs to stand up
Hanuka is represented today as the “Jewish Christmas,” and why not, right? Why not have more fun, more celebration, more love, more gifts. And everyone enjoys a lighter moment instead of things being so heavy and deep.
Problem is, Hanuka suffers from the same dumbing-down that has also made a mockery of Christmas and turned it too into an orgy of materialism. Religious observers in both faith groups need to reclaim what is theirs, because at the core both Hanuka and Christmas are about core values. And if there is one thing that America has lost is its core values, resulting in our culture terrifyingly spiraling down the drain. Religious holidays used to serve the purpose of instilling religious values, may we all return to that soon.
Historically Hanuka was not about silver and blue tinsel or a disarmingly childish sounding “festival of lights” that evokes fairies twirling in tutus with flashy lights sparkling all around. Rather, in reality Hanuka is precisely the opposite image, because it marked a turning point in a bloody civil war between Jews in Israel. For three generations, two Jewish groups representing divergent philosophies were locked in a brutal civil war for control of the Temple and the religious customs and practices that Jews would follow.
On the one hand were liberal secularists, Hellenists, who represented a light Jewish identity dominated by Greek culture and behavior, including unbridled sexuality. They were enabled by Greeks descended from Alexander the Great’s conquering of the region. Opposing them were the “Maccabees,” named after an orthodox Jewish family patriarch who defiantly confronted, and killed, a whole bunch of Hellenist soldiers for control of Israel and the Temple Mount. His sons carried on the tradition of fighting and killing Hellenists for several generations before the matter was settled.
The “festival of the lights” miracle stuff results from the story of the Maccabees finding one sealed pitcher of kosher olive oil for lighting the giant gold menorah in the Temple, and having it last more than the one or two days that it should have lasted, given its limited volume. Read into that fact what one will, this has become a conveniently plain vanilla and non-threatening focus of the holiday, which at one time celebrated the “decisive winning of the righteous and pure over the evil and impure.”
The bottom line is that Hanuka commemorates a Jewish civil war for control of the Jewish future, either as a feel-good universalist ethnic identity destined for dead-end assimilation, or as a daily living Biblical (Torah) truth identity. Both Jews and Christians exist today because the orthodox Jews (Hasmoneans) who inaugurated Hanuka gave rise to the religiously observant Jews who later begot Joshua Of Nazareth (or the Nazirite) and today’s Orthodox Jews. Had the Maccabees lost their civil war with the Hellenists, there would have been no Hanuka, no surviving Judaism, no Joshua Of Nazareth, and no Christianity.
Without Christianity there is no Western Civilization, and without Western Civilization there is no light in this world and all of the Enlightenment science that makes our lives so comfy today. God only knows where the world would be now, had the Maccabees not won their war against the liberal Jews of their time. Which raises two questions. First, why don’t today’s Christians celebrate Hanuka? They should. Christmas is set for the 25th of December, which closely matches the Hebrew calendar’s 25 of Kislev for the start of Hanuka, and I don’t see any contradiction in it. Second question is when do we all begin to push back against today’s destructive Hellenists, who like their predecessors in Israel 2,200 years ago are playing an outsize role in the destruction of the American and Western Civilizations?
Happy Hanuka, everyone!
The Spirit of the Season
Today is Christmas Day, America’s national holiday at least as much as Thanksgiving Day. It is a day of good cheer, happiness, kindness, family, acts of charity, rest and relaxation; a Sabbath of sorts. Across Western Civilization this day has played several different roles and in different formats over the past thousand years, the earliest being solely religious and quite somber. The later versions of Christmas being a non-offending marriage between Christianity and northern European paganism, and being more celebratory.
Christmas as we know it now is largely a creation of Englishman Charles Dickens, who decried the caste system’s forced poverty and lack of Christian charity in his own land, and whose 1843 book A Christmas Carol championed the triumph of kindness and generosity to all over greed and miserly wealth. A literal ghostly spirit of Christmas invaded old man Scrooge’s otherwise selfish life, and left him a changed man. Scrooge’s personal changes, in the true spirit of Christmas Day, then resulted in a domino effect of increasing happiness and beneficence spreading outward from the formerly unhappy and mean old man to all those around him and beyond.
