Each Candle a Question In the Talmud, the rabbis ask what I think might be the purist distillation of a Jewish question about Hanukkah. They ask: What is this Hanukkah?

Hanukkah, this beautiful tradition of light and fried foods, of miracles and gifts, is also part of a very complex story and history that I believe is deeply relevant to us today.

On the one hand, Hanukkah is the story of a nation under foreign occupation by a superpower managing to rise up and for a time, throw off that occupation. We are told to light these candles in the window or outdoors to publicize the miracle. Whether or not we accept the story of the oil miraculously lasting, it seems to me that our survival, persistence, and victory are miracle enough to shine out once a year to say, “we are here, and to say, “sometimes the underdog wins.”

Of course, some see a parallel in Israel today, where the Palestinians are now the Maccabees. While I think that analogy has serious flaws, I can also see the emotional truth to it. So Hanukkah , this celebration of national renewal and liberation from occupation, raises a lot of questions for us today. We also know that the same Maccabees that threw off the yoke of colonialism in the name of justice quickly became corrupted by wealth and power and deeply entwined with the powers they had fought against from the outside. They were as hypocritical as the leaders they threw off, willing to trade in things sacred to Judaism in exchange for continued power and a posh lifestyle.

Again, questions.

Hanukkah, and the Maccabean revolution was not a simple uprising of oppressed Jews against the cruel Hellenist overlords. Instead, it began in polarization and 2 disagreement in Jewish society. Some loved Greek culture and wanted to give up the tribalism of Judaism for what they saw as the universalism of Greek culture. Others hated everything Greek and believed assassinating powerful Greeks was a righteous act. Most were somewhere in the middle, finding some blend and balance of Greek and Jewish culture. In the midst of this infighting, one powerful group of Jews decided to form an alliance with Egypt and install their puppet as Cohen Gadol, the High Priest. The Greeks weren’t going to tolerate this and to punish the leadership, clamped down on Jewish practice and desecrate the Temple.

Yet, it was the Greek’s reaction to Jewish infighting that somehow finally brought the majority of Jews together against the Greeks. The desecration of the Temple brought groups that couldn’t stand one another together and allowed the Maccabees to galvanize a powerful national movement.

This raises questions for us today as we see the Jewish community growing more polarized about things like Israel and assimilation. Instead of working together, we are often undercutting one another. We do so based on deeply help beliefs and principles, but Hanukkah reminds us that such division usually plays into the hands of those who have more power than we do, not to our benefit or the benefit of those seeking justice.

Wednesday this past week was World AIDS Day, and during the day I heard stories about the fight against AIDS in the late 80’s. I was at several of the protests they talked about on the radio. It brought back a lot of memories, memories that are actually never very far away. Like most gay men my age, those years were traumatic, terrifying, exhilarating, and righteously angry.

ACT-UP, to me, felt very much like I thought the Maccabee army must have felt. Up against ridiculous odds, angry, and with people dying around them, they fought in ways they didn’t know they could fight, and somehow, by some miracle, succeeded in getting AIDS drugs, new sorts of drugs that benefit all sorts of diseases now, but in an even greater miracle, fighting for AIDS gained us an acceptance we couldn’t have dreamed of. Gay marriage is a miracle I couldn’t 3 have imagined, not the openly LGBT elected representatives, and people in power.

Part of the power of Coming Out as a movement was that it showed that LGBT people are people “just like everyone else,” and that since we are all human beings, we should have the same right to happiness. By coming out one by one, we made a universal argument about what it means to be human.

But I never thought much about at the time what what our community was giving up by asserting we were just like everyone else. Acceptance has coincided with what seems like a tremendous erosion of LGBT community connections. By getting a seat at the proverbial table of power, we changed that table. But that table is also changing us, as it did the Jews who embraced Greek culture and power, and as it did the Maccabees when they gained power and began to rule. The Hasmoneans ended up more deeply part of Greek culture than the rulers they had displaced.

As a gay man, Hanukkah and World AIDS Day asks me what we gave up in arguing so strongly that we were just like everybody else. What about those things that made us unique, that created a rich, vibrant and well-connected sub-culture.

As Jews, Hanukkah asks us what we gain and what we give up in arguing so strongly that we are just like everybody else, in assimilating so fully into American culture. What about those things that make us different. It asks if now that we have access to power, are we changing the system or is the system changing us?

Dara Horn, in her essay, The Cool Kids, outlines two types of antisemitism. One she calls Purim Antisemitism. In Purim antisemitism, the anti-Semites are very clear and very public that they hate us. The make it clear that they want us gone or worse. That’s the kind of antisemitism we are most aware of, but Horn argues it is actually less dangerous than the other kind of antisemitism, Hanukkah Antisemitism. Instead of open hostility toward us, the Hanukkah anti-Semite says they love Jews, that some of their best friends are Jews. They are good Jews, but there are also these other Jews who can’t be trusted and seem to insist on being different. 4 The Hanukkah anti-Semite, argues Horn, offer us acceptance to the degree we give up our culture. Acceptance in their universal requires an act of self-erasure, and it is that self-erasure, our willingness to participate in our own disappearance in order to gain full acceptance that makes Hanukkah antisemitism more dangerous than Purim antisemitism, according to Horn.

Hanukkah asks us questions we need to hear. So as we light the candles for these last night of Hanukkah this year, let’s be proud of the miracle of our survival, our endurance as a people. Let’s celebrate our own stamina. Just these past years, I feel like we’ve all have one day’s worth of stamina last two years.

At the same time, let these candles ask us questions that seem so resonant to us today. At Hanukkah, each candle is an assertion of hope and persistence, and each candle a question.

May we be blessed by both.

Shabbat Shalom.