Jews’ Centuries-Old Arguments Over Chanukah Foreshadowed Their Arguments About Israel
Many Jews this year are struggling with how to celebrate Chanukah—whether because our joy has been tempered by the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7, the continued plight of Israeli hostages in Gaza, and the massive death toll among civilians in Gaza, or out of fears of antisemitism.
Chanukah has never been an uncomplicated holiday. In fact, its long history is a story of Jews debating questions of military strength. As debates over the Israel-Hamas war roil families and communities, examining that history of internal Jewish argument offers a path for conversations about the complexities of power and sovereignty.
There are, famously, two competing if complementary stories of Chanukah. In one, recounted in the First and Second Books of Maccabees, a small band of ancient Jewish zealots defeat the Seleucid army, which is intent on eliminating Jewish religious and cultural practice, and has defiled the Temple in Jerusalem with idol worship. In the second version, relayed by the rabbis of the Talmud hundreds of years later, a single vial of purified oil, used to reconsecrate the Temple menorah, miraculously lasts for eight nights.
The Talmudic transformation of Chanukah’s story from one focused on a military victory to one based on a divine miracle reflects the rabbis’ antipathy toward the regime that the Maccabees’ victory established: a ruling group known as the Hasmoneans. The Hasmoneans eventually descended into corruption and civil war, and they opened the door to Roman occupation. One Talmudic story describes a certain Hasmonean king murdering every rabbi in the kingdom, and then desperately seeking someone who could recite the blessing after meals for himself and his wife. In another, a young girl descended from the Hasmonean line jumps from a roof rather than marry King Herod, described as an illegitimate heir to the dynasty. In a particularly brutal detail, the Talmud describes Herod preserving her body in honey and possibly even raping her after death.
And so, rather than brood on the military success and its bloody political aftermath, the ancient rabbis put the focus back on God—not entirely, though most prominently, through the story of the divine miracle of the oil.
For modern progressive Jews, the Talmudic story of the miraculous flask of oil sits more comfortably than the story of zealots exercising military strength. This is especially true for those whose experience of the state of Israel is that of a military power occupying another people, and who are currently watching with horror as the civilian death toll in Gaza rises. It is easy to dwell on the rabbinic rewriting of the Chanukah story as a rejection of Jewish military power—and to imagine the ancient rabbis having the same reaction to the power being wielded right now by the modern state of Israel.
But the Maccabees’ story did not go away. Even the ancient rabbis who may have deemphasized the military victory did not erase it entirely. The al hanisim (“for the miracles”) prayer recited throughout the holiday, the earliest written version of which dates to the 8th century, omits the story of the miraculous oil altogether. Instead, it recounts the Maccabees’ victory, but credits God—not human strength—with their success.
Later, the early Zionists reclaimed the Maccabees as exemplars of Jewish political and military power, as the founders of the last instance of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
This fundamental disagreement over how to view the Maccabees has continued to echo through debates about the realities modern state of Israel. On the one hand, as an ethnic and religious minority without state power, prior to 1948, Jews remained forever subject to the whims of the powers under which they lived. At best, in those nations, Jewish communities were granted limited autonomy and political protection in the places where they lived. At worst, they were forced to convert, expelled, and massacred. And most Jewish communities lived with various restrictions on where they could live, what professions they could adopt, if and how they could worship, and what if any citizenship rights they would enjoy. Following the French Revolution, much of Western Europe began to emancipate their Jews—but by the mid-19th century, it became clear that the initial promise of emancipation had not brought about the dreamed-for safety.
Zionism arose as the next idea for how to achieve it, within the context of late 19th and early 20th century national and minority rights movements. As other ethnic groups and national minorities fought for their own rights, seeking cultural and political autonomy both within empires and in new nation-states, Jews debated whether to demand political autonomy in the states where they lived, or to seek safety in the Land of Israel, which resided under the Ottoman and then the British empires. Ultimately, both Soviet Communism and Western European liberalism failed to protect Jews in an era that tragically culminated in the Holocaust as well as Stalin’s murders and other purges of Jews. These horrors made the push for rights where Jews already lived seem naïve, and the nation-state side won out. Those atrocities accelerated the path toward the U.N.’s decision to establish an independent country for Jews in the Land of Israel, alongside the same for Palestinians.
Famously, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, wrote that the new nation should aspire “to be like all other nations, and to be different from all the nations.” That is, “a free people, independent and equal in rights in the family of nations“ and with a “model society, founded on freedom, cooperation, and fraternity with all Jews and the whole human race.”
As Ben-Gurion predicted, that aspiration was not easily realized—and is still not. Exercising political power, including war, easily leads to violating human rights and human dignity. Many of his contemporaries recognized this too. One consistent religious voice grappling with this problem, Rav Moshe Avigdor Amiel—the chief rabbi of pre-state Tel Aviv and a frequent critic of many political systems—wrote in his 1943 book For the Perplexed of Our Time: “A certain communal assembly can make decisions that even the most wicked individual would not be able to make. And we see this even more in war. Even if all of the soldiers are people of integrity, none of whom have violated the commandment ‘Do not murder,’ even so, in their joining together, they are much worse than a wild animal.”
Then and now, some Jews view Israel’s military power only as a point of pride. They sport IDF T-shirts, post photos of soldiers on social media, and defend any Israeli military action as justified and therefore morally pure.