Dickens’ powerful message was a seed that grew wildly in fertile soil, as the contemporaneous Industrial Revolution had created a great amount of wealth and also a great many have-nots. And a hundred years later downtown Manhattan USA at Christmastime was full of powerful images and themes drawn directly from Dickens’ writings. That resulting Christmas culture has spread far and wide, and is now a mix of all the good stuff, including spirituality and morality, along with some old fashioned American consumerism. This has all morphed into the modern version of Christmas most Americans practice or at least enjoy today. It is kind of a third version of Christmas.
But if we go back to its beginning, Christmas Day is closely linked to Christianity’s predecessor, Judaism, and its own festive holiday of Chanuka. Christmas Day always starts on the 25th of December, which is usually right around the Hebrew date of 25th of Kislev, the start of Chanuka. While Chanuka has eight days, Christmas has twelve (similar to Passover having eight days and Easter’s Holy Week having seven at least, and possibly more, depending upon where one lives). And if we then immediately fast-forward back to the present, we see that Christmas has profoundly influenced the practice and understanding of Chanuka. Chanuka now being a heavily mysticized and joyful celebration of a vague miracle involving some olive oil. If you dig deep, you might get an American Jew to tell you that Chanuka is generally about individual freedom, and freedom of religion specifically.
Truth is, Chanuka was indeed originally about freedom, but the kind of freedom we Westerners no longer seem to value, or which we seem to take for granted.
Chanuka is described at hebcal.com as “Hanukkah (Hebrew: חֲנֻכָּה, usually spelled חנוכה … in Modern Hebrew, also romanized as Chanukah or Chanuka), also known as the Festival of Lights, is an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the rededication of the Holy Temple (the Second Temple) in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt of the 2nd century BCE. Hanukkah is observed for eight nights and days, starting on the 25th day of Kislev according to the Hebrew calendar, which may occur at any time from late November to late December in the Gregorian calendar.”
OK, but what was the Maccabean Revolt, you ask? Ah ha, here we have suddenly discovered the true spirit of Chanuka! And one could surmise, the true spirit of Today’s Christmas Day, as well, heir as it is to Chanuka.
The Maccabean Revolt was a true-life rebellion by a small group of totally dedicated, religiously pure Jewish families against an enormous Assyrian empire that was then occupying then-Israel/Judea, roughly 2,200 years ago. It is the triumph of the little guy over the big bad bully; the triumph of monotheism over evil paganism; morality over immorality. Chanuka is the story of winning freedom by the edge of the sword, at total risk of one’s own survival. Those Jews who then strapped on a sword and successfully fought to the death over several generations to rid themselves of the yoke of Assyrian slavery, then set in motion so many future events. Like the subsequent existence of Jesus, the eventual creation of Christianity, and the resulting creation of Christmas Day by people seeking to directly link the day with Chanuka.
Early Christmas was observed by religious Christians as a day of spiritual freedom, similar to the Chanuka celebration of national freedom and sovereignty, without which there was no spiritual freedom for the Jews, whose Temple service had been disrupted by the Assyrian occupation. Which makes one wonder, in the context of where we are right now, December 25th 2020 , as America is poised to be captured and subjugated by China through its secret treaties with Joe Biden, Big Media, and Big Tech…. what was and is the true, original spirit of Christmas Day, and does it have relevance for us right now?
Religious Christians will provide an orthodox Christian perspective, but it is no stretch to say that today’s Christmas spirit could use a heavy dose of the original Chanuka spirit. We need some of that old time religion. We need a modern equivalent of the Maccabean Revolt against the fraudulent, illegal election that just took place, in which America as we have known her for 244 years is about to collapse and be replaced by repression and slavery.
So, I will raise a glass of eggnog to everyone in the spirit of good Christmas cheer. Salud! And I will also raise the American symbol of freedom, defiance, and sovereignty in salute of the brave American citizens who we know are the last hope of restoring our republic: The American longrifle and its updated equivalent, the AR15.
Merry Christmas! May the ancient spirit of the Maccabees fill every patriot heart.