Behind the Hanukkah story of miracles and lights is a story of religious oppression and a group of believers waging a war to win the right to practice their faith according to their conscience. But when “war” itself contradicts something important in the faith then can war-ing ever be acceptable? Can violating our values in the short-term be part of a strategy to achieve our long-term goals?
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Today is the seventh day of Hanukkah. Tonight, people celebrating Hanukkah will light the final candle: the eighth candle. The menorah will be fully lit. The holiday ends tomorrow.
I wasn’t with you for worship last week, but I know that your guest preacher, Joshua Berg, planned to include thoughts about Hanukkah in his sermon. So I’m not sure how much of the Hanukkah story you heard last week, but allow me to tell it again. The theme of my sermon this morning concerns the history of Hanukkah. I want us to think this morning not about the candles and the miracle story, but a story of a holy war, and the question whether it’s ever effective strategy to violate your values in the short term in order to preserve your values in the long term.
This is a human story, not exclusively the Hanukkah story, but rather, an ethical dilemma that we all face in ways large and small. If our goal is peace, can we fight to win it?
About three hundred and thirty years before the birth of Jesus, Alexander the Great, of Greece, conquered a huge empire that stretched from Greece, eastward, all the way to the borders of India. In the middle of that Greek empire, lived the Jewish people.
Mostly, the people that Alexander and his army fought in conquering this vast empire, were Persians. Cyrus the Persian had conquered an empire about 200 years earlier, stretching from the Persian Gulf westward all the way to Egypt. In the middle of that Persian empire, lived the Jewish people.
The Persians had conquered their empire by fighting the Babylonians. It was the Babylonians who had destroyed Solomon’s temple, conquered the remnant of the Jewish kingdom and taken the defeated Jews out of Israel into captivity in Babylon.
The Babylonians had conquered their empire by fighting the Assyrians. It was the Assyrians who first conquered the Jewish nation. The Assyrians had destroyed the northern half of Israel, and scattered the ten tribes of Israel that had lived there. The two remaining tribes in the southern kingdom, with Jerusalem and the temple, would last another 150 years, until being conquered by the Babylonians.
The Jews had fought wars of conquest themselves, defeating the Canaanites and other tribes ever since Moses had led his people out of Egypt.
Before Alexander the Great died he split his empire into four independent Tetrarchies and set his generals to rule over them. Once again, the Jews struggled to remain true to who they were against an occupying foreign government. Some of what the Greeks brought with them the Israelites eagerly adopted. The Greeks brought gifts of philosophy, and art, and architecture, which the Jews eagerly embraced. But other parts of the Greek culture were antithetical to the Jewish faith and impossible for them to assimilate.
In the one hundred seventy-fifth year before the birth of Jesus, an intolerable Greek emperor rose over the Jewish people. His name was Antiochus. In an attempt to unify the diverse peoples under his control, Antiochus forced his subjects to adopt Greek habits, and forbid practices from indigenous cultures. For the Jews this meant some practices their faith required of them, such as circumcision, dietary laws, animal sacrifice at the temple they had re-built in Jerusalem, were now against the law. In the most outlandish offense, Antiochus set up an altar to the Greek god, Zeus, in the very holy of holies in the Jerusalem temple: the center of Jewish religious practice. Antiochus further insulted the Jews by using the temple tax, which is the monetary sacrifice the Jews offered in ritual support of their faith, to pay for Antiochus’ wars.
In the year 169, before the Common Era, a man named Mattathias led a revolt against Antiochus. Mattathais died a year later and his son, Judas, continued the revolution. Judas was a brilliant military leader who was given the nickname “The Hammer,” or “Maccabeus” in Hebrew. This name became the name of his family, the Maccabees. It is the revolution of the Maccabees against the Greeks that presents the background of Hanukkah.
Five years after the war began, Judas Maccabeus and his followers had retaken enough control of their country to take their temple back from the Greeks and to rededicate their temple to the service of Yahweh, the Jewish name for God.
