By James Wilson
(Ed. Note: Christmas approaches. My next few posts will focus on
preparing our hearts not just to celebrate but to emulate.)
Hanukkah is to Passover for Jews as Christmas is to Easter for Christians with a bit of difference. The events of 165 BC where the Jewish Feast of Light is rooted are not so much about birth as re-birth. Hanukkah follows Passover in historical terms while Christmas obviously precedes Easter in those same terms. For a witness who finds the fulfillment of the one in the other that makes for perfect propriety.
Hanukkah emerges from a Jewish war for independence from a Greco-Syrian empire called the Seleucids. The Seleucid Emperor, Antiochus Epiphanes, was hell-bent to Hellenize – re-make in his cultural image – the Jews. He set up Greek god images in the Jerusalem Temple and compelled sacrifice to them, executing a Jewish high priest named Yochanan who resisted. Others were arrested, tortured and killed for refusing to compromise their faith. An elderly priest named Mattathias inspired his five sons – led by Judas – to revolt. Their outnumbered and outgunned army won victory after improbable victory and drove the Seleucids from Jerusalem. The Maccabean party was the beginning of those known as Pharisees in Jesus’ day and the ultra-orthodox of today.
Their piety forbade them to offer sacrifice in a temple defiled by pagan worship. The priests cleansed the temple and prepared for their first authentic Torah worship in a long and painful time. Discovering only enough properly consecrated oil to light the Menorah – traditional seven-piece candelabra of Israel – for one day, they took a leap of faith while awaiting the eight days required for consecrating new oil supplies. Miraculously, the oil stayed alight the whole eight days. Since then this feast of light has been celebrated each year – and in Jerusalem’s Old City since the 1967 liberation.
Truth is, the situation in 165 BC and 2016 AD are a lot alike. Then and now a culture that denies legitimacy to Jewish existence, let alone Jewish faith and history, demands the conversion of Jewish Holy Places – including the remnant of the Temple – to serve a faith tradition of hostility to Jews and their God. The army defending that defilement – the Temple area had become a slum – was driven from Jerusalem in the Six Day War, but their claims are still pressed. Today the situation presents an even more brutal challenge, inasmuch as Palestinians have made clear they desire the destruction of the Israeli people as much as the obliteration of their culture.
Each year the United Nations observes an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on November 29. Each year on this day – the anniversary of the 1947 UN vote to partition the Palestine region into Jewish and Arab sections – UN resolutions are proposed and usually adopted condemning Israel for “occupying” her own capitol city. Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their national capitol although they have never had a nation, much less a capitol. Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon asks if it is true the Palestinians actually want a state and declares history shows the answer to be no.
Danon points out Israeli PM Ehud Barak offered ninety-five per cent of Judea and Samaria plus all of Gaza in 2000 and Yasser Arafat instead launched war via the Second Intifada. In 2008 PM Ehud Olmert offered the same West Bank territory and Mahmoud Abbas flatly rejected. The Palestine Liberation Organization’s charter calls for the extermination of Israel – a state of their own is not an alternative to this intention.
Danon maintains the real goal is not statehood but permanent client status – effective international welfare – inasmuch as the Palestinians have shown no ability to govern themselves. His grasp of history is accurate – the PLO is dependent on Israel for even clean drinking water – whether or not his conclusion is correct. It is a matter of record the Palestinians – not the Jews – refused the UN partition and launched the first of an uninterrupted line of aggressive wars against Israel – the terrorist activities commenced without waiting for armies to gather. It is as well documented the Palestinians use the building materials donated them for building terror tunnels instead of housing for a society in the lands they control.
In any case, with the recent UN declarations that Israel and the Jews have no historical connection to any of the holy places in Jerusalem or throughout Israel, there is a clear parallel to the ancient Seleucid monarch’s obsession with obliterating all that makes Israel herself. Hanukkah celebrations take on a special poignancy in this season that is so seminal and so summary with respect to the trajectory of all human history.
What can we do? Besides supporting the just claims of Israel to a right to exist on land they have inhabited over three and a half thousand years and demanding our government follow suit, we can celebrate Hanukkah alongside Christmas. We can eat potato pancakes and donuts, reflecting on how the God of Jews and Christians brought plenty from poverty – and still does. We can give gifts of money to children – meant to encourage them to give – over eight days instead of the commercial glut that is Christmas for so many. We can play with the dreidel – the little spinning top inscribed with the letters of the Hebrew acronym that says, “A great miracle happened here.”
And we can praise the God who once and again rescued Israel from obliteration for extending the reach of that rescue to all humankind in the sending of His Son at this time of year and this season of history. Of course that would mean resurrecting the authentic essence of Christmas – that other Feast of Light.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships, The Holy Spirit and the End Times, and Kingdom in Pursuit – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at praynorthstate@gmail.com
