The Hanukkah Lights Cry: ‘Beware of Power without Identity’
Why Hanukkah Became a Diaspora Holiday about Being Seen
The Hanukkah story that most Jews know is not the story Jews once told – and it will not be the story Jews will tell in the future. Across two thousand years, Hanukkah has been repeatedly reinterpreted to align with the dominant Jewish concern of the moment: survival in exile, protection against Jewish nationalism, dignity in emancipation, state building, and power in sovereignty. These transformations were not accidents. They were acts of creating meaning.
We stand today at a crucial junction in Jewish history. October 7 shattered long-held assumptions – about the safety of Jews in the Diaspora, about the stability and invincibility of Israel, and the moral clarity of Jewish power. To look honestly at Hanukkah requires more than revisiting the past; it requires us to acknowledge the danger of using Hanukkah to confirm what we already believe. The enduring lesson of Hanukkah’s evolving story is not certainty, but humility; the recognition that what feels like unshakable truth may simply be the echo of our own fears and desires, projected backward onto the past.
Two Hanukkahs: Miracle and Memory
Each year, Jews gather to light the candles of Hanukkah, often without noticing that the flames reflect two quite different—and even competing—stories.
One story, preserved in the Talmud and codified in Jewish law, centers on the miracle of the oil. When the Temple was rededicated on the 25th of Kislev, the Maccabees could find only enough pure olive oil to last a single day. Miraculously, it burned for eight, sustaining the Temple service until new oil could be prepared.
The second story, far more familiar in modern Israel and in American Jewish culture, is the tale of military heroism found in the books of Maccabees and Josephus: the few against the many, Jewish warriors defying overwhelming odds and reclaiming political independence.
The Disappearance of Judah the Maccabee
What is rarely acknowledged is that this second story virtually disappeared from Jewish tradition for nearly two millennia. Judah the Maccabee is never mentioned by name in the Talmud, nor does he appear as a heroic figure in medieval Jewish literature. Even the work that functioned for centuries as a kind of “Megillah” for Hanukkah—Megillat Antiochus—effectively removes Judah as the central hero, shifting the narrative to a priestly figure named Yochanan the High Priest. Many view this as a reference to John Hyrcanus, Judah’s nephew, who would later become the first Hasmonean ruler to achieve full independence from the Seleucid Empire and to mint Jewish coins, beginning around 132 BCE.
A Diaspora Holiday Is Born
Rather than preserving the Maccabean narrative, the rabbis reshaped Hanukkah into something fundamentally different: a holiday uniquely suited to Jewish life in the Diaspora.
The defining commandment of Hanukkah is not simply to light candles, but to light them publicly. Pirsumei nisa—publicizing the miracle—requires that the menorah be placed where it can be seen by others, including – and perhaps especially — non-Jews. Hanukkah is unique among Jewish rituals in explicitly requiring that a mitzvah be performed in a way that is visible beyond the Jewish community itself. Even the mezuzah, the closest parallel, is seen only by those who enter a Jewish home. The Hanukkah lights, by contrast, were meant to be displayed in courtyards and windows facing the street.
Assimilation, Not Idolatry
This was no accident. It was a deliberate rabbinic response to the central threat that animates the Books of Maccabees themselves: assimilation.
When Judea came under Greek rule following the conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors, Jews encountered something entirely new. Earlier imperial powers, the Assyrians, Babylonians, and others—had destroyed cities, exiled populations, and imposed political domination. But they did not offer a compelling cultural alternative. One could live in Babylonia as a Jew, but one could not become a Babylonian Jew.
Hellenism was different. It was not primarily a religion but a culture: language, philosophy, education, athletics, and civic life. One could adopt Greek ways and still consider oneself Jewish. The category of the “Hellenized Jew” emerged for the first time, blurring the boundary between Jewish distinctiveness and cultural conformity.
Victory Without Sovereignty
For this reason, the conflict that produced Hanukkah was not simply a war against the villainous Antiochus Epiphanes. It was also, and perhaps primarily, a civil war among Jews—between those who believed Judaism could coexist comfortably within Greek civilization and those who feared that such accommodation would hollow Judaism out from within. The early forms of Hellenization were extreme and intended to abolish Jewish tradition. But, while beyond the scope of this article, Jews did absorb Hellenistic culture. One only need look at the number of Sages with Greek names or acknowledge that the Jewish calendar in Talmudic times was based on Alexander the Great’s conquest of Judaea.
What complicates the modern celebration of Hanukkah even further is the historical reality that Judah the Maccabee did not truly win. While the Temple was rededicated under his leadership, the Seleucid citadel remained in place, overlooking the Temple Mount. Archaeological and textual evidence suggests that a Greek fortress positioned in the lower City of David could indeed have dominated the Temple precinct as it existed before Herod’s massive renovations.
Power Vacuums and Political Survival
The Books of Maccabees themselves acknowledge this uneasy reality. As the Jews purified and rededicated the Temple, they did so under the watchful presence of Syrian soldiers who continued to pose an immediate threat. Hanukkah marked religious relief, not political independence.
