Tradition Today: O Hanukka!

Secular, religious, Zionist, cultural Jews all can feel a part of this holiday.

By REUVEN HAMMER
Hanukka (photo credit: courtesy)
Hanukka
(photo credit: courtesy)
This week world Jewry is celebrating the holiday that everyone loves – Hanukka. Secular, religious, Zionist, cultural Jews all can feel a part of this holiday. Children like the legend of the oil, the sevivon and the gifts. The lighting of lights is easy, beautiful and inspiring. Who can resist sufganiyot and levivot? And the nicest thing is that there are really no prohibitions connected to it and the one mitzva there is, the lighting of the hanukkia, is really quite simple. Much easier than building a succa or koshering the house for Pessah. Isn’t it nice to have an occasion when all Jews can agree on something and celebrate together no matter what they believe or do not believe?
My favorite recollection about celebrating Hanukka goes back some 20 years to the beginning of the restoration of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. My wife and I were sent by the State of Israel on a mission to help encourage a partnership with newly emerging Jewish schools. This was not my first time there, but the previous visit had been in the mid-1970s when suppression of Judaism was at its height. It was difficult for me to grasp the fact that now everything was in the open. No longer did I have to hide the fact that we lived in Israel, or attend secret meetings, or speak only in open places, or use magic slates that could be quickly erased. No longer did I have to worry that my room was bugged – which it always was – or that I was being followed by the KGB – which I always was.
Among the places that we visited was Riga, where I had been before. Only now instead of clandestine meetings in a home, I was openly visiting a Jewish school and giving a lecture on Hanukka in a public place. I still have the poster on the wall in my study which announces a lecture called “O Hanukka!” in Cyrillic.
The highlight of the visit was speaking at the first Hanukka celebration in that Jewish school to be held since the school had been closed at the beginning of World War II. The school had remained closed and been turned into a residence during the Nazi and Soviet eras. Now the city of Riga had returned the same building to the Jewish community. In the very same rooms where their grandparents may have studied 50 years earlier, Jewish youngsters were studying Judaism openly. Incidentally they were also learning five languages – Hebrew, Yiddish, English, Latvian and Russian – and doing it well.
At the Hanukka assembly I spoke to them in Hebrew and presented them with a gift on behalf of the State of Israel. We lit the hanukkia and recited the sheheheyanu blessing – giving thanks that we had lived to see the first such lighting in that building in 50 years. I doubt if there was a dry eye in the auditorium.
My wife and I will think of that this year when lighting our hanukkia, as we do every year. It seems to me to be particularly appropriate because there is much in common between the story of Hanukka and the struggle that Soviet Jews went through to attain that moment. Hanukka is the first holiday that is based on a struggle for religious liberty, for the right of Jews to be Jews and observe their religion freely. The Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites because they wanted to make use of them, not because they opposed the observance of the Israelite religion. The Babylonians destroyed the Temple and exiled the Jews because of purely political reasons connected to power struggles between great nations in that area, not because they opposed the worship of the Jewish God.
But the actions of the Syrian Greeks were an attempt to Hellenize the Jewish people. The last straw was forbidding Jews to observe the Torah and forcing them to change their religious observances in accord with Hellenistic beliefs. There were also those among the Jews who wished to adopt Hellenism and thus collaborated with the Syrians.
So too in the Soviet Union. Yes, there was anti-Semitism, although not officially, but more importantly there was an attempt to wipe our Judaism as such, both the religion and the culture. Thus no Jewish education was permitted and those who observed religious rites were discriminated against. At the same time there were Jews who believed in communism and went along with it.
The victory over the Greeks was a victory for Judaism and for freedom of religion. So too the victory over the Soviet Union was a victory for Judaism, for the Jewish religion and for Jewish education. The Hanukka lights, therefore, remind us not only of what happened bayamim hahem “in those days” of the Maccabees, but also what happened uvazman hazeh “and in this time,” in the era of Soviet oppression. The light of Judaism burns on not only for eight days but for thousands of years.
The writer is the head of the Rabbinical Court of the Masorti Movement and author of several books, the most recent being Entering Torah.