Ancient Rabbis Tried to Cancel Hanukkah: Here’s Why They Didn’t Succeed

Over 1,500 years ago, Hanukkah was almost canceled. The reason it wasn’t offers a path forward in today’s age of extreme unpredictability.

Hanukkah, which literally means “dedication,” was instituted nearly 2,200 years ago by the Maccabees to commemorate their rededication of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem on the 25th of the Hebrew month of Kislev in the year 164 BCE. But Hanukkah wasn’t the only holiday they established in honor of their victories over the Greeks. Others included the 28th of Sh’vat, marking the day the Greek King Antiochus (of Hanukkah infamy) departed Jerusalem, and the 13th of Adar (the day before Purim, which is today observed as the somber Fast of Esther), celebrating the Maccabean victory over the Greek general Nicanor. 

Together with Hanukkah, these post-biblical holidays celebrated triumphs that, at the time, seemed irreversible. They were the Maccabean equivalents of modern Israeli holidays like Yom Ha’Atzmut, which celebrates Israeli independence on the 5th of Iyar, and Jerusalem Day, which commemorates the reunification of Jerusalem during the Six Day War on the 28th of Iyar.

But then, in 70 CE, about 250 years after the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and, with it, any remnants of Jewish sovereignty. Jews faced a difficult and tragic decision. The Maccabean holidays celebrated victories that had been undone, or they commemorated the liberation and dedication of a Temple that had been destroyed. Should they continue to celebrate these holidays? Imagine, heaven forbid, whether it would make sense to celebrate Yom Ha’Atzmaut if the modern state of Israel were destroyed, or to celebrate Jerusalem Day if Israel once again lost sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Talmud (Tractate Rosh Hashanah 18b) records debates on this question that lasted from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE through the 3rd century CE. By the end of nearly 200 years of disagreement, the emerging consensus was that these holidays should in fact be canceled. This led one of the most prominent sages of the Talmud, Abaye (278-338 CE) to suggest, “So cancel Hanukkah and its associated practices!” 

Abaye’s teacher, Rav Yosef, pushed back against Abaye’s suggestion, arguing that Hanukkah was different than other Maccabean holidays. Why? “Because the miracle is publicized,” he said. At first glance, it seems like Rav Yosef was arguing, as the medieval Talmud commentator Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki, commonly known by his acronym Rashi (1040-1105 CE), understood him to be saying, that so many Jews were already familiar with the miracle of the Hanukkah story — oil for the Temple’s menorah that was meant to burn for one day lasted for eight — that  it would have been too difficult to sever popular attachment to the holiday, regardless of how much sense it made to do so. 

But there’s a big problem with Rashi’s reading of Rav Yosef. The historical record doesn’t suggest that most Jews were even aware of the miracle of the Hanukkah story for hundreds of years after it happened. Neither of the first two Books of Maccabees, which were written in the decades immediately following the rededication of the Temple, mention the miracle of the oil, even though they recount plenty of other miracles. The Jewish-Roman historian Josephus Flavius (37-100 CE) appears confused as to why Hanukkah is sometimes called “Lights,” writing, “I suppose the reason was, because this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us, and that hence was the name given to that festival.” But he never mentions miraculous oil burning in the Temple’s menorah. The story is missing entirely from the Mishnah (compiled around the year 200 CE) and from the Jerusalem Talmud (compiled between the 4th and 5th centuries CE). It only appears for the first time in the Babylonian Talmud (compiled between the 5th and 8th centuries CE), hundreds of years after the story took place. In other words, it really doesn’t seem like the miracle was all that “publicized.”

