The story of Hanukah tells us that once the temple had been defiled by Antiochus and won back by the Maccabees, that it needed to be re-dedicated to the true principles of the faith. When we’ve lost our way, when we’ve suffered through conflict and come through, part of healing is to name and claim our true selves again.
Watch a video of this worship service
Hanukkah is known as the festival of lights. A time of joy and magic. At Hanukkah, we light a Menorah, and tell the miracle story of the lamp required to rededicate the temple with oil enough only for one day that lasts for the full eight days the ritual requires. Hanukkah is celebrated with a family feast, and eight days of gift giving. The spiritual theme of Hanukkah is affirmation and faithfulness.
But the Hanukkah story begins with conflict. A big conflict. We celebrate what has been restored because something important was previously lost. The re-dedication of the Temple follows an earlier profanation of the Temple. The Feast of Lights is the closing scene in a story that begins with 20 years of war. The joyful occasion of Hanukkah is a victory celebration after a Jewish family nicknamed, “The Maccabees,” led their people in a revolution against the Greek Seleucid Empire who had occupied their land for a hundred and fifty years after Alexander the Great.
So Hanukkah is a story that begins with a broken community and then, recovering from the conflict, asks us to rededicate ourselves to our core principles. Like so many religious stories that resonate centuries after they happened, the celebration of the next eight nights gives us an opportunity within the frame of an old story to meditate on a common spiritual theme in our own lives.
Conflict disconnects us from relationships. Conflict disconnects us from community. Conflict disconnects us from ourselves.
After we have been separated from what is important in our lives, how do we come back again?
The long background of the Hanukkah story is this:
About a thousand years before the Common Era, the Hebrew speaking people of the mid-East, organized themselves into a unified nation under the kings Saul, then David, and then Solomon. Their capital was at Jerusalem. Solomon built a great temple there.
After Solomon’s reign ended, the nation split into two. The northern area took the name Israel, and was a loose collection of 10 of the original 12 Hebrew-speaking tribes. The southern kingdom took the name Judea composed of the other 2 tribes.
The divided kingdom lasted about 200 years, or until about 700 years BCE (Before the Common Era). At that time the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrian empire under the leadership of Sargon II, and Senacharib. The 10 tribes of the northern kingdom became the “10 Lost Tribes” of Israel that you may have heard about. Jerusalem, still the capital of the southern kingdom was sieged by Senacharib, but not conquered, mostly because the Assyrians were now themselves under attack at their rear by the growing Babylonian empire.
The Babylonian empire eventually overthrew the Assyrian empire and around the year 600, BCE, the Babylonians under a general named Nebuchadnezzar, came back to Judea and conquered Jerusalem. This is when Solomon’s temple, the first temple, was destroyed. With the fall of Jerusalem, the residents of Judea were transported east into Babylon, in what is known as the Babylonian captivity.
About 50 years later, the Babylonian empire was itself destroyed by an empire even further to the east, the Persian Empire, under a leader named Cyrus. Cyrus’ policy was that conquered people within his empire could retain self-rule, as long as they understood their vassal state and respected the empire. So the Judeans were released from their captivity and were allowed to return to the area of their former kingdom and rebuild. It was then, shortly before 500 BCE that the Judeans re-built the temple in Jerusalem, now called the second temple.
The Persian Empire continued to expand westward into the Mediterranean and eventually attacked the Greek nation. The Greeks fought back and under Alexander the Great defeated the Persians and then created a Greek empire stretching all the way east into modern-day India. The Hebrew-speaking people watched their rulers change from Persian to Greek, but continued to live and worship around Jerusalem and the second temple as they had.
After Alexander’s death, in 325 BCE, the Greek empire was divided into 4 parts, each part ruled by a different general. At first the Greek generals allowed the subject people to retain their individual cultures. Eventually, though, the Greek ruler sought to forcibly convert all the residents of the Empire to Greek culture. This practice was called Hellenization, after the old name for Greece.
For the second temple in Jerusalem this meant the Greek rulers set up a statue of Zeus in the Holy of Holies and converted the temple to worship of the Greek gods.
Many Jews, I’m sure, were happy to adopt Greek culture. The Greeks were powerful. The Greek culture was filled with literature and art and philosophy. Jews who converted to the Greek culture gained social stature and privilege, wealth.
But to others, the attempt to annihilate Jewish culture was too much.
And here, I want to pause.
What would you do?
How meaningful are cultural practices like worship at the temple, and studying a particular sacred text? How important is it to you to be part of a tribe? How connected are you to a historical identity? Are you the kind of person who goes along, who adapts and learns new ways easily? Or do you say, “Yes, I can change, about some things, but only so far? Are there certain principles essential to who you are, your identity, where you cannot compromise, without becoming disconnected from yourself? Are some changes so cutting that to change doesn’t mean to grow, but to die?
Hanukkah is about conflict, how we handle it, how we get through it. What it does to us. And what we need to do after enduring through the conflict.
About the year 170 BCE, a Jewish family, led by a man named Judeaus and nicknamed “Maccabee” or “The Hammer” organized a revolt against the Greeks. After 20 years, the revolt was successful. The Maccabees, established a new Jewish kingdom, called the Hashmonean Dynasty, the first independent Jewish kingdom since the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians 400 years earlier.
The Hashmonean Dynasty ruled the area for about 100 years until the area was once again conquered by a foreign empire, this time the Romans, about the year 60. In the year 40 BCE or so, Caesar Augustus installed a local king, loyal to Rome, named King Herod.
And then, well, the next part of the story is the story for next week.
