By Frank Dimant
A few days before Christmas I was asked by media to offer a suggestion on how intermarried couples can best celebrate Chanukah and Christmas. How the holidays can be blended and how a universal message emanating from these two holidays can be articulated to children in a mixed marriage.
It was my opinion that the two holidays share nothing in common, save for the giving of gifts, which has been over-emphasized in Chanukah as a result of the commercialism that confronts all religions today.
Christmas represents, according to the Christian world, the birth of the messiah. It is a time to recall what they deem to be a miraculous birth and has tremendous religious significance for Christendom.
Chanukah, on the other hand, represents a victory against the very question that the reporter posed to me. Many view Chanukah as solely about the liberation and rededication of the Temple, and about a flask of oil that should have lasted for one day burning for eight. But this is not the only substantive message that should resonate from Chanukah. Chanukah represents, in fact, a significant victory of the minority against the majority within the Jewish nation itself. The Greeks who occupied the Jewish homeland were not interested in a physical genocide of the people, but rather were driven by the very notion of assimilation in which secularism was to triumph over religion.
Within the Jewish community itself, collaborators known as Hellenists talked of the mutual value systems that existed between the Greeks and the Jews, and the dawning of a new era that was to unfold. It would be an era in which Jews would blend in effectively with society around them, in which they would slowly abandon their tradition and heritage. We were, according to that powerful majority view, destined to be like everyone else, working side by side, engaging in mutual trades, learning philosophy and basically becoming an extension of Greek society.
The Maccabees, who represented a minority in Jewish life, held firmly to the Torah and to the values of Har Sinai. They did not buckle under the demands of the majority. They did not acquiesce and were not cowered into a behavioural system that ran contrary to Jewish tradition. It was the Maccabees who rose in defiance, not only against the Greek empire, but equally important against the Jewish secularists of the day, the Jewish majority that had comfortably drifted into Hellenistic society. The candles of the menorah represented the flames of the Torah. The rededication of the temple meant the rededication of Jewish life. It assured us that generations to come would benefit from the teachings which our ancestors had received.
With assimilation and intermarriage on the rise, the message of the Maccabees has never been more urgent. The desire to be accepted as part of the secular world is so overwhelming for some Jews that they have shed their distinctive characteristics. But the very miracle of Chanukah shows us that a majority rule pushing us to be part of a system of universal messaging, while abandoning our distinct Jewish calling, has never proved to be the best option for the survival and revitalization of the Jewish people.
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