Sure Action; Unsure Outcome

A Second Hanukkah Reflection

Yesterday’s Hanukkah reflection—not that these are planned, I’m letting the words fall from my brain to the page—left me wanting to recenter my thoughts on the productive and the positive. While I wrote yesterday from a place of hurt and urgency, these early morning hours with coffee at the keyboard before the house wakes up (currently, 7:16 am EST) find me in a more hopeful mood.

I gestured toward this in yesterday’s post: The Hanukkah story, Hanukkah, literally, dedication, tells the story of a Jewish rebellion led by a dynastic family, the Maccabees (really, a family from the soon-to-be established Hasmonean dynasty), against an occupying force, the Seleucid empire, that had occupied Jerusalem and desecrated the Temple. Important to know for non-Jewish people, the Temple was not merely a house of worship; indeed, the Temple in Jerusalem was the place of sacrifice, a core component of ancient Israelite cultic practice, and the Temple was Gd’s dwelling place on earth.

The Temple plays such an outsized role in Jewish life that an annual fast day is observed on its (imagined) day of destruction, and the mythic understanding of this fast day suggests that a series of catastrophic events occurred on this same day throughout (Jewish) history. I don't mean to say ‘imagined’ to suggest the Temple was not destroyed by Rome and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Jewish people slaughtered or enslaved; this certainly did occur, and archeology bears this out, but the literal dating and tracing of events throughout time to this mythologized date is more interpretive than historical. At any rate, the Temple’s significance is hard to overstate.

Indeed, while an eschatological (end-times) portrait of the coming messianic age is held to by only a narrow subset of religious Jews, the idea that a third Temple will be constructed and the sacrificial system resumed does feature in some interpretations. There’s more to it than that, and this hoped-for third Temple is not a mainstream Jewish belief, but I share this to help you understand the significance of the Temple—both in the centuries before the common era and today. It is a holy act to pray at the Kotel, the Western Wall, a remnant of a wall surrounding the second Temple in Jerusalem.

To share yet one more sign of its importance, outside of the Reform movement, many Jewish movements refuse to call their houses of worship ‘temples,’ preferring ‘synagogue’ or, in Yiddish, shul. The rationale is that only the Temple in Jerusalem is the temple, so using that word for any other house of worship is inappropriate.

For my Christian readers, the Gospel According to John suggests Jesus participated in the Hanukkah celebration:

At that time the Festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon (John 10.22-23).

I don’t want to take us too far afield here, but I want you to understand the circumstances of the Hanukkah story. To occupy and desecrate the Temple through the construction of idols was one of the worst offenses to the ancient Jewish people because idolatry was one of those big no-nos, and so, to construct idols within Gd’s dwelling place was the ultimate sign of disrespect.

We’re hanging a Purdue banner at Bobby Knight’s house.

Important to the Hanukkah story, an eternal light burns at the altar of the Temple: the ner tamid. This eternal light was a menorah in the ancient Temple—ah ha! In modern synagogues, the ner tamid continues to feature, illuminated by gas or electric light. The ner tamid is the visual symbol of Gd’s presence. This practice is interpreted from Torah, for example, from Exodus 27:

You shall further instruct the Israelites to bring you clear oil of beaten olives for lighting, for kindling lamps regularly.

Aaron and his sons shall set them up in the Tent of Meeting, outside the curtain which is over [the Ark of] the Pact, [to burn] from evening to morning before [YHWH]. It shall be a due from the Israelites for all time, throughout the ages [my emphasis].

To recap, the Temple is a big deal; to occupy and desecrate the Temple is the ultimate insult and show of domination against the Jewish people; a militaristic family, the Maccabees, led a rebellion against the Seleucids who occupied and desecrated the Temple, and Hanukkah recognizes the Temple’s rededication. Good so far?

Part of the rededication of the Temple is re-igniting the ner tamid. And what do we need for this? Oil from beaten olives, and because you’ve been a blog reader for some time, you know that we Jews distinguish between the holy, or sanctified, literally “set apart,” and the common, or appropriate for everyday use. To sanctify the oil for the ner tamid, to take common oil for everyday use and sanctify it, literally to set it apart, for cultic use in the menorah or lamp at the entrance to the Temple, there is an eight-day sanctification process.

To the Maccabees' dismay, after retaking the Temple, they could only recover a small amount of sanctified oil. The miracle of the oil for Hanukkah is that from that small amount of oil, the flame continued for all eight days while the new oil was sanctified. The ner tamid was re-ignited and burned continuously, and what does this represent? Gd’s presence in the Temple. Pretty cool, huh?

Like I alluded to yesterday, this interpretation comes largely from the rabbis of the Talmud. There was a tradition to emphasize the militarism of the Maccabees, but this did not sit comfortably with the ancient rabbis. Perhaps they were troubled by the glorification of militarism, or perhaps the concern was much more pragmatic: It’s not a good idea to publicly celebrate a rebellion against an occupying force when you have just been occupied by Rome. At any rate, the rabbis preferred to downplay the violence and recast the festival of dedication as a festival of light.

Here is the question that I suggest we wrestle with: Why did the Maccabees light the menorah at all, with such limited oil? Why not wait for the new oil to be sanctified? The instruction from Torah is to burn the oil day and night for all ages, so wouldn’t the Maccabees have known that they couldn’t yet perform the mitzvah, the instruction, without first producing more oil? Why not sanctify the new oil, then relight the lamp, with confidence they could keep the fire burning?

I turn us toward another insight from the rabbis of the Talmud, from the ancient work Ethics of Our Ancestors:

He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it (Pirkei Avot 3).

This is the real lesson of the Festival of Dedication: Our jobs are to do the work, even or maybe especially without any sure guarantee of its outcome. Despite knowing they lacked the oil to perform the instruction, the Maccabees lit the menorah anyway. Wouldn’t you know it, the lamp burned for all eight days until the new oil was ready. The lesson is taking the next best step, even without the promise of a good result. This comes from centering ourselves in our values.

We are not required to complete the work, but neither are we excused from taking it up. That is the resilience I want to draw from when I try to fulfill my obligation of repairing the world.

My favorite verse in Torah, and I’m certainly not alone in this, is Deuteronomy 16.20: Justice, justice, you shall pursue. I hope to ignite the fire of justice. Justice must be pursued even without the surety that it will be achieved.