Hanukkah means, “dedication.” The story of Hanukkah is the story of the Jewish people fighting for their faith against oppression and reclaiming their faith values through the act of dedicating their central place of worship.
The history of Hanukkah is told in four books in the Catholic bible called First, Second, Third and Fourth Maccabees. Those books don’t appear in Jewish scriptures, nor in the Protestant Bible. Nor will you find in the four books of Maccabees any account of the story most of us know of Hanukkah, how the oil, only enough for one day, miraculously burned for the entire eight days required to purify the temple after the Greek desecration. The miracle legend was added later. The Romans, who would conquer the Jews after the Greeks, wondered why the Jews celebrated Hanukkah. The Jews were afraid to tell their new rulers that their holiday celebrated a victorious revolution over their previous rulers so they told them it was a story about a miracle of lights instead. For Jews the festival of lights has lasted as a children’s story, but the significance of Hanukkah is of a people fighting for their faith against an oppressive government.
And so, Hanukkah, at its historical core, is based on a story of a Holy War: a war fought in defense of religion.
Even to bring those two words together, holy and war, should bring a little shiver to your spine. When is war ever holy? How can the holy ever be served by violence?
The holy, whatever it is, is peaceful, joyful, coming together in harmony across differences. The holy is life-giving, not death-dealing.
War and violence desecrate the holy, just as surely as Antiochus desecrated the Holy of Holies by removing Yahweh’s altar and raising up a statue of Zeus. Didn’t the war waged by the Maccabees violate the spirit of the holy just as gravely as Antiochus’ sacrilege in the temple?
Does the Greek ruler’s prior violation of the holy justify the consequent violation of the holy that the Maccabees committed with their war? Or did the two acts simply compound the violation of the holy?
And yet, under Antiochus the holy was being abused, daily. Must the holy be forever a simpering victim to forces that would suppress it, with no recourse to defending itself?
After all, making war wasn’t the goal of the Maccabean revolt; freedom to follow their faith was the goal, a holy goal, with the temporary horror of war employed as the strategy to win the goal.
And so, this is the question that we wrestle with, in ways small and large, personal and national and global: it is acceptable to violate your values now in order to secure your values for the future?
Is it OK to dispense some temporary injustice to achieve a larger justice? Is it acceptable to treat a few people badly in order to achieve a greater good? Is it OK to use violence to keep the peace, or to win it back? Or, when you start waging war, do you simply place yourself on the same side as the enemies of peace, taking the side of your enemies against your own values?
I mentioned my sermon topic to my husband this week and he responded, “Oh, that’s the question of whether it would be right to go back in time and kill Hitler.”
It is kind of like that. Is it acceptable to commit a murder, in order to prevent a murder?
My husband had another example too. He teaches history. He told the story of Julius Caesar’s assassination. 44 years before the Common Era, while the Roman Empire was still nominally a republic, Caesar amassed a vast amount of power to himself and declared himself Emperor for Life. A group of Roman Senators conspired to assassinate him, believing that they were defending liberty and democracy. And yet assassination surely has to be a violation of liberty and democracy.
In the U. S. we often think of World War II as a good war, a just war, even a holy war. The war itself was horrible, of course, but the cause was clear and worthy, and it helps in our later judgment that we won that war. But we’ve fought other wars, too, where we thought, or at least some thought, that the cause was worth fighting for, and the results have been less laudatory, and less justifiable of the pain and suffering of war.
But historical and national examples aside, this is a dilemma we face in our personal lives as well.
I think of myself as a generous person, and I want to be generous, and yet I often say “no” when I’m asked for money on the sidewalk. The point of my confession is not merely that I have a value of generosity that I don’t always follow, my point for today is that I somehow think that not being generous in that way in the short term, might help lead to a change in our culture toward a larger goal where people are supported in the ways they truly need, without having to ask for handouts on the street. That would be true generosity, I believe. I choose to temporarily violate a personal value because I imagine, maybe fancifully, that I’m working toward a larger goal.
