The Great Chanukah Polemic of 1891– Relevant Today?

If, as the polemic suggests, the Rabbis invented the miracle of the oil lasting 8 days, was this to avoid glorifying military might and tell a cautionary tale against internal division and misuse of Jewish power?
Criticism from kids is welcome!
Well, sometimes.
So, when they tell me I look like an old homeless man, do I explain I feel comfortable and that anyway, I will be 70 next birthday?
No! I smile, say, “Really?” and buy new clothes.
A winter clothes-shopping trip every 10 years is not too high a price to pay for shalom bayit.
But there are other times when their criticism is worth deeper reflection.
So, when middle daughter says, “You should be more careful how you explain Jewish stuff to non-Jews,” I take it seriously. Especially when the wife nods her silent agreement. Whoever thought silence wasn’t powerful was never married!
We‘d been at a gathering two days earlier where, for the benefit of non-Jews, I gave what I thought was a highly nuanced summary of Chanukah, as we lit the menorah, showing how the rabbis ensured the festival avoided glorifying military victory over our oppressors by possibly making up then celebrating the miracle of one days’ worth of pure oil actually lasting 8 days.
But, said middle daughter, “You made it all about Jewish Persecution, and left out the jolly bit about it being our Festival of Light.”
She had a point!
Everyone can relate to Light, as a universal symbol of hope. Indeed, Josephus’s history of Chanukah states it was called ‘the Festival of Lights’ because ‘it had been beyond all our hopes that our right to our traditional worship and customs would be brought to light.’
However, I had wanted to make a different point, that the simple account of Chanukah with which we are brought up belies a more complicated history and its cautious treatment by Rabbinical text and prayers.
The Books of the Maccabees and Josephus’s Antiquities tell that the ‘Nasty Greeks’ did not storm in on a supremacist whim. Instead, Judean society was divided between ruling class Hellenists, who wished to reform or replace traditional Jewish worship and customs, and the Traditionalists. The Hellenists invited the Greek emperor to invade.
What’s more, the Maccabees’ capture of Jerusalem (164 BCE) was not a final victory assuring peace and religious freedom. It was followed by a bewildering array of battles against neighbors. The Greeks even temporarily retook Jerusalem. The Maccabees eventually sealed peace through endless battles and negotiating treaties and alliances with regional and foreign powers.
Neither the Book of Maccabees ( ~130 BCE) nor Josephus’s Antiquities (94 CE) mention the miracle of the oil. It appears much later in both the historically inaccurate apocryphal Megillat Antiochus and the Talmud, where the Rabbis ask ,‘What is Chanukah?’ They unequivocally explain the eight-day festival as commemorating the eight-day miracle of the oil, rather than the Maccabees’ victory, even though this is mentioned. This is reflected in the festival’s prayers, al-Hanisim and Ha Nerot Hallalu, which attribute the victory mainly to God, and in the list of things we give thanks for, omit or place last ‘wars’. *
Maybe the Rabbis were reluctant to lavish praise on the Maccabees, given their Hasmonean descendants inclined towards Hellenization, ironically, undermined the traditional separation of powers to usurp the priesthood, and fought a civil war which prompted Rome to make Israel its vassal state.
However, where did the tale of the miracle of the oil come from? It is not mentioned in Al-Hanisim, already in use by the time of the early 4th C Rav Sheshet! Forward 2055 years to the furious ‘Chanukah Polemic’ of 1891, when the Russian Maskil and polymath, Chaim Zelig Slonimski, suggested the miracle may never have happened. He based this on the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah, claiming it considered the military victory as the miracle and simply described how a bit of oil was used each day until purified oil was available. Orthodox reaction was severe. At least one supporter of Slonimski made a public retraction, but did Slonimski have a point? You read the texts and decide! **
Secular pre-state Zionists inclined to this view, taking the Maccabees as inspiration and, as Marc Spiro in his discussion of the polemic notes, Rav Zev Yavetz, a founder of Mizrachi, whose ability to integrate Torah and secular wisdom was eulogized by Rav Avraham Kook, excluded the miracle of the oil from his account of Chanukah in his opus magnum of Jewish history. He was not the only orthodox authority to do so.