This might be one reason why another medieval Talmud commentator, Rabbi Yom Tov ben Abraham of Seville, often referred to as the Ritva (1260-1320 CE), offered a different interpretation than Rashi of Rav Yosef’s defense of Hanukkah. According to the Ritva, when Rav Yosef argued against canceling the holiday “because the miracle is publicized,” he was referring to lighting a menorah on Hanukkah to affirmatively publicize the miracle of the oil, to make it known to the broader world. In other words, Rav Yosef wasn’t saying that if one were to survey awareness of the story of the oil, then it would turn out that “the miracle is publicized.” It wasn’t. Rather, he was saying that the core feature of Hanukkah is to proactively make sure that “the miracle is publicized,” to make it well known. And the fact that Hanukkah’s practice of lighting the menorah fulfills this function is reason enough to not cancel the holiday.

Rav Yosef’s commitment to appreciating the miraculous is not an isolated stance. Elsewhere, the Talmud (Tractate Shabbat 53b) records another debate between him and the very same Abaye. The Talmud tells the story of a poor man whose wife tragically died while still nursing their son. He couldn’t afford a wet nurse. A miracle occurred, and he grew breasts, enabling him to feed his child. Analyzing this man, Abaye said it was “dishonorable that the order of creation was altered on his behalf.” Rav Yosef, however, argued that the departure from nature demonstrated the man’s greatness. 

The term “miracle” is used to describe an unexpected break in the causal order of nature. Abaye and Rav Yosef offer two fundamentally different outlooks on such disruptions. Abaye suggests the ideal world is predictable, governed by decipherable cause and effect. Rav Yosef, however, argues that, while we can generally predict the laws of nature, when we can’t, the disruption should be viewed as an opportunity, rather than a problem. 

So who is right?

This is an age-old debate that doesn’t have an easy answer. But what is clear is that Abaye’s perspective finds unpredictability much scarier than Rav Yosef’s. If the natural order is predictable, as Abaye believes it should be, then we can learn how to control it. If it’s unpredictable we lose that power, and the comfort that comes with it. Rav Yosef’s approach of trusting that which we can’t forecast is a form of optimism in unpredictability, in that which we cannot control. 

This larger context clarifies that the disagreement between Abaye and Rav Yosef about canceling Hanukkah wasn’t just about the specific miracle of the Hanukkah story. It was about miracles more broadly. There seemed to be general consensus that, barring any additional reason, Hanukkah should have been canceled along with all the other Maccabean holidays. But some rabbis, like Rav Yosef, saw Hanukkah as an opportunity to publicize the value of miracles more generally.

Even though it was not yet well “publicized” for the first few hundred years after the Maccabean rededication of the Temple, the story of oil burning in the menorah held powerful symbolism for this message of proactively “publicizing” appreciation of miracles of all kinds. If we trace Rav Yosef’s intellectual and spiritual lineage back to the Torah, we find its roots in Deuteronomy’s warning against thinking that success in this world is brought about by “my own power and the might of my own hand.” If the natural order is entirely predictable, then with enough contemplation and hard work, it can be mastered, and success is a result of that mastery. But, Deuteronomy argues, that is not how things work. The natural order is not entirely predictable, and therefore success is the result of much more than just hard work.

That sentiment became symbolically represented by the menorah in the biblical book of Zechariah, classically read on the Shabbat of Hanukkah. The book records a vision of a menorah with two olive trees. The prophet asks what it represents, and an angel responds that the image symbolizes that humans are not in control of everything, that the divine manifests in mysterious ways. Rephrasing Deuteronomy, the angel says, “not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit” does change come about. Whether understood just metaphorically, or also literally, the Hanukkah story’s miracle of olive oil in a menorah evokes this paradigmatic biblical imagery of trusting disruptions to our expectations for the natural order, of letting go of desire for total control.

This embrace of the unpredictable is needed now more than ever. As we look around the contemporary world, we notice all sorts of military, political, and technological disruptions to how we think the world is supposed to work. We can choose to be afraid of how these disruptions highlight our lack of total control. Or we can accept Hanukkah’s invitation not only to optimistically embrace and trust this unpredictability, but also to use the menorah’s light to “publicize” this outlook to the world.