each generation reinterprets the meaning of its holidays

• the 2^nd book of maccabees suggests it is a delayed celebration of sukkot (in chapter 10:9):

And they cel­e­brat­ed a fes­ti­val to the Lord for eight days, like the days of the fes­ti­val of Sukkot, and they remem­bered the pre­vi­ous days when they cel­e­brat­ed the fes­ti­val of Sukkot in moun­tains and in caves, and they went out in the desolation/wilderness, like wild beasts.

• early rabbis deprecated the military aspects of the maccabean revolt

• They high­igh­t­ed the sto­ry of the mir­a­cle of the oil.
• They even tried to can­cel the cel­e­bra­tion.

• anti-Zionist Rabbi Dr. Adolf Jellinek of late 19^th Century Vienna wrote:

“We are Ger­mans, French­men, Mag­yars, Ital­ians, and so forth, with every fiber of our being. We have long ceased to be true, thor­ough­bred Semi­tes, and we have long ago lost the sense of Hebrew nation­al­i­ty.” and “There is no Jew­ish nation. The Jews form, it is true, a sep­a­rate stock, a spe­cial reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty. They should cul­ti­vate the ancient Hebrew lan­guage, study their rich lit­er­a­ture, know their his­to­ry, cher­ish their faith, and make the great­est sac­ri­fices for it; they should hope and trust in the wis­dom of divine prov­i­dence, the promis­es of their prophets, and the devel­op­ment of humankind so that the sub­lime ideas and truths of Judaism may gain the day. But for the rest, they should amal­ga­mate with those nations whose cit­i­zens they are, fight in their bat­tles, and pro­mote their insti­tu­tions for the wel­fare of the whole.”

• early 20^th century Louis D. Brandeis, suggested a zionist appreciation in an address delivered in Boston, 1915

Chanukkah, the Feast of the Mac­cabees, cel­e­brates a vic­to­ry-not a mil­i­tary vic­to­ry only, but a vic­to­ry also of the spir­it over things mate­r­i­al. Not a vic­to­ry only over exter­nal ene­mies-the [Hel­lenist] Greeks; but a vic­to­ry also over more dan­ger­ous inter­nal ene­mies. A vic­to­ry of the many over the ease-lov­ing, safe­ty-play­ing, priv­i­leged, pow­er­ful few, who in their pli­an­cy would have betrayed the best inter­ests of the peo­ple, a vic­to­ry of democ­ra­cy over aristocracy.

As part of the eter­nal world-wide strug­gle for democ­ra­cy, the strug­gle of the Mac­cabees is of eter­nal world-wide inter­est. It is a strug­gle of the Jews of today as well as those of two thou­sand years ago. It is a strug­gle in which all Amer­i­cans, non-Jews as well as Jews, should be vital­ly inter­est­ed because they are vital­ly affected.

The Mac­cabees’ vic­to­ry proved that the Jews-then already an old peo­ple-pos­sessed the secret of eter­nal youth: the abil­i­ty to reju­ve­nate itself through courage, hope, enthu­si­asm, devo­tion and self-sac­ri­fice of the plain peo­ple. This will bring again a Jew­ish Renaissance.

• mid-20^th century American communist Morris Schappes praises the Jew’s struggle against fascism

For My Glo­ri­ous Broth­ers deals with obe­di­ence to law. Resis­tance to tyrants, we learn from this retelling of the hero­ism of the Mac­cabees, is the truest obe­di­ence to law. We derive the les­son from this inspir­it­ing nov­el deeply and mov­ing­ly. The writ­ing of it must have been not a dis­trac­tion from, but an inten­si­fi­ca­tion of, his still uncom­plet­ed expe­ri­ence of resis­tance to the Amer­i­can fas­cists. In forg­ing his Mac­cabees, Fast ham­mered steel for his own use; his own con­duct in bat­tle stead­ied the flame with which the Mac­cabees burn.