After the rededication of the Temple, Antiochus Epiphanes died, and his young son Antiochus V, together with his regent Lysias, soon faced a brewing civil war in Antioch. Seeking to stabilize their western territories, they offered a peace agreement: Jewish religious observance would be tolerated, but Judea would remain a vassal state of the Seleucid Empire, and the king would retain the power to appoint the High Priest.
The Jewish aristocracy in Jerusalem was largely content with this arrangement. It allowed Jewish practice to continue while space for Hellenization- moderated but not abandoned as noted above.
Judah rejected this peace offer. He continued to fight, against the will of the Jewish leadership but with the support of many if not most of the population. He achieved his greatest military victory by killing the Seleucid general Nicanor in 161 BCE, an event commemorated for generations as Yom Nicanor. Yet support eroded. In 160 BCE he could muster only about eight hundred men against a Seleucid force of 20,000 and died in the battle of Elasa.
His two remaining brothers, Jonathon and Simon, fled with a small band of followers into self-imposed exile east of the Jordan.
For all intents and purposes, the revolt had failed. Jewish practice survived. The Temple cult continued unabated. But always under the shadow of the citadel. Hellensim, in subtler and less provocative forms, continued to expand among the urban elite and, most likely, the people at large. Hellenism had not been exorcised; it had been absorbed.
Independence came only later – and not through victories on the battlefield. It emerged from imperial instability. Nine years after Judah’s death, Alexander Balas rebelled against Demetrious I. Both sought Jewish support realizing that Jonathan and his men could be critical in determining the outcome of the civil war. Demetrious offered concessions. But Balas offered something more decisive. He appointed Jonathan High Priest and ethnarch. Jewish political authority was restored – not seized but granted amid civil chaos.
The Hasmoneans lived in a world of power vacuums. Over the next century and a half, Syria and Egypt would see an extraordinary turnover of rulers—far more than in the preceding era. Jonathan and later Simon succeeded not because they defeated empires, but because they understood how to maneuver within collapsing ones.
Hanukkah and the Enlightenment
The modern recovery of the Maccabean story is itself a product of upheaval. When Jews began attending secular universities in large numbers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they encountered Christian Hebraists studying Hebrew and Jewish history to understand Christianity’s origins. Through this encounter, Jews rediscovered Josephus and the Books of Maccabees in their historical form, and with them rediscovered Judah the Hammer.
From Religious Liberty to Statehood
In the Enlightenment, Hanukkah was recast as a story of religious liberty. In nineteenth-century America, especially during the Civil War, Maccabean imagery rebutted stereotypes of Jewish weakness. The theme of religious liberty resonated for both Jews and non-Jews alike. Among Jewish elites, Hanukkah came to symbolize dignity and moral seriousness, often contrasted—fairly or not—with the unruliness associated with Purim.
Early Zionists read Hanukkah differently. For them, it was a story of statehood: of a small people reclaiming sovereignty through courage, familiarity with the terrain, and unconventional warfare – ambushes, caves, tunnels, hidden passages – against imperial armies equipped even with war elephants. Recasting the story of Hanukkah served an important need: Creating myths that would allow the fight for statehood to continue beyond the first generation. Those delegates at the First Zionist Congress were dreamers but they knew that the fight for a Jewish state would require at least a generation to achieve. Before the revival of the Masada story, before Trumpledor, before Shomreem, the Maccabees were the first Zionist heroes intended to sustain the battle for statehood.
The Three Oaths and the Fear of Redemption
The transformation of Hanukah by early Zionists was one of the cornerstones of Orthodoxy’s early opposition to the Zionist project. It was proof, in their eyes, that these secular Zionists were overturning Jewish law and tradition for secular pursuits, just as Jewish Hellenizers had done two thousand years earlier.
From the rabbinic perspective, Jewish nationalism had ended in catastrophe. The First Jewish Revolt culminated in the destruction of the Temple. The Second Jewish Revolt, fought largely in the Diaspora during the reign of Trajan, led to the devastation of Jewish communities in Alexandria, Cypress, and likely elsewhere. And the Bar Kochba Revolt, initially supported by Rabbi Akiva himself, ended with the mass killing and complete exile of Jews from Judea and the Roman renaming of their land as Syria Palaestina.
If Rabbi Akiva – the greatest sage of the Talmud – could misread the signs of redemption and endorse a messianic national uprising that in ended in such ruin, then the danger lay not merely in Roman power but in Jewish overconfidence. The lesson that the Sages drew was stark: nationalism and messianism were combustible forces, and when ignited prematurely, they threatened the very survival of the Jewish people.
It was in this context that the rabbis articulated what later came to be known as the Three Oaths, derived from verses in the Song of Songs and preserved in the Talmud (Ketubot 111a). According to this tradition, Israel vowed not to ascend to the Land en masse, not to rebel against the nations of the world, and, in a reciprocal formulation, the nations vowed not to oppress Israel excessively.
