The attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach earlier this week shattered more than a communal gathering. It punctured a fragile illusion many Jews still cling to: the belief that Jewish joy, if gentle enough, visible enough, and cheerful enough, will be left alone. A beach, candles, songs, families – surely that should be harmless.
Jewish history suggests otherwise.
In the days since Bondi, many have reached instinctively for Hanukkah language, for light against darkness, for resilience and hope.
But if we listen honestly to the words Jews have sung on Hanukkah for centuries, the festival’s central song does not begin with innocence or optimism. It begins with danger.
Ma’oz Tzur is the most familiar of Jewish hymns. Its melody is rousing, almost comforting.
Children sing it without understanding its words.
Families hum it by habit.
Yet Ma’oz Tzur (Rock of my salvation) is not a song of calm faith. It is a song forged in fear, anger, and defiance, composed in Germany in the late 12th or early 13th century, during or immediately after the Crusades, when Jewish communities across Europe were massacred simply for existing.
The author, whose name “Mordechai” is encoded in the acrostic of the first five stanzas, lived in a world where Jewish gatherings were targets and public Jewishness invited violence. His song reflects that reality unflinchingly.
The opening verse already carries a sting that most modern singers glide past:
When You prepare a slaughter for the barking enemy,
then I will complete with song the dedication of the altar.
This is not poetic excess.
The Hebrew is blunt.
The poet conditions thanksgiving on the defeat of those who threaten Jewish survival.
Redemption, he insists, is not sentimental. It is earned against enemies who bark at the Jewish people, who hound them, who attack them in moments of vulnerability.
The next four stanzas rehearse Jewish history as a cycle of persecution and rescue, in Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece.
Each empire believed it had solved the Jewish problem.
Each failed.
The Hanukkah story is only one in a long chain of persecution and fighting, not an exception to it.
Ma’oz Tzur insists that Jewish memory is not linear progress but recurring danger.
That insistence matters after Bondi.
WHAT HAPPENED on an Australian beach in 2025 is not medieval, but the instinct behind it is ancient.
Jews gathered visibly, joyfully, without apology.
Two terrorists decided that this visibility itself was intolerable.
Ma’oz Tzur was written precisely for such moments, when Jewish celebration is treated as provocation.
The most unsettling part of the Hanukkah song, however, comes at the end.
For centuries, many prayer books omitted the final stanza entirely. It was transmitted quietly, sometimes only orally, because it was too dangerous to print.
There, the poet drops historical allegory and speaks in the present tense, naming his enemy through barely veiled code. The stanza reads, in full:
Expose Your holy arm,
and bring near the end of redemption.
Avenge the blood of Your servants
from the wicked nation.
For the hour has grown long,
and there is no end to the days of evil.
Push aside the Red One into the shadow of the cross,
and establish for us the seven shepherds.
This is not a plea for inner peace.
It is a cry of rage and exhaustion.
The “wicked nation” and “the Red One,” Edom, are well known rabbinic stand-ins for Rome and Christianity – for the world that sanctioned Jewish slaughter during the Crusades.
The phrase “the shadow of the cross” leaves little ambiguity.
This is a persecuted minority demanding that God stop siding with their oppressors.
That stanza makes many modern Jews uncomfortable, and understandably so.
JEWISH-CHRISTIAN relations today are radically different. The Catholic Church is not launching Crusades. Contemporary antisemitism does not wear medieval armor – but it is alive and kicking in the Muslim world.
But discomfort does not mean irrelevance.
The stanza’s power lies not in its specific target but in its emotional truth.
It gives voice to a Jewish experience that has repeated itself too often: the sense that violence against Jews is tolerated, rationalized, or minimized; that time drags on while danger persists, that evil days seem endless.
Bondi Beach fits uncomfortably well into that emotional landscape.
The attackers were not Christians, and the ideology animating them was not medieval theology.
But the pattern is hauntingly familiar.
Jews gathered peacefully. Jews were attacked. Jews were reminded, once again, that safety is conditional and temporary.
Ma’oz Tzur does not tell Jews to respond with hysteria or denial.
It does not pretend the world is safer than it is. But it also does not counsel silence. Instead, it insists on memory, on clarity, and on refusing to domesticate Jewish history into something polite and inoffensive.
This year, there is understandable debate within Jewish communities about visibility, about public celebration, about prudence. Those are serious questions, not cowardly ones. Jewish history teaches caution as well as courage. Ma’oz Tzur itself was censored for centuries because Jews understood the cost of being heard too loudly.
But what the song sung every Hanukkah does not permit is amnesia.
It refuses the fantasy that Hanukkah is about harmless lights floating above a hostile world.
It insists that Jewish survival has always been contested, that Jewish joy has always required defiance, and that songs are sometimes written not because it is safe to sing them, but because silence concedes too much.
After Bondi, Ma’oz Tzur should no longer be sung on autopilot. Its words should grate. Its anger should disturb. Its realism should unsettle anyone who is tempted to explain away what happened as an aberration or anomaly.
Hanukkah is not the denial of danger: It is the memory of surviving it.
Ma’oz Tzur reminds us that Jews have faced barking enemies before, that Jewish gatherings have been attacked before, that Jewish songs have been sung in defiance before.
It does not promise that history has ended. It promises that Jews are still here.
This, after Bondi, may be the most defiant, sensible, and realistic message Hanukkah has to offer.
The writer is a rabbi and physician who lives in Ramat Poleg, Netanya. He is a co-founder of Techelet-Inspiring Judaism.