Spread Light Throughout Our World
Spread Light Throughout Our World By Rabbi Judy Chessin

As we kindle our Hanukkah menorahs, only a month after the horrifying “Tree of Life Synagogue” shooting in Pittsburgh, we might be reminded of this season in years past in Billings, Montana.
Twenty-five years ago, in 1993, white supremacists in Billings broke windows of Jewish homes which displayed menorahs. In a sign of solidarity, thousands of non-Jewish families and businesses placed Hanukkah menorahs or pictures in their own windows! That story exemplified America at its best. It reminded our nation that when there are prejudice and bigotry against any race, religion or nationality, we are all victims of hate.
A quarter of a century later, as our Jewish community was rocked yet again by hatred, we were likewise also overwhelmed by outpourings of love and solidarity. After the events in Pittsburgh last month, friends and neighbors from all walks of life held out their hands in love and support to our Jewish community. Temple Beth Or received cards, letters, flowers, calls, and offers of help. We heard from our Muslim neighbors and from churches from all around Ohio. People of all faiths came to our services of healing to express their solidarity and support and to offer hugs or simply stand by us in silent witness.
I was immeasurably touched to receive a large packet of letters from an entire public school high school class to whom I had spoken earlier in the season. All students expressed sorrow that the Jewish people were suffering and condemned the hatred and violence which is becoming more and more common-place in their world.
Hanukkah is the festival of military victory but it is also a festival of miracles. A rabbi was asked why we celebrate Hanukkah for eight days and not seven. After all, what kind of a miracle was the first day of Temple dedication, since presumably the single jar of oil should have burned at least a day? And the rabbis answered that the very fact that our ancestors lit the first lamp in spite of having had to fight, in spite of their losses, in spite of their pain – that the Jews had enough faith to kindle the menorah at all was the first miracle.
Hanukkah teaches us that we will probably always have to battle to combat oppression and tyranny. But it also teaches that we must remain hopefully optimistic and join hands with good people everywhere, who join us in the healing task of repairing our broken world, Tikkun Olam. No other festival reminds us as vividly that we cannot drive out darkness with more darkness, but rather by having the faith and courage to spread the light.
Chag Urim Sameach,
Happy Festival of Lights.
Rabbi Judy Chessin
Hanukkah Can Help with Crisis of Faith
December 1, 2018 by tbo5275 • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: Hanukkah, Hebrew, Jewish History, Jewish Holidays, Rabbi Ari Ballaban •
Hanukkah Can Help with Crisis of Faith By Rabbi Ari Ballaban
Like many Jews, I have a little bit of family in Israel. My Israeli relatives (cousins, aunts and uncles) moved there in the wake of the Holocaust; the rest of my family chose to come to America.
One might expect the Israeli side of my family to be, in some fashion, “more Jewish” (whatever that means!) than that which settled in the US—he or she would be mistaken. In fact, while my American relatives are active and practicing Jews, those who are in Israel, like many Israelis, tend toward secularism and struggle with anything in Judaism they consider “religious.”
On multiple occasions, my Israeli relatives and I have debated how one can believe in God in a post-Holocaust world. As far as they are concerned, any God who would allow the Holocaust to occur is no God worth believing in. Best cast scenario, they would suggest, is that no God exists at all.
Hanukkah is, at its core, a Jewish attempt to reconcile theological crises like this.
At the conclusion of the Maccabean Revolt, during which a Jewish family led a rebellion to gain freedom from the rule of the Hellenistic, Seleucid empire, the Jews of 2nd-century BCE were faced with their own crisis of faith: how to revitalize their people’s religiosity after the recent, wholesale destruction of Jewish culture. The question that underlied the Maccabees’ task echoes what many Jews have wondered lately: What do we do, first, when it seems like our God has abdicated the role a beneficent Sovereign ought to play? Second, what do we do when we begin to experience doubts about the meaningfulness of belief in God at all?
Thence comes the significance of Hanukkah, the holiday of rededication.
The root Ḥet, Nun, Kaf, from which Hanukkah’s name comes, is precisely about the reaffirmation of that in our world which, though originally sacred, has been sullied. According to Jewish lore, the Hanukkah miracle of 164 BCE marks the time when our ancestors decided that they would not let Syrian-Greeks—and the calamities they inflicted upon us, our holy places, and our sense of the Sacred—dictate the innermost essence of our religion or faith.
Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid’s Syrian-Greek leader during Maccabean Revolt, sought to make the practice of Judaism burdensome. As an imposition to the Judeans, he also attempted to turn the Second Temple into a shrine for Pagan gods like Zeus. Hanukkah—the coda to the Maccabean Revolt, the Hasmoneans’ victory lap—was an inflection point in the Jews’ response to that crisis. It marks the precise moment when the Jews, miraculously having won a war and survived yet another oppressive regime, showed the world that neither persecution nor violence would stop them from following their ancestral religion as they saw fit.
Unfortunately, Hanukkah—especially as it is often celebrated in 21st-century America, as a wintertime, Christmas look-alike—risks becoming spiritually irrelevant to American Jewry’s religious praxis. There may be nothing wrong with the inevitable cultural interchange that occurs when Jews are in societal dialogue with those of other faiths; however, it is essential that Jews maintain the core integrity of their holidays’ meaning. Hanukkah, minor festival though it may be, has the potential to hold major religious significance, especially in times when Jews experience strife.
This holiday, being born of Jews’ confrontation with an often-inhospitable world, deserves to be recognized for what it is: a statement by Jews that their history, religion, and culture cannot be destroyed. In it, we find the strident spirit of rebellion on which Jews have relied for millennia. In our world today, there are many who would all too happily gloat if Jews were to surrender their religion in response to violence, if we were to decide that our religion lacks meaning in light of the iniquities and indignities we still face.
Surprising though it may be, the 2nd-century BCE rededication of our ancient Temple should be quite relevant to 21st-century CE Jews. The debate in which I will undoubtedly continue to participate with my family (or with others who feel, given our history, that God has abandoned the Jews) is legitimate. Nevertheless, I am confident asserting that Hanukkah provides us with a model for an authentic Jewish commitment that, regardless of what happens to us, we as Jews will survive the tribulations of our times; we will come out, at the other end of our difficulties, stronger for the experience. Ultimately, I have no doubt, we will turn our weaknesses into strengths and our suffering into celebration.
Chag Hanukkah sameach, may we all rededicate ourselves and our faiths to the cause of goodness and light,
Rabbi Ari Ballaban