So were the Rabbis in Shabbat 21b making the miracle up? Or was it possible that in the intervening centuries, the daily lighting of the menorah for a short time each day, gave way to a legend that the oil actually lasted for eight days? Either way, why did the Rabbis consider the oil the real miracle? Was it, as some suggest, to assuage the Romans, who were sensitive to celebrating rebellion against an Empire?
Or was there another reason, relating to this week’s Fast of Teveth that mourns Imperial Rome’s destruction of the Temple? In the shadow of that national trauma and its associated exile, the Rabbis sought to warn against what they thought responsible: internal division, gratuitous hatred and misuse of military power (Yoma 9b, 8). Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Zealots’ violent rejection of the Sages advice to make peace with Rome as military resistance was futile. Instead, they burned down Jerusalem’s food warehouses and induced famine, believing a hungry people would fight harder (Gittin 56a.10). The Rabbis of the Yerushalmi Talmud ridiculed Rabbi Akiva’s Messianic belief in Bar-Kochba’s futile use of force in the later final catastrophic rebellion against Rome.
These themes resonate today: internal division, invasion, national trauma, a war without a clear-cut end, separation of powers, injudicious use of power, messianism, regional alliances to make peace. And we have sages today who, like the Rabbis of the Talmud, warn against internal division and misuse of power.
Moshe Lichtenstein of Yeshivat Har Etzion said at a 2023 rally against judicial reform “…(if) the price of achieving it is to tear our society apart, it’s not worth it…. we are facing a precipice, a division and disunity that has been our downfall before and might be our downfall once again.”
This Yom Yerushalayim he said ‘When there’s a party taking pride in the name Jewish Power… which the rest of religious Zionism legitimizes and does not cast out, we are in grave trouble….Bar Kochba should not lead our way…we are hurting people we should not hurt…When (religious) Jews act with indiscriminate violence against populations, these things….lead to exile.’ No less than Ronen Bar, head of Shin Beth, has warned similarly.
I do not have the wisdom to know what today’s Israel should do. I can only support those in Israel who would take a corrective course, trying to make it a ‘Rosh Pinah’ (cornerstone***) of any regional peace pursuant to this war’s current security gains.
Middle daughter was right!
Whether for Jewish audiences or not, the story of Chanukah should be told as our Festival of Light and Hope, but depending on circumstances, re-telling the story in part as a tale against internal division and the injudicious use of power seems more necessary than ever.
However, thank God for the Maccabees! If it weren’t for them, or if they had been Charedi and not enlisted, we’d all be Greeks, not Jews!
NOTES:
* Nusach Ari and Edut Mizrachi siddurim omit the word milchamot (wars) altogether and Ashkenaz or Nusach Sefard list it last
**For those interested, the Rambam opens his Halachic guide to Chanukah describing the Greek oppression of the Jews, “until the God of our ancestors had mercy upon them, delivered them from their hand, and saved them.” This, claimed Slonimski, was the miracle referred to in subsequent verses. Indeed, all the Rambam says about the oil is that ‘a single cruse (remained)…enough for merely one day. They lit the arrangement of candles from it for eight days until they could crush olives and produce pure oil.’ Slonimski assumes they used a bit each day. One could indeed read it this way but given the Rambam obviously knew the Gomorrah described the cruse lasting for eight days as a miracle, it would be odd if he considered anything but that to be the miracle in his own text. Nonetheless the point remains that no earlier version of the Chanukah story includes the miracle of the oil, so the question arises ‘Where did the story come from or did the Rabbis make it up for some particular purpose?’ However, it is of interest that the Meiri (Menachem ben Solomon HaMeiri, 1249–1315, famous Provencal Talmudist) also says the priests placed only one-eighth of the cruse each day but he says the miracle was that this small amount burnt all day (see Steinsalz Talmud Babli Shabbat 21b).
*** From Psalm 118.22 said on Chanukah “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”