WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I asked one year why we Jews celebrate Hanukkah. This year, I narrow the focus: Why do we American Jews celebrate Hanukkah?
This Week: But Why Do WE, American Jews, Celebrate Hanukkah?
Some of you may recall I gave a pop quiz one erev Hanukkah week a couple years back: Question One, 100 points: “Why Do We Celebrate Hanukkah?” By “we” I meant all of us Jews on this planet. I offered three alternative answers: [a] what we learned in the first grades of Hebrew school, that the oil lamps with a day’s oil supply burned for eight days; [b] the campaign of a liberal local rabbi, that we should make it a festival of fighting global warming (though how everyone lighting more and more candles every night for a week fights global warming, only a liberal can tell you); and, [c] the meaning to which in the fourth grade or so of Hebrew school I began to subscribe, the Maccabees wresting homeland Jewish independence back from the Seleucid heirs of Alexander the Great.
But this first December, erev Hanukkah, week of this year, let me narrow the question’s focus a little. Ok, it’s one thing for Israelis, latter-day landsmen of the Maccabees of the Hasmonean kingdom Judaea, to celebrate the restoration of their Jewish kingdom’s independence, but why should we, Diaspora Jews today of America, light candles for eight nights to commemorate that quickly Roman-snuffed out flicker of restored Jewish homeland rule two thousand years back?
Because while the State of Israel is the state of Israelis, who are the citizens with standing, e.g., to deal with and defend its borders, the Land of Israel in which the State of Israel sits (currently coextensively) is the homeland of a whole people, the Jewish people, our people, us. That’s the first of two reasons I light the Hanukkah candles. That homeland of Israel is ours, not Arabs’ (who have 78% of the Palestine Mandate in Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan), and my lighting of those eight nights of candles commemorates and honors the Maccabees’ redemption of it, however briefly, however long ago, for our people.
My second reason for lighting Hanukkah candles is in support of the Maccabees’ modern successors, modern Israel’s Israelis, comprised of the final generations of the Old Yishuv, and of the ingathering of our people from east (today at least half) and west, who collectively believe that the entirety of the Jewish homeland of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, including the hill country heartland of Judea-Samaria (called such, not “West Bank,” by the UN itself in 1947) and historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) historically and legally belongs to and is the heritage of the Jewish, not Arab, people.
I beseech those of my fellow American Jews, alas the majority, who feel it their right, along with the UN and EU, to impose a “two-state solution,” ripping from Israel the natural defensible boundary of the Judea-Samaria ridge, Jordan Valley and Jordan River, and, for many, historic Jerusalem, to read about
[1] the historicity of biblical Israel, twelfth century BCE Jewish settlement of which began in the Judean-Samarian hills, and c. 1000 BCE incorporated Jerusalem, where two Jewish Temples successively stood for a millennium, relics of which are continuously unearthed to this day;
[2] the unbroken organized homeland presence of Jews during the long dark post-biblical centuries between Hadrian and Herzl (e.g., James Parkes, Whose Land?, asserting that that continuous tenacious homeland-claiming Jewish presence, in spite of every discouragement, wrote our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds”; Samuel Katz’ Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, in which P.M. Begin’s Foreword called the book’s chapter on Jews’ continuous post-biblical presence the book’s most important chapter; Jerome Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, tracing that presence and arguing that Parkes was right);
[3] the Zionist movement, the incredibly heroic struggle to bring home persecuted exile communities from Europe and the east, and the courageous struggle to regain the homeland’s independence in 1948 and defend it in the wars of 1967 and 1973, and to this day.
If, having absorbed all this, you feel empowered to join the UN and EU in demanding Israelis walk out of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, into a militarily indefensible, Jewishly meaningless ghetto rump of the Jewish homeland, nine miles wide in the lowland middle, content yourself in commemorating exclusively that the oil lamps burned for eight days.
Happy Hanukkah!