But for other Jews, Israel’s power is something only to be criticized and rejected. Particularly after more than five decades of a brutal military occupation that strips Palestinians of basic human rights, scenes of the army protecting Israeli settlers as they rampage through Palestinian villages, and the aerial bombardment of Gaza, it can be hard to imagine Israel as anything but a regional military power.
And since Oct. 7, this centuries-old argument over Jewish force that lies at the root of Chanukah and that animated Israel’s founding has been reignited with an understandable ferocity.
The horrific Hamas attacks, including the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of Israelis, shattered any sense of security among Israelis, and breached the very social contract that underlies the state. Israelis, justifiably, are furious at the government that abandoned the communities in the south for decades, that ignored warnings by female lookouts about the planning of a massacre, that failed to deploy the army to save lives, that prioritized protecting rampaging settlers in the West Bank, and that continues to place fighting Hamas above rescuing Israeli hostages.
For some Jews, especially younger people in the U.S., Hamas’ massacre was one of their first experiences of seeing Jews being vulnerable to Palestinian violence on a large scale. Many progressive Jews have constructed their identities around the Jewish community being relatively privileged, and therefore obligated to stand in solidarity with other minority communities. In recent years, major violent attacks against Jews in the United States have primarily come from the right—notably the murders in synagogues in Pittsburgh and in Poway, California, carried out by white nationalists. (This has not been the case in Europe in recent years, where attacks on kosher grocery stores, synagogues, and individuals have been perpetrated in the name of supporting Palestinians.) More than 1,200 Israeli Jews, along with Palestinian citizens of Israel and foreign workers, murdered by Palestinians did not fit the framework that many young progressive American Jews had come to accept. While most progressive Jews critical of Israel and committed to minority and human rights were able to recognize the horror of Hamas’ attack, some therefore rushed to reframe it in the context that they already knew, and to view these murders as the natural result of the long-standing siege on Gaza. Some protests against Israel began even before the retaliatory bombardment did.
At the same time, others in the Jewish community do not hesitate to support the full use of Israeli power, regardless of the consequences. This includes ignoring the horrific photos of children killed and displaced in Gaza, rejecting reports of Palestinian deaths, and calling for the flattening, reoccupation, and even resettlement of Gaza. This intoxication with power, and concern only for one’s own people, is also an immoral response to the real suffering of millions of Palestinians who had nothing to do with the Hamas attacks, and indeed themselves are suffering under Hamas rule.
In a Torah commentary in his collection, Hegyonot el Ami, Rav Amiel considers the commandment to place one’s Chanukah menorah outside, where it can be seen by passersby, but not more than 20 cubits above ground. The person who does place it higher than 20 cubits, he says, obviously places a very high value on the commandment to light the menorah—after all, they troubled themselves to climb up very high. And yet, he writes, this person misses the whole point of the commandment, which is to ensure that people can see and appreciate the light. Similarly, Amiel says, some factions of Jews place the commandment to settle the Land of Israel above all other commandments, and miss the point that the command to settle the land cannot be separated from the obligation to live out all of Torah’s other instructions there.
As Rav Amiel notes, the prioritization of establishing Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel over all else can lead quickly to the annulment of other obligations toward God and toward other human beings.
At the same time, as both ancient and modern rabbis have understood, one cannot write the Maccabees, the military battle, or the Hasmonean dynasty entirely out of the Chanukah story. Those who wish to erase any trace of desire for Jewish sovereignty, or who feel uncomfortable with any use of state power to protect Jews, must explain how Jews would and could feel permanent safety as a minority under a foreign government—a situation that has historically ended badly for Jews. Even while Jews live relatively comfortably in modern liberal democracies such as the United States and Canada, many have pointed to recent antisemitic events—including attacks on synagogues in Montreal and in Albany, New York—as evidence that our status might not be entirely secure. And, of course, the relative freedom and cultural and religious flourishing of Jews in prewar Europe gave way to the horrors of the Holocaust. “Permanent” or “entire” safety may not be guaranteed for any people. But given the realities of recent history and today’s international order, in which militarized countries are how people organize and aim to protect themselves, it is no wonder that most Jews—and also Palestinians—believe that protection can be found only in a nation-state of their own.
But as the ancient rabbis remind us, unbridled military might can end up destroying our ethical core, sidelining God, and obscuring the Jewish imperative to make divinity manifest in our world. A comment in the Talmud on the verse “God of revenge, God” (Psalms 94:1) suggests, “Great is revenge that it was placed between two names of God.” But Rav Amiel cautioned that the bracketing of the word “revenge” with two names of God is meant not as a celebration of vengeance—but rather as a restriction of it. To him, God sets limits on human vengeance precisely because revenge destroys the image of God that is embodied in both the pursuer and the pursued.
Precisely in the middle of a war, Jews are called on to celebrate Chanukah in such a way as to hold both of the holiday’s stories simultaneously—to grapple with the need for power, as well as the dangers of becoming too enamored of power and corrupted by it. The questions raised by the state of Israel about both Jewish vulnerability and Jewish sovereignty are not so new. They have always been at the heart of Chanukah. An authentic observance of the holiday resists too simple a telling of its stories, and too easy answers to its questions.
