Posts Tagged → menorah
Hanuka’s meaning for America
Tonight is the last night of Hanuka, and it is important to say that this holiday is still important for America, even if 99% of Americans don’t observe it, don’t know what the Menorah stands for. Those who do not want to be consigned to the dustbin of history can learn lessons from history, apply those lessons, and win. Hanuka presents modern freedom-loving Americans with a history lesson in never giving up, sticking to your principles, and always pursuing freedom, no matter what it takes to persevere.
Often called the “festival of the lights” in an effort to make it sound all cheery n’ stuff, Hanuka is in fact a commemmoration of a long, hard-fought, quite bloody civil war military campaign in Israel 2,400 years ago. That conflict restored Jewish control over Jerusalem and with it, the traditional (Biblical) service in the Great Temple there.
Christians take note of two things: Without the Jews winning the war, there would have been no Jesus/ Yeshua 400 years later, and note also that Christmas, which is America’s national holiday, is marked on the 25th of December. Hanuka begins on the 25th day of Kislev, the Hebrew calendar’s winter month. Jesus was a Jew, the Apostles were all Jews, most of the early Christians were Jews, and when it came time to create a new holiday for Christians, Christmas was set on the same date as Hanuka. There are no coincidences here.
Another important thing to take note of here: While the war ending in the “miraculous” discovery of a bottle of kosher olive oil hidden away in the Great Temple is often described as Jew vs Greek, it was also very much Traditional/ Orthodox Jew vs Liberal Jew, allied with the Greeks. In other words, a bloody tension has always existed between the liberal Jews and the Orthodox Jews, and it is only suspended when both groups are being chased down the same street together by mindless mobs who hate all Jews.
During the civil war that Hanuka marks, the blood of all combatants flowed abundantly, as this was no simple “spiritual battle” as the holiday is often described. Hanuka was not won by those who engaged solely in “spiritual” type behavior, like praying really really hard. Mean “X” tweets were not met with spicy retorts, and the loser then shut up and hid in shame.
Nope, a lot of blood flowed, as a result of years of close quarters combat with edged weapons. The Greeks and the liberal Jews lost more blood, and more lives, than the traditional/ orthodox “Maccabee” Jews, who ended up taking back what had been taken from them, by force: Jerusalem (another related history lesson: Judaism is Zionism, which is the 3,500-year-old religious movement to keep Jews living in Zion/ Israel/ Judea. The Maccabees were Zionists).
Key word here being “force.” The fighting was not mere words contained within the walls of the Oxford Union Debate Club, or other academic classrooms. It was borne out in hand-to-hand physical contest, which the most determined will usually win.
Hanuka’s lesson for freedom-loving Americans today, right now, is (and somehow I just know that you have heard this phrase somewhere before in recent times)… Fight! Fight! Fight!
Be determined, strong, and of brave spirit, because President Trump is not going to be in office forever.
Menorah = Freedom everywhere, including in America
Hanukka’s message to Americans
While Christmas is the national holiday of America, Hanukka is the other big holiday happening now. Today is the last day, and it is worth taking note of the meaning this religious holiday can and should have for all freedom-loving Americans.
Let us reflect upon what the message of Hanukka is and should be for Americans, because God knows, we are all in need of inspiration right now. Especially as we daily recognize ever more just how rogue and turned against us citizens our own federal government has become.
Hanukka is the commemoration of an unbelievably heroic and unlikely war outcome 2,300 years ago by a band of ferociously patriotic religious Jews battling against one of the regional superpowers of their time. In short, when Alexander the Great died, his Greek empire was divided into large parts, each run by one of Alexander’s generals. Seleucus was one of those generals, and while his life was a whirlwind of cloak and dagger politics, leading massed battles, and shifting political alliances, he ended up founding one of the regional empires. The Seleucid Empire included all kinds of remote areas and sleepy places and small peoples that the Greeks did not really care about, including the nation of Judea and its natives, the Israelites/Judeans/ Jews.
But the powerful Greek Seleucids ended up caring very much about the relatively small and highly religious Judeans, because most of the Jews would only go so far in pledging their loyalty to the Greeks, due to religious differences. While in general the Greeks had a very broad and inclusive view of culture, what was then called the pan-Hellenic, and while the Jews could go along with a lot of cultural differences so long as their religion was not compromised, the Greeks did require a basic fealty to their most important values. And those polytheistic values strongly antagonized the Jews’ monotheism.
It must be said that the resulting civil war was as much between religious Jews and Hellenized Jews as it was between religious Jews and the Greeks. Essentially it was the Orthodox Jews vs. the assimilated and very liberal Jews and their protectors, the Greeks. This fact obviously has great implications for the tensions between religious Jews today and their more liberal and religiously distant brethren.
An armed showdown began when the Seleucids erected their own statues and began sacrificing pigs in the Jews’ Great Temple. You know, the same large hill whereupon another uninvited, rogue, imperialistic and colonizing symbol has been erected, namely the golden dome of the rock. And so a Jewish priest names Mattathias (essentially Matthew in today’s English, a name familiar to Christians) picked up a sword, killed some bad guys with some gutsy moves, and started a Jewish rebellion against an overwhelmingly superior military force.
The Greeks and their liberal Jewish allies responded with force, and the Orthodox Jews fled their homes in Jerusalem to the Judean Hills, where they eked out a meagre existence in caves and remote washes where the Greek patrols did not go. Using hit-and-run guerilla war tactics over several years, Mattathias and his sons’ troops eventually wore down the Greek resolve, to the point where headlong massed battles resulted in smaller forces of Jews utterly annihilating their opponents.
Following the final battle, when the Jewish “Maccabees” returned in force to Jerusalem, they found the Great Temple ransacked and wrecked. Despite a great desolation upon the land, as a result of this terrible civil war, the religious Jews were able to scrape together enough pure olive oil to re-light the gold Menorah in the Great Temple while they also pulled the religious service back together, too. That fact about the olive oil has become kind of a materialistic Christmasized silver and blue tinsel fairy tale about a miracle, and thus great emphasis has been placed on the “miracle of the oil.”
Truth is, this “miracle of the oil” is almost a Monty Python sketch of what really happened, because the true miracle of Hanukka was that the tiny force of true believer Orthodox Jews was able to defeat a much more powerful but spiritually flaccid enemy. Where have we seen this same kind of scenario play out elsewhere in history? Hmmm, my fellow Americans?
The message of Hanukka is that no dark, evil force can defeat goodness and righteousness. This is the true miracle of this holiday, that a small band of humans, led either by George Washington or Mattathias the Priest, can defeat hordes of knuckle dragging barbarians. This is a message of inspiration that all Americans need right now, because we are now facing a terrible plague of evil, moral rot, and sadistic cruelty emanating from the present interloper rulers of our nation’s capital. Many people predict America is heading for a civil war, or at least an armed contest between the central government of Washington, DC, and the rest of the country. Hopefully, our election system is not so corrupted that we can vote our way out of this mess.
Don’t worry, Americans, because if you call upon God and are willing to sacrifice and take risks, like the Orthodox Jewish Maccabees did 2,300 years ago, then you can, we can, miraculously re-take the America that is ours from those who have risen up to steal it and make us all subjects and slaves to their evil power.
My fellow Americans, take heart from the history of Hanukka that you, too, can be successful against what look like overwhelming odds.
The light of freedom shines bright, including in our hearts and our spirit to fight for what is right