Intro to Hanukkah

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter lit the first national menorah in Washington, D.C. There it is, a perfectly normal-sized example of the candelabra, more specifically called a Hanukkiah, that Jews around the world light during the eight-day festival of Hanukkah. And here is the national menorah 40 years later, nine meters tall. In fact, so tall that you need a hydraulic lift to light it. I think this is a fitting visual representation of Hanukkah's recent history in the United States. Namely, Hanukkah has become a big deal. Some non-Jewish Americans even hold the misconception that Hanukkah is the Jewish Christmas. Christmas and Hanukkah do generally occur around the same time. Hanukkah always falls on the 25th of Kislev, a month on the Jewish calendar. But because the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, Hanukkah shifts around from year to year on the Gregorian solar calendar. So it's always relatively close to Christmas, but sometimes as early as Thanksgiving. Hence the rare Thanksgivica of November 2013. Thanksgiving and Hanukkah overlap in a once-in-a-lifetime double event. What is being called Thanksgivica? But this is my first Hanukkah. Did I say that right? The next Thanksgiving won't be until 2070, and then after that, 2165. Adding to its proximity to Christmas, Hanukkah also is a family-oriented holiday and, at least in the United States, sometimes involves gift-giving. Running with these similarities, some assume that Hanukkah must hold the same status for Jews as Christmas does for Christians. But Hanukkah is actually a relatively minor holiday for Jews. Major holidays include Passover, Sukkot, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, which commonly is attributed the title of the most important holiday. Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot form the Shalosh Regalim, or the three ancient pilgrimage festivals during which ancient Israelites would journey to the Temple in Jerusalem. On major holidays, many Jews don't work, don't use electricity, or don't drive. But none of that applies to Hanukkah as a minor holiday. It's not even mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Now, if you're Jewish or have had close contact with Jewish traditions, Hanukkah brings to mind eating fried potato pancakes called latkes or levivot in Hebrew, playing a game with a dreidel, or you might even recall the popular Hanukkah miracle story of one day's worth of lamp oil lasting for eight days. From my own perspective, I see Hanukkah as a microcosm, exemplifying the three tenets of religious literacy. That religions change over time, religions are internally diverse, and religions are embedded in their respective cultures. So today we'll examine how the holiday evolved, the diversity of its practice today, and the specific ways that Hanukkah evolved embedded in American culture specifically. Let's get into it. Hanukkah derives from the Hebrew word for dedication, and it specifically refers to the rededication of the Jerusalem temple in 165 BCE by Judah Maccabee. In the centuries after Alexander the Great, Judea was ruled by a Hellenistic government called the Seleucid Empire. And things took a turn for the worst when the Seleucid ruler, Antiochus IV, came to power. According to the text 1 Maccabees, Antiochus persecuted the Jewish people. He outlawed Jewish religious practice and desecrated the temple in Jerusalem by conducting pagan sacrifices there. The Jewish priest Judah Maccabee, a word deriving from the Hebrew word Word for hammer. emerges in the text as a military general who leads a successful revolt against the Seleucids. Judah's family would later become known as the Hasmonean dynasty, and they go on to rule Judea and the surrounding areas for the next century, until Rome invades and sets up Herod the Great as a puppet king. This was the first time in centuries that an independent government ruled the region after Judea bounced back and forth between regional superpowers. To this day, Judah Maccabee is celebrated by many Jews and pops up in official places like Israeli postage stamps, as well as sporting clubs. The origin of the Hanukkah story is first outlined in 1 Maccabee chapter 4. Then Judas and his brothers and all the assembly of Israel determined that every year at that season the days of dedication of the altar should be observed with joy and gladness for eight days, beginning with the 25th day of the month of Kislev. There's the origin story for Hanukkah, but notice that there is no mention of oil lasting for a miraculously long period of time. And though lighting the candelabra is mentioned in passing, it's not the main focus of the story. The rededication of the temple is the main focus of the story. The association between Hanukkah and lights developed over the next 250 years. The first