Affirming our identity

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross

Chanukah, Chag ha-Urim “The Feast of Lights,” is a bright and luminous spot in the dead of winter. The kindling of the m’norah — increasing one additional lamp each night, from one to all eight, because our sages of antiquity taught that “one should never decrease in matters of holiness” — represents the defiant affirmation of our faith in a dark and troubled world.

The origins of the holiday lie in an even darker and more troubled time, nearly 2,200 years ago, when the Seleucid Emperor, Antiochus Epiphanes, summarily criminalized the faith legacy of his Judean subjects. He erected a statue of Olympian Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple, mandated that the Jews were to sacrifice only to the gods of the Greek pantheon and forbade circumcision, kosher slaughtering and Torah study on pain of death.

Now, there are many in our South Florida community who witnessed far worse during the Nazi era. The difference is that the Germans sought to obliterate the physical presence of the Jewish people first from Europe, then from the rest of the world. The decree of Antiochus was, in its own way, far harsher, because it expressed an indifference to the Jewish body and sought instead to obliterate the Jewish soul.

This was, frankly, just fine with some Jews. Then, as now, there were many of our people who viewed circumcision as arcane and barbaric; who didn’t keep kosher (and, in modern terms, were first in line when stone crabs came into season); who didn’t study Torah; and who were indifferent to annual pilgrimage to the national shrine in Jerusalem, let alone to attending the synagogue daily. They couldn’t read Hebrew, but were fluent in Greek; they gave their children Greek names that would “pass” in polite society; and they went modern rhinoplasty one better by subjecting themselves to epispasm, a plastic reconstruction of the foreskin so they wouldn’t stand out at the gymnasium.

The underlying tragedy of Chanukah is that it was precisely the effort of these assimilated Jews to fit in that drew the attention of Antiochus to his Judean subjects in the first place. The First Book of Maccabees records that a Jewish delegation came seeking permission to open a gymnasium in Jerusalem, a request which so pleased the emperor that he decided on the spot that all Jews should relinquish their culture, language, practices and beliefs in favor of his own. His Draconian enforcement of that legislation included bloodshed so savage and so indiscriminate that it polarized the Jewish world.

The frank detail we have to be honest enough to confront, is that the story of Chanukah has little to do with the reconsecration of the Altar in the Temple (and nothing to do with the little flask of oil, which only came up four centuries later in the Talmud). The story of Chanukah is bound up not with the war our people fought against an oppressor over the idea of religious freedom, but with a civil war fought among our own people over our corporate integrity.

Thinking in those terms, kindling the m’norah constitutes our ongoing affirmation of that integrity. Lighting these lights is our declaration that we are not modern Hellenizers, but rather proud and true children of Israel who affirm our identity, our legacy and our commitment to each other.

This sacred holiday may recall the long-ago rededication of the Altar in Jerusalem, but today it marks our own personal rededication as, to paraphrase poet Karl Shapiro, we “sink deep in a Western chair and rest our soul, and say our name aloud for the first time unconsciously.”

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross serves at Jewish Congregation of Marco Island.