Hanukkah marks the time when the Maccabees re-took control of the temple in Jerusalem, threw out the statue of Zeus, and re-dedicated the temple to Jewish worship. Hanukkah means “dedication” in Hebrew. The dedication ritual required burning oil lamps for eight days to purify the space. The priests could only find enough oil for one day, but they lit the lamp anyway, and then, (a miracle!), the lamp stayed lit for the full eight days.
Today, Jews light eight candles on a Menorah, one for each day.
Under the Persian empire the Jewish people were not completely independent, but they were free to be themselves. They could rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. They could worship again in a manner that had not been able to under Babylonian rule. They could be themselves.
And for a time, the Greek rulers allowed the same freedom. The people had a choice, either tend toward the Greek identity, or hold on to a Jewish identity. Many Jews assimilated. To them, the advantages of identifying with the Greek culture were many, and perhaps the markers of Jewish identity were not so important. In either case, you could be yourself, make your own choice, go one way or the other.
But when the Greek rulers changed the former policy and decided that the new policy would require all residents of the empire to behave as Greeks, speak as Greeks, worship as Greeks, they created a conflict.
When the Greek rulers came in to the Temple, in the most sacred center of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, a place where no one but the highest priest was allowed to enter, the mystical dwelling place of God himself, and on that spot set up a statue of Zeus, something essential in Jewish identity had been violated. The occupation became intolerable.
Thou shall have no other Gods before me.
Thou shall not make graven images
Honor thy father and mother.
I imagine that for many Jews who had been comfortable assimilating to the Greek culture, that the Maccabean revolution was unwelcome. Why fight it? What did it matter which unreal God was honored in the Temple? Look at the pain and suffering of a revolution. Violence is never justified. Let’s save our outrage for something actually important.
For the Maccabees, the value of retaining an independent Jewish culture were obvious and important, important enough to go to war over.
But for all of us, either for this or that, if we have a life of worth and value, something is that important. As Emerson says:
“A person will worship something–have no doubt about that…. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
When something sacred to us is violated, we feel disconnected from ourselves. Our identity feels shattered. We are lost. Ungrounded. Untethered.
Who am I? asks the woman who can no longer live alone and must move from the home where she’s lived for decades. Who am I if I no longer live in those rooms, and tend that garden, and say hello to those neighbors?
Who am I now? asks the man (I’m thinking of my father) when my wife of 68 years has died?
Who am I? asks the immigrant to the United States, and who are these children of mine who speak English and dress like Americans?
Who are we? Many Americans have been asking lately, when the foundations of our democracy are threatened and our national character is disparaged and cheapened?
“Who are we?”, as a church, this community has been asking. Having gone through a period of conflict, perhaps we know how the Maccabees felt under Greek rule. We’ve suffered in the last few years from external challenges, like COVID. And we’ve suffered through internal challenges that have taken us away from ourselves. We’ve watched important principles of our faith be violated. We were sometimes unkind. We let enmity and gossip spread. We suffered bad behavior and didn’t stop it. We suffered incompetence and didn’t hold people accountable. We suffered as people in positions of authority violated their offices, and we shook our heads and let them continue.
For some, this no longer felt like the place we had known and love. Our temple had been profaned. We become disconnected from ourselves. Something essential was lost. Something we must find again, and re-dedicate ourselves to.
“Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul.”
Over the last few months, I’ve tried to lay out several places where we might ground our core identity. Principles of freedom, reason, and tolerance. A religious method that challenges us to be reality-based. Democracy in our governance. A liberal religious history that searches freely for truth and meaning through Judaism, Christianity, Protestantism, Humanism, Transcendentalism. We are Unitarian Universalists. We are also the particular character of this community. We are the aggregate of these particular members who choose to be with us.
Something in that is sacred to us. It is that sacred thing that keeps you coming, year after year, or inspired you to join today. It is that sacred thing, too essential to your being to simply give up on when times get tough. So you stay. Even through conflict, you stay. And you nurture the sacred core of this community. A sacred something worth sacrificing for, and working for, and giving to, and defending.
Something in this sanctuary we have dedicated our lives to. For Unitarian Univeralists the sacred is not a God, or a sacred text, but a way of ordering our lives and being together: the seven principles; the mission statement of this church; the covenant we recite in response to the lighting of the chalice; sacred values of love and peace and justice; sacred principles guiding our lives in sacred community.
And when that sacred core has been violated, or replaced, or maybe simply become dusty, or taken for granted, or ignored, when we have forgotten who we are, then we need to name it again and re-dedicate ourselves to it, again.
“In the quietness of this place, surrounded by the all-pervading presence of the Holy, my heart whispers: Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in good times or in tempests, I may not forget that to which my life is committed.”
Tonight, if you’re observant, you will light the first candle.
With each candle lit, we name ourselves. We name what we are living for. We say what is non-negotiable. We note where we are willing to bend, because our principles can be expressed in new ways and we want to grow and change and move with the world around us, but we re-affirm the core principles sacred to us that we will not let be uprooted.
We say we are this, not that. We see who we wish to be, and as we light each candle we let its light light our path to that goal a little further.
We are these people. An inclusive religious community that inspires personal and spiritual growth. Light a candle
We care for one another. Light a candle.
We strive for social justice, a healthy environment, and a peaceful world. Light a candle.
We say again, this is my faith. This is my covenant, and I dedicate to preserving a community where:
Love is the spirit
the quest for truth a sacrament,
and service a kind of prayer.
To dwell together in peace, (light a candle)
to seek knowledge in freedom, (light a candle)
to serve humanity in fellowship.