century Jewish historian Josephus refers to the holidays simply as lights, or phota in Greek. And from that time to this, we celebrate this festival and call it lights. I suppose the reason was because this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us, and that thence was the name given to that festival. It's interesting that Josephus himself doesn't even seem to know why it's called lights and just throws out a guess. Another text from that period, the Gospel of John, still refers to Hanukkah as the Feast of Dedication. So even though the holiday is now called the Festival of Lights, the history of this association is kind of mysterious. It seems to be a later innovation, just like the origin of the famous Hanukkah miracle too. The legend goes that when the Maccabees returned to the temple following their victory, they found only one flask of ritually pure oil. The rest had been desecrated by the Seleucids. This would have been only enough oil for one day, and the process of ritual purification would have taken another week to complete before new oil could be used. Somehow though, miraculously, this one flask lasted eight days, enough time for the Maccabees to repurify themselves and produce new pure oil. Remember, the origin story of Hanukkah itself in 1 Maccabees does not mention this at all. It actually comes hundreds of years later in the Talmud, the central text for rabbinic Judaism compiled during the Late Antique Period. Here's the text and citation on screen if you'd like to pause it and read it for yourself. This story has become very popular, and it's a great example of how the meaning and rituals surrounding a holiday can evolve over the centuries. Remember, religions change over time, but I'll also argue here that rituals, how they're conducted, and how people interpret those rituals also change over time. In other words, holidays and their commensurate rituals have a life cycle. In fact, a lot of the most recognizable Hanukkah celebrations today are relatively modern. One example would be the Hanukkah game dreidel, which is a Yiddish word related to the verb to turn or to rotate. It's also called a sevivon in Hebrew, which is a turner or a twirler. The game is played with a top that has four sides marked with four Hebrew letters, which form an acronym for Nes Gadol Haya Sham, a great miracle happened there. In Israel, the acronym is actually different and the last word changes to be a great miracle happened here. Landing on each letter means you either get to take a certain amount of money from the pot or put money into the pot, though more family-friendly versions of the game use fake chocolate coins. The legendary origin of dreidel is that Jews played the game during times of Seleucid persecution to hide the fact that they were studying Torah. But this story was created later on, probably as late as the 19th century. The game more likely shares an origin with other gambling games from 16th century Central Europe that involves spinning a top called a teetotum. And speaking of Central Europe, that leads me to the next point. A lot of the popular practices associated with Hanukkah Like playing dreidel, eating latkes, and jelly donuts called sufganiyot have what we might call Ashkenazi roots, meaning that they originate from Jewish communities with roots in Germany and Eastern Europe. Though historically there was a lot of diversity in Hanukkah celebration across Judaism. So here I want to introduce the terms Sephardic Jews and Mizrahi Jews. Lots of people use Sephardi and Mizrahi interchangeably, but they technically refer to different diaspora for communities with some overlap. Sephardic Jews have roots in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, while Mizrahi Jews generally refers to Jewish communities from throughout North Africa but also the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran, as well as the culturally distinct branch of Yemenite Jews. All of these communities retain traditions from their respective cultures. Many fled their countries of origin throughout the 20th century during the rise of Arab nationalism in the 50s and 60s. Arabic-speaking Jewish communities from Tunisia and other North African countries historically celebrate Eid al-Banat, or Chag Ha-Banot in Hebrew. This is a celebration of Jewish women and their strength and heroism that falls on the seventh night of Hanukkah. Some of the modern Jewish writers that I read for this episode are trying to popularize this tradition today, and they specifically link Eid al-Banat to heroes like Judith, who saves Israel from an Assyrian general in the apocryphal Book of Judith. or women who resisted the Seleucids during the Maccabean Revolt. We also see the influence of North African cuisine in some Sephardi and Mizrahi Hanukkah-time food. So, rather than sufganiyot, which are basically a