The history of Hanukkah tells of people so committed to their faith that they went to battle rather than bend. Their choice is inspiring. But often we do choose to let go of cherished commitments. And sometimes letting go is the better, and even the more religiously principled, choice.
SERMON, “Faithfully Flexible” Rev. Rick Hoyt-McDaniels
Did you notice, in the hymn we just sang, “Light One Candle” that the verse actually calls for eight candles to be lit? Light one candle at a time until all of the eight candles for Hanukkah are lit.
Light one candle for the Maccabee children with thanks that their light didn’t die.
Light [a second] candle for the pain they endured when their right to exist was denied.
Light [a third] candle for the terrible sacrifice justice and freedom demand.
But light [the fourth] candle for the wisdom to know when the peacemaker’s time is at hand.
Then,
Light [a fifth] candle for the strength that we need to never become our own foe.
Light [the sixth] candle for those who are suffering the pain we learned so long ago.
Light [the seventh] candle for all we believe in, that anger won’t tear us apart.
And light [the final] candle to bring us together with peace as the song in our heart.
So light one candle with thanks to those long ago Jewish ancestors, the Maccabees. Without their zeal and revolutionary spirit, the temple in Jerusalem destroyed by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzer II around 600 BCE, and then rebuilt about 70 years later, under the rule of the Persians, would have continued to be occupied by the Greek rulers who came in under Alexander the Great around 330 BCE. Under Greek rule, the temple had been converted to a temple devoted to Zeus. Indeed, an altar of Zeus had been set up in the place called the “Holy of Holies” in the Jewish Temple. Pigs were sacrificed on the altar. Temple prostitutes offered themselves in the courtyard.
All of this was an outrageous insult to the Jewish religion, and indeed, it was meant to be so.
The first Greek rulers, after Alexander the Great, allowed the Jews to retain their religion. Even so, some of the Jewish people slipped away and began to follow Greek ways, wanting to identify with the dominant culture, rather than the oppressed. These were called Hellenizers.
This created tension among the Jewish people between those who felt it was important to retain their Jewish identity and faith, and those who chose assimilation to the Greek culture. Eventually the tension grew so great that the Jews began a civil war among themselves.
The new Greek rulers then saw that a practice of tolerance wasn’t working to keep the peace, so they started a policy of forcing all of their subject peoples to convert to Greek religion and culture.
They took over the temple. They outlawed circumcision. And they required participation in Greek religious festivals.
This was intolerable to the most devout Jews, including a Priest named Matthias and his sons Judas and Simon, who then led a revolution against the Greek rulers. We know them by their nickname, Maccabeus, or, “The Hammer.”
They main phase of the revolution occurred in the years 167 to 160 BCE. By 160 the Maccabees had regained control of the temple and the story of Hanukkah occurred.
Back and forth fighting continued for another 20 years or so, and it should be said that the Greek empire, called the Selucid Empire was also fighting the Romans during this time, not just the Jewish revolutionaries. But in the year 141 BCE, the Maccabees won decisive control of Judea again, for the first time in four hundred and fifty years. Simon Maccabeus set himself up as King. They called this era the Hasmonean Dynasty, named after an old family name of the Maccabees. The Hasmonean dynasty lasted one hundred years, until they were ousted by the Romans, and Rome set up Herod as the king in Jerusalem.
So light a second candle for the pain that the Jewish people must have felt when their right to exist was denied.
And light a third candle for the terrible choice they had to make when they decided to start a war against the Greek rulers rather than submitting to their insults and facing, possibly, the complete extermination of the Jewish faith.
Imagine being required to make that choice.
The Jewish people knew what war looked like. For four hundred and fifty years they had been subject peoples in their own land as one after another wave of empire swept through and over them: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks. Their own kingdom had been founded through war as they fought and conquered numerous tribes of people who had lived before them in Canaan.
They knew what war does to families, to villages, because they had lived it, and remembered it in their scriptures. They knew what war does to bodies, and to spirits. They knew the sacrifice that war would require them to make.
And remember, prior to this time, the Greeks had ruled for one hundred and fifty years or so, and during that time, many, many, Jews had voluntarily given up their religion and culture. They learned the Greek language. The adopted Greek habits. They ate the way Greeks ate, and dressed the way Greeks ate, admired Greek art, studied Greek philosophy. Their children played with the Greek family across the street. And when they grew up they fell in love with and married the Greek boys and girls next door.
Is that really so awful?
Is preventing that future really worth going to war over?
A lot of folks who maybe didn’t really care one way or the other got swept up and killed in the Maccabean revolution. Is that justice for them?
A lot of Jews who had happily embraced the Greek culture decades earlier, weren’t so happy to suddenly have to re-adapt to a culture and religion they hadn’t identified with for generations.
I’m not here to preach what should have been the right path for the Jews of 167 BCE. I’m only here to sympathize with the complexities of their decision.
On one hand you have a religion and way of life of great value under grave threat. The Jewish identity was being suppressed. For some people, who they were, in their very heart of hearts, at their very core, was in danger of being wiped out. To some, devout Jews, what the Greeks were doing to them was erasing them, destroying them, putting their light out. The Greek policies meant they could no longer live as the person they were, which amounts to the same as murder.
For these people, to go to war was an act of self-defense. War entailed the possibility that they might be killed, but not going to war meant allowing themselves to be killed anyway. The only possible way to live as the people they were, was to fight.
