Hanukkah Can Help with Crisis of Faith
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
Lessons of the Liminal: Focusing on the Journey, not the Destination
January 1, 2019 by tbo5275 • Rabbi Ballaban's Column • Tags: bifurcation, journey, liminal, Rabbi Ari Ballaban, transition •
Lessons of the Liminal: Focusing on the Journey, not the Destination By Rabbi Ari Ballaban
Liminality—though some consider this word needless jargon, I suspect it nevertheless is a favorite of many rabbis (though Rabbi Chessin prefers “bifurcation!”) This densely descriptive term is one that people who study religion love to love, because it enables them to name an important type of experience that crosses boundaries of culture, time, and place. But what does it mean, and what is it all about? Perhaps more i importantly, allow me to answer: Why should you care about noticing the liminal?
Though he didn’t coin the term (that distinction goes to Arnold van Gennep), Victor Turner, a famous 20th-century anthropologist, was instrumental in developing the idea behind it. He used it in studies of communal rites of passage. As he observed, there are particularly fraught times in most cultures when people transition from one part of their lives to another. These marginal moments in life define us; if we want to use the technical term for them, we call them liminal.
Even if people in a culture aren’t explicitly conscious of experiencing something liminal, they (the moments) tend to be precarious for those who navigate them. When we traverse a liminal juncture, we cross a threshold from one part of our lives into another. When boys and girls have b’nai mitzvah, they start the process as children and finish it as adults. When adults get married, they start their wedding ceremonies as unmarried individuals and finish as newly wed unions.
Focusing on liminality leads us to ask: What happens in between the beginning and the end of processes like these? What happens, for instance, if a ceremony or rite of passage somehow goes awry or isn’t completed…does the child technically not become an adult? Do the adults not become married? Liminality is about transitions, and studying it reminds us that our lives in many ways are more affected by the processes of the transformations we undergo than by any longer term status a transition is meant to enact.
If we look around us in the world, we can see the liminal everywhere, both inside and outside of the realm of religion. As we begin 2019, we may notice an extra measure of liminality around us. The new class of congress? The way they settle into their new roles—whether, for those that are returning, into a new status quo, or, for those that are newly elected, into an entirely new reality—will set the tone for many coming years of politics. A new tax year? At this time, in this transitional moment, we make choices that are likely to affect us long into the future.
The importance of the liminal is even apparent in the general spirit of how we mark a “new year” in Western culture. As many of us set New Year’s resolutions, we simultaneously confront the progress (or the lack thereof) that we made on self-imposed vows in the past year and, likewise, ponder how we might strive to change course in the year to come. These experiences are nothing if not liminal; by virtue of their boundary-crossing nature, they are both precarious and potent.
As you begin 2019, I encourage you to take time to think not just about what you hope to become in the coming year, but to consider how you hope to get there. Remember that the part of life that makes our stories most rich is not that which describes what we are—professional titles, family roles, ranks or social status—but the trajectory our lives take in attaining such distinctions. As the new year progresses and you make decisions for the future about what to do and who to be, be mindful of the liminal; it will help you set the tone for a good year to come!