In light of the above, the fol­low­ing but­ton I pur­chased from Egg Cream Arts in Wash­ing­ton Square Park on Octo­ber 28, 2019 feels appropriate.

your lapel buttons

Many peo­ple have lapel but­tons. They may be attached to a favorite hat or jack­et you no longer wear or poked into a cork-board on your wall. If you have any lying around that you do not feel emo­tion­al­ly attached to, please let me know. I pre­serve these for the Jew­ish peo­ple. They will soon be donat­ed to the Yeshi­va Uni­ver­si­ty Muse­um in NYC. You can see many of the but­tons shared to date.

A question…

…for those who live in the mod­ern world, “don’t believe in mir­a­cles”, and do not want to cel­e­brate the nation­al­is­tic aspects of Chanukkah:

…what does Chanukkah celebrate?

Please feel free to leave a comment.

sources for the story of chanukkah

First and formost there are the original sources, the Books the Maccabees.

Book I and Book II (each with hyper­links!) and Book IV [The Revised Stan­dard Ver­sion of the Bible is copy­right© Nation­al Coun­cil of Church­es of Christ in Amer­i­ca and dis­trib­uted to reg­is­tered users (see User Agree­ment) with their kind permission.]

On the Mac­cabees in gen­er­al cul­ture, the Book of Mac­cabees is referred to in Moby Dick — CHAPTER 133 “THE CHASE — FIRST DAY” by Her­man Melville

Joesphus’ “Antiquities of the Jews” also tells the story.

This edi­tion on the WWW is trans­lat­ed by William Whiston

Book XII con­tain­ing the inter­val of a hun­dred and sev­en­ty years. from the death of Alexan­der the Great to the death of Judas Maccabeus.

Book XIII con­tain­ing the inter­val of eighty-two years, from the death of Judas Mac­cabeus to the death of Queen Alexandra.

The story of Chanukkah is told well in the historical novel by Howard Fast, My Glorious Brothers.

For a list of edi­tions and a first edi­tion avail­able.

For a short telling of the plot.

This page was first pub­lished at davka.org before the exis­tence of the Wikipedia. At that time, I was pleased to see that some­one had devot­ed an entire site to the works of Howard Fast. That is now gone, but Fast does have a Wikipedia page. The page that is now gone had an interesing piece by Fast on being Jew­ish. Howard Fast has writ­ten a num­ber of nov­els of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion of Jew­ish inter­est. With the exis­tence of the Wikipedia page some of those oth­ers are no longer “nec­es­sary”. How­ev­er, one devo­tee has main­tained his inter­est with a bib­li­og­ra­phy of Howard Fast (and all his alias­es). My Glo­ri­ous Broth­ers appeared in a list of texts for teach­ing Jew­ish His­to­ry from the what was the UAHC Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment, but that is no longer. Also gone is a list of texts for teach­ing Ancient & Medieval His­to­ry from J. S. Arken­berg of ORB [The Online Resource Book for Medieval stud­ies (ORB) which was a coop­er­a­tive effort on the part of schol­ars across the Inter­net to estab­lish an online text­book source for medieval stud­ies on the World-Wide Web. In prin­ci­ple, authors of the var­i­ous arti­cles that make up ORB main­tain their own arti­cles at their own loca­tions. Each arti­cle is con­nect­ed to ORB’s Title Index, which can be accessed at any time by click­ing on the ORB icon (see the top left cor­ner above) any­where it appears. In addi­tion, each arti­cle will be linked direct­ly to relat­ed arti­cles and oth­er infor­ma­tion avail­able on the Web. Some authors wel­come your ques­tions, com­ments and obser­va­tions about their arti­cles. This invi­ta­tion is indi­cat­ed by a sen­si­tive mail icon after the author’s name.] Anoth­er list that has dis­ap­peared is of texts of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion main­tained by Soon-Yong Choi, Ph.D. (Cen­ter for Research in Elec­tron­ic Com­merce, Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin His­tor­i­cal Fic­tion Site)