But for people who had not previously been fighters, taking up weapons and learning how to use them, and organizing into a revolutionary army, and developing military strategy, enduring the hardships of war, spending the next seven years in fierce fighting and twenty more years after that in continuing skirmishes with counter-revolutionary forces, the act of becoming a “fighter” also meant no longer living as the person you were.
The fighter may be defending his old way of life, but he does it by giving up his old way of life.
That also, is some of the terrible sacrifice required of going to war. So maybe even in the gravest of situations, going to war may not be the right choice. So light the fourth candle for the wisdom to know when the peacemaker’s time is at hand.
To kill for the Jewish faith, when the Jewish faith commands “Thou shalt not kill” means placing two important values against each other.
This, I think, is the complexity of the Hanukkah story that is sometimes missed.
The Hanukkah celebration begins with the story of the rededication of the temple and the miracle of the lamps that only had enough oil to burn for one day, but burned anyway for the full eight days required to purify the temple from the Greek profanation.
So you can tell the Hanukkah story as a story of light overcoming darkness, which fits with other spiritual themes of this season: solstice, and “dark of winter” and “Grateful for small miracles, we rejoice in the wonder of light and darkness and the daring of hope” as we heard in our Call to Worship.
There’s nothing wrong with that sort of Hanukkah story, but it’s incomplete. The miracle of lights story leaves off the part of the story that explains why the temple needed to be rededicated, and what had been required of the Jewish people in order to regain control of the temple, that is, the seven years of war they had just fought, and the twenty more years to come of struggle for power.
But even if we include that part of the story, we miss the deeper context of the story, which is that the revolution wasn’t just between oppressed Jews and oppressor Greeks, but also between Jews who had one kind of religiously conservative view of their faith identity, and other Jews who had a more relaxed and culturally accommodating view of what it meant to be a Jew.
And, as much as that intra-faith struggle took place between Jew and Jew, I’m sure it also took place within individual Jewish persons.
What does it mean to be a Jew?
What must I hold on to with an unbreakable grip? What can I let go?
Does being Jewish require a Jewish temple in Jerusalem? Well, there hasn’t been a temple in Jerusalem since the temple that the Maccabees rededicated was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.
Can I be a Jew without following the kosher food laws?
Can I be a Jew without strictly observing the sabbath?
Can I be a Jew assimilated into a foreign culture, speaking their language, and following their customs?
The Maccabees would say no. But for more than two thousand years many Jews would say I can be Jewish without those things.
If living and worshipping the way we always have is the essential value, then the decision to fight to defend that value becomes more easily justified, even when “fighting” itself violates many of our other core values, and when the fighting itself requires we abandon our former way of life.
But if “being Jewish” is the essential value, and the Jewish identity can be retained as some sort of inward truth that doesn’t require the outward expressions of temple, and kosher laws, and sabbath observation, and so on, then the sacrifices inherent in “fighting” no longer seem justified. The better choice, even the choice more true to our faith, is not to fight, but to flex.
As I move through a final year of preaching, trying to draw some final thoughts from all of the core issues of spirituality and the regular festivals of the Unitarian Universalist liturgical year, I think this is the deepest lesson of Hanukkah: that sometimes, fighting for what we believe is the better choice. But sometimes, the better choice is to let go.
I don’t mean a cowardly, casual relationship to your core principles, letting go without resistance because it’s easier to give up than to stand up.
But I mean that sometimes what we hold to be our core principles can, on closer examination, reveal themselves to be merely a current, contingent expression of some deeper value that is closer to our core. In that case, when it is only the outward expression under attack, while the true core is protected; and when what would be required of us to defend the outward expression does itself do violence to the true core; than we actually do our enemy’s work when we fight.
So we light a fifth candle, says Peter Yarrow, “for the strength that we need to never become our own foe.” We must be careful not to lose ourselves in fighting for ourselves.
We light a sixth candle for those who are suffering the pain we learned so long ago.
It’s a terrible situation to feel your values under threat. I know many of us are feeling this terror today. To see compassion replaced with cruelty. To see ignorance and prejudice ascendant. To see corruption practiced openly in the highest levels of government. To see cherished institutions disparaged and attacked. To see necessary help withheld from the poor and the sick, while the richest grow their wealth ever more obscenely. To see the planet despoiled for short-term gains without regard for the future.
It hurts. We know that pain.
And part of that pain, the lesson from Hanukkah, is the complicated question of what do we do?
Is it right, in this case, now, to take up arms, to resist, or to revolt? The lesson from Hanukkah, I caution, is not to glorify the choice of the Maccabees as always right in every case, but to be very clear, before you make your choice, about what you really believe, what is truly essential, what is actually at stake.
And to determine whether it is possible to defend what is threatened, and win what we seek, without killing what we hope to defend and losing anyway.
So we light a seventh candle, for all we believe in, that anger won’t tear us apart.
Which brings us to the eighth and final candle. Lighting this candle, the purification is complete and the rededication is accomplished.
Eventually the warring will stop. Endless war is not the goal. Even a fully justified war is only a tool helping us get past the war. Eventually, we will have to sit down with our enemies and make peace with them. Eventually we will have to rebuild what our war destroyed and we will have to create new community on new terms with the people we fought against, a new community now including a history of intolerable insults and the war we fought in retaliation.
Every action of war must be undertaken as the first step in creating the foundation for a future peace.
And so we light the eighth and final candle: “to bring us together with peace as the song in our heart.”