Or, another example, this week I lied several times when people who didn’t know the news of my mother’s death would casually ask me how I am. I would answer, “I’m fine.” But I’m not fine. I’m depressed. I don’t mind sharing the truth, but I want to do it in my own way, in my own time. But even so, I was lying. And it felt icky. But I choose to lie because I felt a little lie now was in service of a larger truth. If I didn’t let my personal news hijack our conversation now, then we could do together what we needed to do and attend to our mutual relationship so that when I do choose to tell the truth, we can both give that moment the attention it deserves.
And so I withhold generosity, in order to be generous. Or at least I tell myself that’s what I’m doing. Or I tell a lie, or I evade telling the truth, because I think I’m making space for a deeper truth at a later time.
So the Roman Senators kill the leader of the democracy in order to preserve the democracy. The Maccabees start a war in order to win the right to worship a god who commands, “Thou shalt not kill.”
And I’m reminded of the rioters who stormed the capitol a year ago, perhaps ready to do violence against our elected representatives, and throw out the results of our election, in order to defend our elections. Or so they thought.
And I think of the demonstrations in our nation’s streets a year and a half ago, mostly peaceful, but with some who were willing to do violence, in order to protest violence, or smash windows and loot from innocent citizens in order to protest unjust treatment against innocent citizens.
I’m thinking of our current conversations about racial injustice and wondering with those who seem to say that ending race-based discrimination requires treating people differently based on race.
I’m thinking of the times as a minister that I’ve had to eject a disruptive person from the church community, in order to preserve the church community and our faith value of welcoming and inclusiveness of all persons.
These are difficult questions.
They are difficult for an individual, and for a nation. And difficult for a faith community, too.
Sometimes the conditions of life become intolerable. Sometimes the hardships of injustice and oppression and inequality, and cruel treatment of ourselves or the ones we care about become so abject, that something must be done. This cannot go on.
Perhaps life for the Maccabees under Antiochus was that kind of situation.
Perhaps Judas Maccabeus was committed to peace, wanted only to get along, to follow his faith in the way that his people had for centuries, to worship the God who advised us all to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.
So in choosing to go to war he made the most heart-breaking, difficult choice possible. He chose to give up being who he was, in order to change himself into the kind of person who could do what he felt must be done to create a space where he and his people could be themselves again.
I cannot judge anyone who faces that situation and who makes that choice. I’m fortunate that I don’t feel I ever have faced that situation. I offer my sympathy, and my condolences for anyone who is in that position.
But we should remember the story of the Maccabees as tragedy not heroism.
When a person, in order to do what they think needs to be done for their liberation, gives up who they are, they add to their own oppression. Violating our principles means violating ourselves. Working against our values means losing ourselves before we win anything.
I wish for you, better, that you can find your way to your goals by following the path of your values, not stepping away from them.
Better, if we can, if possible at all, to stay true to ourselves. To stay connected to ourselves. To live and act and move in the world, and to affect change in the world, by being more of who we are not less. Better that we become who we want to be by being that person now. Better that we starting living the vision of what we want the world to be, not putting off the vision while we do the opposite for a time, and hoping to come back to the better vision later.
Let us make truth by being truthful. Let us win generosity by being generous. Let us make justice by being just.
I wish for you, that you find the tools you require to achieve the ends you seek within the values that you already hold tightly. Is there a compassionate way? Is there fair and equal way? A just way? A free and responsible way? A relationship-nurturing way? A holy way?
The instances of persuasion and respectful argument and moral example affecting change are more numerous than instances where violence was successful. And the non-violent path is proven much more effective in making long-lasting change that leads to healthy communities.
On the other hand, the assassination of Julius Caesar led to Caesar Augustus, not the restoration of the Republic. The war to end all wars lead to… another war.
Dr. King says, in a reading from our hymnal, “One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.”
As we light the final candle on the Hanukkah menorah let us say a prayer of thanks for the ability to worship freely according to our faith, and shed a tear for the Maccabees, who won their peace only by losing it.