Yet anoth­er retelling that was on the WWW was The Mac­cabean Revolt (as part of A Peo­ple’s Epic by Wal­ter L. Field [95 years young… when this page was first pub­lished in 1997], he prob­a­bly has the dis­tinc­tion of being the old­est liv­ing web pub­lish­er. Wal­ter has authored numer­ous books includ­ing “A Peo­ple’s Epic,” a 95 page his­to­ry of the Jew­ish peo­ple done in an unusu­al rhyme form called ter­cet. He has also authored “The Tale of the Horse,” “Sym­pho­ny of Threes,” and “Glean­ings from the Bible.” in rhyming verse). You can still find copies of the book in used book­stores on the Web

A his­to­ry of the peri­od appears at the Inge­borg Ren­nert Cen­ter for Jerusalem Stud­ies of Bar-Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty Sec­ond Tem­ple Peri­od (538 B.C.E. to 70 C.E.) Per­sian Rule.

© MemHeh Pro­duc­tions pre­vi­ous update: Decem­ber 16, 1997.
Updat­ed Decem­ber 9, 2009.
Most recent update Decem­ber 8, 2025.

olive oil

Some inter­est­ing links relat­ed to Olive Oil.

When in Israel just after Chanukkah 5757 we worked a day on an archae­o­log­i­cal dig at Tel Morasha where we saw an oil press under­ground.

Olive oil has a rich and endur­ing his­to­ry.… It lit the lamps of the tem­ples and homes of our ancient civ­i­liza­tions. The Wikipedia arti­cle: Olive Oil (which did not exist when this page first went online [the orig­i­nal link has rotted]).

John Bergman, pres­i­dent of Bergman Euro-Nation­al, a real estate invest­ment com­pa­ny writes about Olives. In Oil Coun­try? [link rot]

An Ode to Olives or The Olives Home Page, main­tained by Nao­mi Smith includes links to lots of infor­ma­tion about olives, recipes using olives, books about olives, places to buy olives and olive prod­ucts and oth­er olives on the web! [link rot]

Fran­toio Olive Oil press is (accord­ing to them) the only U.S. restau­rant with in-house olive oil pro­duc­tion (with pho­tographs of the press). [link rot]

This text was first post­ed on June 2, 1999.
Most recent pri­or update: Decem­ber 9, 2009.

on the winter solstice

My father used to tell us that there were two piv­otal “events” in world his­to­ry: the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion and the win­ter sol­stice. There are sug­ges­tions that Chanukkah is a win­ter sol­stice hol­i­day (the increase in lights is a good hint). Here are a few of the more inter­est­ing gen­er­al links to sol­stice relat­ed sites.

• The win­ter sol­stice is one of those days that has been impor­tant since his­to­ry trails back into folk­lore and myth. Tech­ni­cal­ly it is the day of the year when day­time is short­est. Although you might say that it might be a prod­uct of neo-mod­ern insan­i­ty, it does have a tra­di­tion, and aware­ness of that tra­di­tion helps. Amaz­ing­ly enough the Wikipedia. arti­cle (checked in 1997) cites the fol­low­ing item, a link on this site for some of its information!
• Win­ter Festivals/Festivals of Light (pre­pared by Loren Mad­sen)
• A Sol­stice Web Cam­era
  THE WINTER-SOLSTICE-SUNSET-IN-A‑5,000-YEAR-OLD-CAIRN
  Ancient Euro­peans often con­struct­ed mega­liths and cairns so that they’d align with astro­nom­i­cal events. For sci­en­tif­ic rea­sons, a cam­era is record­ing the win­ter sol­stice sun at one such cairn in Orkney, Scot­land, and of course some­body came up with the bril­liant idea of turn­ing this into a Web cam [link rot]. Broad­casts are sched­uled for Decem­ber 10 to 22, every­day between 14:30 and 15:15 GMT (1997).
  View at the BBC
  View at Newgrange

This text was first post­ed in 1997.
The pre­vi­ous updates: Jan­u­ary 24, 2001;
most recent update Decem­ber 9, 2009.

Down­load and print A Mad Libs Chanukkah Sto­ry to enjoy at your Chanukkah par­ty.
Down­load and print Chanukkah Ana­grams to enjoy at your Chanukkah par­ty (answer here).

…to be continued…