Against this backdrop, Orthodoxy in the late 19th and early 20th century was virtually unanimous in its condemnation of this secular Zionist movement led by Jewish youth who openly rejected Jewish law. As one Orthodox rabbi wrote after the First Zionist Congress, “not a thousand Maccabees will bring the Messiah.” Even today among some Haredi communities, the Holocaust is explained as punishment for Israel’s violation of the Three Oaths.
When the Warning Is Reversed
Yet history rarely moves in straight lines. And Orthodoxy does evolve even if it claims it does not. In recent decades, the most militarized readings of Hanukkah have emerged within religious-nationalist circles. As the first Rav Kook explained, in the 1920s, the Three Oaths are not within the 613 Mitzvot. They are merely agadic in nature. Moreover, even if law, because the non-Jews had violated their vow not to oppress the Jews “too much” Jews were no longer bound by this oath. Later, leaders of Gush Emunim openly invoked the Maccabees as proof that Jews should act without waiting for international permission, especially in Judea and Samaria. After all, Judah did not wait for permission to purify the Temple.
Similarly, since October 7 Israeli soldiers have often been compared to the Maccabees and praised for their valor and fearlessness.
Power Vacuums, Then and Now
As a proud Zionist—committed to Jewish self-determination and to the survival of both Israel and the Jewish people—I, too, love the Maccabees. But I also recognize the overlooked parallel: Hasmonean independence arose from a power vacuum. Less than a century later, it collapsed when the Hasmoneans failed to navigate the rise of Rome. Under Alexander Jannaeus, the kingdom reached its greatest territorial extent since King David—only a few short decades before Roman legions entered Jerusalem in 63 BCE.
I am proud of Israel’s nearly eighty years of independence and its ability to defend itself. But modern Israel, too, was born of power vacuums — after World War I and World War II. That global order is now fading. China will shape the 21st century in ways we cannot imagine. The Islamic world is reasserting its influence in ways not seen in hundreds of years. Liberal democracies – long the safest homes for Jews in the Diaspora and Israel’s strongest allies – appear increasingly fragile.
Humility After Trauma
When I look into the Hanukkah lights this year, I see questions, not answers. My pride in Israel’s military successes is tempered by the knowledge that military achievement and territorial expansion alone are not a secure foundation for our future; that future will depend far more on diplomatic skill, strategic restraint, and wisdom in navigating a rapidly emerging world order.
Will we show greater wisdom than the Maccabees?
Will we avoid the national catastrophes of 66 -135 CE? (i.e. the destruction of the Temple and the total exile of Jews from Judea).
Will we allow Messianic certainty to hijack our future?
Will the Third Commonwealth be the shortest lived of all?
I do not know.
But I do know that the most necessary Jewish virtue now is humility.
Simon ben Giora would have killed Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai had he known the rabbi was escaping Jerusalem to negotiate with Rome. To Simon, this surrender was a betrayal. He could not imagine that Judaism would survive precisely because of that “treason.” Bar Kochba similarly must have been incensed that the Jews of Sepphoris remained loyal to Rome during his revolt. He could not have imagined that it was only because of this refusal that Sepphoris would later be home to Yehudah HaNasi and provide him with the safety to codify the Mishna.
Those who shout loudest, who brand dissenters as traitors, who confuse arrogance with faith – those are the voices that must not be allowed to determine the Jewish future or the future of Israel.
And this danger is even more acute after October 7 when Israel and Jews everywhere are in a global state of PTSD.
As I finalize this post, I am still reeling from the news of Sydney. But my response was immediate. I attended a Hanukkah candle lighting on the beach in South Florida. I was afraid that the people leading the lighting would use the tragedy to blame anti-Semitism on the left or to proclaim that such incidents prove why we can never leave Gaza or make peace with the Palestinians. After all, a common tendency after trauma is to see the world as black and white and make choices accordingly. I was grateful that the Chabad rabbis leading the program emphasized that in times of darkness, the smallest light shines brightest.
Our task today is to recognize our temporary color blindness and act with humility and caution. When we look at the lights of Hanukkah, we see that the flame is never still. Its colors shift from moment to moment. Reality moves the same way – alive, unstable, always changing.
It is impossible to know which way the flame will turn next. We must remember that none of us are prophets able to predict the future. Instead, we are witnesses and stewards – paying close attention to what is unfolding, bearing responsibility for how we respond, and choosing carefully how to act with the light before us.
What the Hanukkah Lights Ask of Us
The Hanukkah lights do not reject power. But they should remind us that power taken without authority will corrupt just as the Maccabees were corrupted by combining the High Priesthood with Kingship.
They warn us never to confuse power with identity — and never forget that Jewish survival has most often depended on those who chose wisdom over certainity.
They remind us that the light that flows from those candles is not the light of artillery or rockets but the light of the Ner Tamid in the Temple.
