WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I envisioned our “Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop” as a forum for fashioning our responses, especially to fellow Jews using them, to Jewish homeland-delegitimizing dirty words. It must be, but we must also contend against especially Jews diminishing Jewish significance of terms evincing Jewish homeland equity and rights. “Palestine” and “Palestinian” are two such terms, and another, discussed this week below, is “Hanukkah,” annually commemorating, for over two thousand years, Jewish connection and commitment to our holy Temple and its holy site.
A Different Type Task This Week in the Workshop: Undimming the Hanukkah Lights
When we began this Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop a few weeks ago, I expected that we’d cope with correcting fellow Diaspora Jews’ mistaken or alas otherwise use of dirty words delegitimizing our people’s historic homeland of Israel – e.g., “1948 founding of Israel” (last week); an inside-the-land-of-Israel “two-state solution” as a forced class of solution, as opposed to “less than a state” (Rabin in his last speech) or recognition that Israel and Jordan are Jewish and Arab Palestine states (the week before that); or “West Bank settlements” (the week before that).
I didn’t think in terms of Jews and others delegitimizing legitimate terms through diminishing the significance of Jewish equity in them. “Palestine” and “Palestinian” are two such terms. Many Jews believe they refer only to Arabs. They don’t, and we need to resurrect Jewish equity in them.
But this past week a prolific pro-Israel American Jewish commentator, editor of a pro-Israel commentary house, referred to Hanukkah, which starts Sunday night, as a “relatively minor Jewish festival.” In these days of the U.S. administration threatening to open a consulate to Palestinian Arabs in the heart of Israel’s capital, undivided Jerusalem, and the world at large demanding a “two-state solution,” save for mutually agreed “adjustments,” along the historic Jerusalem-excluding “1967 [i.e., 1949]\ lines,” such dimming of the Hanukkah lights is an elephant filling the Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop. Here goes.
Jonathan Tobin wrote a JNS article Wednesday, Stop Complaining About Christmas Trees and Enjoy Your Own Holiday, about a luxury condo resident who complained that this season’s menorah was given less prominent placement than the building’s Christmas tree. Jonathan writes that Jews “who pursue controversies about trees, creshes or which holiday songs are sung at public school assemblies do nothing to protect the right of Jews,” but instead make themselves “part of an effort to promote a vision of America that is aggressively secular and in which the public square is cleansed of all religious symbolism or practice.” He calls this wrong both as a matter of constitutional law and “for what is good for the country and the Jews.” I fully agree with that.
Jonathan goes on:
“Jews may generally think of Christmas trees as linked to the celebration of religious observance and often define themselves as much by not having such a tree in their homes as they do by inflating the relatively minor Jewish festival of Hanukkah into a blue-tinseled version of their neighbor’s holiday. Hanukkah is a festival that commemorates a bloody war against a foreign power that sought to extinguish Jewish identity with the help of assimilated Hellenist Jews – not a Jewish version of ‘good will to all men.’” [emphasis added]
But Hanukkah is more than that. Here’s the comment I posted at the foot of Jonathan’s article:
“Jonathan’s right that Jews who object to trees and other symbols of Christmas do nothing to secure Jewish rights, but neither do those who regard Hanukkah as a ‘relatively minor Jewish festival.’ It commemorates annually for over 2000 years the liberation of the Jewish Temple from foreign desecration and its cleansing and rededication. In today’s times, with even a party in the Israeli government contending that the Temple Mount belongs only to Muslims, and the world trying to displace historic Jerusalem from Israeli control, we should view our commemorating the Temple’s rededication not as a festival of minor significance but as a two millennia annual expression of the tenacity of our Jewish people’s connection to our people’s holiest site.”
Hanukkah is not “a Jewish version of Christmas,” for all that we’ve contributed to this misimpression by, e.g., seeking public display equality of menorahs and trees. Nor is it, except perhaps to children, a celebration of a miracle that a day’s worth of oil lasted eight days. The miracle, if one there was, lay in the homeland Jews throwing off, through decades of struggle, Jewish peoplehood-suppressing overlordship of their homeland by the imperial Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great.
But neither is independence from the Seleucid rulers precisely what Hanukkah commemorates. That war was no more a “civil war” than was the American Revolution (in which many colonists supported not George Washington but the British), the acid test being whether a people which was not independent when the war began was when it ended, But Hanukkah does not commemorate the homeland Jews’ ultimate victory in that war. The Maccabees’ capture of Jerusalem, including the Temple (but not the Akra) occurred in the early years of their struggle against the Seleucid rulers; independence came two decades later. Hanukkah commemorates the liberation, cleansing and rededication of the Temple, our Jewish people’s holiest place on our holiest site in our holiest city.
Today, the U.S. administration is threatening to open a consulate to Palestinian Arabs in Israel’s capital, undivided Jerusalem, and the world at large, which today calls Jews in historic Jerusalem “settlers,” demands severance from Israel of historic Jerusalem. This is no time for we ourselves to denigrate Hanukkah as a “relatively minor Jewish festival.” It isn’t, and both we American Jews and our fellow Americans must understand it as such.
I envision a Martian landing in my kitchen Sunday night as a I light the first of eight nights’ Hanukkah candles:
Martian: What are you doing?
Me: Lighting the first of eight nights’ Hanukkah candles.
Martian: What are you commemorating?
Me: Restoration and rededication after foreign pollution of my Jewish people’s holy Temple on our holiest site, our Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Martian: So for how many years have your people been annually commemorating your Temple’s rededication?
Me: Two thousand one hundred eighty-five.
How important is getting across to Americans, not just to Martians, this intensity of our connection and commitment to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? An astute friend of mine who sends out current events emails each week this week sent out a Jewish Press piece on Thursday: US ‘Palestinian Authority’ Consulate To Open Soon in Jerusalem, to which he prefaced the comment: “The Biden administration believes it can defy the Israeli government as it is sure it will have no pushback from the American Jewish community. It will also defy the US Congress.”
My friend’s concern is not without basis. The US Reform and Conservative movements, representing by far the largest segments of religiously organized American Jews, are on record, along with other major American Jewish organizations, as calling for an inside-the-land-of-Israel “two-state solution” along “the 1967 borders” save for mutually agreed “adjustments,” which excludes Jerusalem’s Old City with its Temple Mount,
Many Muslims these days refer to the entire Temple Mount as “the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site.” In this they are joined by American newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer, which on 5/24/21 headlined Israel’s reopening the Temple Mount to Jews, which it had temporarily closed only to Jews due to Arab violence, as “Mosque Visits Resume.” The Jews returned to the Mount, not to the mosque. Jews have resided in historic Jerusalem for three thousand years, relentlessly returning whenever the ruling foreign empire expelled them from the city, again becoming the city’s majority during 1800’s Ottoman Empire rule, and throughout those three millennia nobody called Jews in Jerusalem “settlers,” like the world does today.
So enough with Hanukkah as a “blue-tinseled Jewish Christmas,” with the menorah as the Jewish counterpart of Christians’ Christmas tree, with this dimming of Hanukkah’s lights. We and other Americans need to see Hanukkah for what it is – a two millennia lasting annual assertion of Jewish connection and commitment to the site of our Jewish Temples which had stood for a millennium, from which we will not meekly walk out and hand over to “Palestinians” who’ve never ruled Jerusalem or Palestine ever.
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