In the Talmud (Shabbat 21b), the rabbis ask a deceptively simple question: ‘Mai Chanukah?’ ‘What is Chanukah?’ It’s almost as if they’re not sure what it is, or why we celebrate it. What they really want to do is to get to the essence of Chanukah. And so they explain that when the Maccabees were victorious over the Syrian Greeks, they found only one cruise of oil for the menorah—enough only to last one day, and it burned miraculously for eight days. This, of course, is a far cry from what we read in our siddur—that the miracle was that God empowered us, and delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, and a great military victory was won by the Jewish people in reclaiming the Land of Israel from its defilers. Lots of ink has been spilled explaining how the Talmudic rabbis wanted to de-emphasize the military aspect of Chanukah in favor of a more spiritualized one. As adults, we can all nod knowingly at each other, acknowledging that, while the miracle o...
A blog by Rabbi Gil Steinlauf