version of Polish pączki or German Berliners, you might celebrate by eating sfenj, a spongy donut that is popular in Morocco. Generally speaking, though, some argue that Hanukkah exemplifies a controversial phenomenon in the wider Jewish world that is sometimes called... Ashkenormativity, or the normalization of Ashkenazi traditions at the expense or erasure of other Jewish cultural traditions rooted in Sephardic, Mizrahi, or Ethiopian Judaism. That is a huge and controversial topic, though, and it deserves its own episode. I want to turn back now to Hanukkah in the United States as another example of diversity within Jewish practice. As we saw with the National Menorah, Hanukkah has enjoyed a bigger and bigger role in American public life. In a thoroughgoing history of Hanukkah in the United States, the scholar of American Judaism, Dr. Diane Ashton, argues that Jewish immigrants to America pumped up Hanukkah's importance as a kid-centered counterbalance to Christmas, starting as early as the 1800s. Now, we sometimes forget that Christmas itself inflated in importance over the past 150 years or so. Throughout the 1800s, Christmas grew bigger and bigger and eventually became a federally recognized holiday in 1870. During this time period, some Jewish leaders, especially rabbis from the branch of Judaism called Reform Judaism, basically rebranded Hanukkah. 19th century rabbis like Rabbi Max Lilienthal and Isaac Wise started creating Hanukkah events for their kids at their synagogues, which included singing songs and handing out candy, and they popularized these events in Jewish magazines. By the 20th century, it started to become a commercialized holiday along with Christmas. By the mid-20th century, Dr. Ashton writes that Hanukkah and the American marketplace had become interwoven to an unprecedented degree. She uses examples like Jewish women's organizations, urging mothers to create festive tableware and decorations and holding Hanukkah parties for their kids. Ashton argues that Jewish families and communities did this paradoxically, on one hand, to maintain unique Jewish identity and autonomy in a Christian-majority country. While, on the other hand, out of a desire to participate in American culture, to feel American. Children continue to play a primary role in Hanukkah celebrations to this day. According to a study conducted by the economist Ron Abramitsky, American Jewish parents with kids under 18 are much more likely to celebrate Hanukkah than other Jewish holidays. The scholars hypothesize that American Jewish parents don't want their kids to feel alienated from their peers who celebrate Christmas. So, they're more likely than American Jews without children to adopt Christmas-inspired rituals like gift-giving or the controversial Hanukkah bush, an analog to the Christmas tree which some Jews would say is antithetical to a holiday that was inspired by Jews resisting surrounding cultural influences, namely, Hellenism. The study also found that according to data from a large American grocery store chain, U.S. counties with smaller Jewish populations. also happen to have comparatively higher sales of Jewish food products per capita during Hanukkah. The study suggests that this phenomenon is consistent with the hypothesis that celebration of religious holidays is designed not only for worship and enjoyment, but also to provide a counterbalance for children against competing cultural influences. In this case, Christmas. Members of Chabad Lubavitch, a movement within Hasidic Judaism, also played a huge role in publicizing Hanukkah in the 1970s. In 1974, they put up a big menorah in Philadelphia, and then a year later in San Francisco. And remember that national menorah under Carter? Yep, that was because of Chabad. They wanted to publicize the miracle. For many Jews today, proclaiming the miracle is a vital aspect of Hanukkah. Visually displaying the menorah in windows at dusk or on the National Mall so that the miracle can be proclaimed. It's important to say here, though, that the miracle of Hanukkah for many Jews is not so much oil lasting eight days, but the fact that a small band of Jewish rebels managed to throw off an empire's rule. In a larger sense, the phenomenon of the Americanization of Hanukkah reminds us of a critical part of the study of religion. That religion is responsive to the cultural environment within which it operates, and that religious beliefs and practices are embedded in those cultures and can evolve in those cultures. And so that you can check my research, I'm including a bibliography in the description below. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. Hey everyone, hope you enjoyed that video. So many of you might not know, but I've recently moved to Cairo, Egypt to start a postdoctoral research fellowship. 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