The Holiday with the Strange Name

On the surface, there is nothing strange about the name Hanukkah (which we can loosely translate as dedication) for the holiday we celebrate this time of year. As mentioned in the Book of Maccabees, the 25th of Kislev was when the altar was rededicated, and the Temple service restored. The only problem is the re-. True, there is no Hebrew word for rededicate. But that may well be for good reason.

The dedication – better, hanukkah or chinuch – of something or someone normally only happens at its beginning. Rashi (Genesis 14:14) explains the term that way, giving us three examples of a process through which an item or person is put into motion on its permanent trajectory. In other words, it is dedicated for its telos. Ostensibly, this only happens once.

This was also true of the chinuch of a child, that which Jews have translated as education. Like all pre-modern societies in which resources were quite scarce, traditional Jewish education was a strategic investment that needed to pay off. Having people train to be carpenters only to decide they wanted to become sailors and then farmers was seen as a terrible waste of precious manpower and time, which is why it almost never happened. Essentially, education was one per person. This was true of religious education as well. For all but the most gifted, a single-minded and straightforward education in one’s youth was designed to instill a basic understanding of the Torah’s contents and contours. While adult education for these masses did exist, it served more as a way to keep one’s connection to Torah. It was certainly not a second education.

So in what way did Hanukkah mark the dedication of the Second Temple altar? That altar was not new. It had already been dedicated long ago and was now simply returning to the use for which it had originally been dedicated. The default was to see the foreign idolatrous worship instituted in the Temple by the Hellenists in that light. It was an aberration that did not take the Temple away from its dedicated purpose. Like a temporary illness, its end would only be complete once the original practices of the Temple were reinstated. Hence, no need for any new dedication.

Yet, however fatalist it itself largely was, Hellenism ironically brought a new and proto-modern sense of choice to the Jewish people, something which gave life to the concept of rededication. All of a sudden, there were at least two ways to be Jewish, the traditional way or the Hellenist way. (While Jews had strayed before, it rarely meant taking on a completely different approach to one’s life and identity). Once there was a choice to continue on one’s initial trajectory or radically alter it, chinuch was no longer a one-time event. In the past, training for one thing had also been an effective way to exclude all others. Robert Frost’s less traveled road was one essentially not traveled at all. With the advent of Hellenism, this was no longer the case.

Whether or not the Chashmonaim fully understood its implications, they ushered in a new concept of education that would become ever more relevant. As the Jews would soon experience an almost interminable exile into societies that often sought their assimilation and then, finally, with the eventual explosion of personal choice and the societal resources that make it possible, continuing education and rededication would become ever more critical.

I often note that many well-educated Jews miss the depth and beauty of the Torah because they studied our most important text exclusively as young children. Perhaps such is good enough for someone who will automatically continue on a set trajectory for which there is a single dedication (chinuch). But even if that is so, I am not sure that such people exist today, certainly not in large quantities. In that sense, rededication, or better, reeducation in its most positive sense, is possibly even more important than our early education, which may or may no longer serve as the touchstone for the rest of our lives.

It can be said that the yearly calendar serves as a microcosm of our lives as a whole. What is true about our need to rededicate ourselves as adults is something that, on some level, we must really do every year. Hence regarding Hanukkah, we can say, ke’shemo, ken hu (it is just like its name)! There are a variety of reasons the dedication we took on at the beginning of the Jewish year has likely dissipated. Going back to the grind of regular work after the intense Tishrei holiday season, the shorter days and the colder weather all serve to dampen our religious commitment and bring about a need for a rededication to the purpose upon which we set out at the beginning of the year. Hanukkah is that time, to give ourselves a mini-dose of the new concept of chinuch that this holiday so powerfully introduced.