This year is different. In Israel, there are reports from far-right groups that accept nationalist interpretations of Hanukkah, with a “Maccabean march” to claim the right to full Jewish control over the Temple Mount. And I confess that, in this moment of global horror, I have wondered if any kind of celebration can seem appropriate. But I also know that Hanukkah – a true festival of lights – is the best holiday that any type of Jew could wish to celebrate right now.
Setting aside the apocryphal stories about oil and the eight days, the true miracle of Hanukkah has always been its adaptability. It is the most modern of Jewish holidays, always changing to respond to the most pressing needs, hopes, or desires of the community at a given time. And for a long time, it has had immense communal value, especially for those of us who could primarily describe ourselves as secular or cultural Jews.
For Hanukkah in 2023, there are cold cities in Canada and damp neighborhoods in London that have decided to remove menorahs from their town hall gardens. Which means that, for Jews, this holiday is an important opportunity. It often happens that Jewish culture in the United States seems excessively obsessed with the act of remembering, but the time has come, urgently, for Jews to examine our culture in the context of the current moment and ask ourselves if what animates the core of our personal Judaism is substantive enough, resilient enough, to equip us to withstand both what is happening and what is coming. This is the kind of thing that is best done together.
In the early 20th century, when Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in cities like New York and adopted the celebration of Christmas to demonstrate their acceptance of American culture, synagogues and Jewish groups sought to transform the minor holiday of Hanukkah into a major December event. After the Holocaust, Hanukkah, which in its most classic version commemorates the Maccabean revolt against the Hellenization of Judea in the 2nd century BCE, became increasingly associated with the founding of the Jewish state: a way of presenting to the diaspora the idea of a contemporary Israel and of mythifying the new nation itself.
In recent decades, when some synagogues struggled to fully accept the reality of interfaith families – a frustrating and counterproductive reluctance, given that 40 percent of American Jews are married to non-Jews – Hanukkah has served as a simple and convenient agent of unity within families and between Jews and non-Jews. As a solstitial holiday centered on universal ideas of light in darkness, a more anodyne version of Hanukkah emerged and became popular. The notion of “Chrismukkah” originated in the 19th century among German and Austrian Jews (the term they used was “Weihnukka,” based on Weihnachten, the German word for Christmas), but Chrismukkah, as a celebration of the united family, gained importance in the United States when the phrase appeared in a subplot of the television series The O.C. And the truth is that it has stuck around, perhaps because Chrismukkah underscores some of the inherent open generosity of Hanukkah. Everyone can participate. In Judaism, that is rare to say.