Hanukkah symbols

About hanukkah symbols

Hanukkah (KHAH-nuh-kah) is the eight-day Jewish festival that begins on 25 Kislev, a month that usually falls in December. It commemorates the Maccabees’ victory over the Syrian Greeks and their rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem. The lamp lit on its eight nights has its own page, the hanukkiah. The pages here are the cruse of oil of the Talmud’s story, the Dreidel and its four letters, Gelt, and the fried foods, Latkes and Sufganiyot. Several of their stories are much younger than the festival, and each page says when they first appear and who questions them.

Judah Maccabee’s rededication

By 167 BCE, My Jewish Learning writes, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who ruled the Syrian Greeks, had defiled the Temple and banned Jewish practice. The Maccabees, the five sons of the priest Mattathias, led by Judah, fought a three-year campaign. The First Book of Maccabees tells what they found when they went up to cleanse the sanctuary: “the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned.” They built a new altar and dedicated it on the twenty-fifth day of Chislev, “on the very day that the nations had profaned it”, and kept eight days of celebration. Judas and the assembly of Israel then decided that the days should be kept every year from that date. My Jewish Learning gives the year as 164 BCE. The Second Book of Maccabees says they kept the eight days “in the manner of the Festival of Booths”, Sukkot. Neither book is in the Hebrew Bible; both are in the Catholic Bible.

Richard Hidary of Yeshiva University notes that the date was not the day of a victory but the anniversary of the altar’s defilement. He suggests that the date had first been chosen for a Greek winter solstice festival, the Feast of Poseidon, and that the growing number of lights each night may come from the lengthening days after the solstice.

The oil, and the rabbis

Josephus, writing about 250 years later, called the festival the Festival of Lights. By the time of the Mishnah it was called Hanukkah, “dedication”, but the Mishnah gives no rules for it. The Babylonian Talmud, in Shabbat 21b, has the story of the single cruse that “contained sufficient for one day’s lighting only” and lit the Temple lamp for eight. The oil is not in the books of Maccabees, the old liturgy or Josephus, Isaac Slater writes; it first appears in the Talmud. Because the rabbis, and not the Torah, instituted it, Hanukkah is a minor festival in Jewish tradition. Its one ritual is lighting the Hanukkah lamp, and most Jews go to work or school through all eight days.

How Hanukkah grew

In modern times, My Jewish Learning writes, Hanukkah is rivalled only by the Passover Seder as the most observed Jewish ritual. Zionism gave it a new meaning. The early pioneers in the Land of Israel identified with the Maccabees, and a poem by Aharon Ze’ev, written in 1936, put the secular Zionist reading plainly: “no miracle happened to us, we found no cruse of oil.” The Israeli Hanukkah food, the jam doughnut, dates from the same years, the 1920s.

In America the festival grew beside Christmas. Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University writes that American Jews gave presents at Purim until the late 19th century, when the custom moved to Hanukkah, in imitation of Christmas. In 1941 a guide for Jewish women urged parents to shower children with Hanukkah gifts to make them “immune against envy of the Christian children and their Christmas presents.” Dianne Ashton of Rowan University dates the rise of Hanukkah gift-giving to the 1950s, when Jewish child psychologists and rabbis promoted it after the Holocaust. My Jewish Learning counts this nearness to Christmas among the reasons Hanukkah looms larger today than its place in Jewish tradition. The older gift is Gelt, money given at Hanukkah since at least the Middle Ages.