The Hanukkah Anthology delves into the stories and messages of Hanukkah as they have unfolded in Jewish literature over the past two thousand years: biblical intimations of the festival, postbiblical writings, selections from the Talmud and midrashim, excerpts from medieval books, home liturgies, laws and customs, observances in different nations, stories and poems, art, and recipes. This timeless volume features many works by prominent authors, including Herman Wouk, Judah L. Magnes, Chaim Potok, Heinrich Heine, Emma Lazarus, Howard Fast, Sholom Aleichem, Curt Leviant, I. L. Peretz, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The Hanukkah Anthology delves into the stories and messages of Hanukkah as they have unfolded in Jewish literature over the past two thousand years: biblical intimations of the festival, postbiblical writings, selections from the Talmud and midrashim, excerpts from medieval books, home liturgies, laws and customs, observances in different nations, stories and poems, art, and recipes. This timeless volume features many works by prominent authors, including Herman Wouk, Judah L. Magnes, Chaim Potok, Heinrich Heine, Emma Lazarus, Howard Fast, Sholom Aleichem, Curt Leviant, I. L. Peretz, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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Overview
The Hanukkah Anthology delves into the stories and messages of Hanukkah as they have unfolded in Jewish literature over the past two thousand years: biblical intimations of the festival, postbiblical writings, selections from the Talmud and midrashim, excerpts from medieval books, home liturgies, laws and customs, observances in different nations, stories and poems, art, and recipes. This timeless volume features many works by prominent authors, including Herman Wouk, Judah L. Magnes, Chaim Potok, Heinrich Heine, Emma Lazarus, Howard Fast, Sholom Aleichem, Curt Leviant, I. L. Peretz, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780827613928 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Jewish Publication Society |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2018 |
| Series: | The JPS Holiday Anthologies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 504 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HANUKKAH AND ITS HISTORY
SOLOMON GRAYZEL
The First Hanukkah: 165 B. C. E.
The last outpost marched through the gates; the heavy wooden doors were swung shut, and the iron bolts moved into their sockets. Erect and gloomy, the captain of the small band of Syrian soldiers stood in the narrow court awaiting the report of his returning outpost. Its corporal saluted: "Just outside the walls of the city." He went on. Without moving, the captain again calculated the chance of holding out until the Syrian army, defeated in the field, would reorganize and come to his aid. The Acra fortress was none too strong, his trained soldiers none too many. As to these self-despis- ingjews ... His eyes wandered to where, silent, frightened, the bolder among them stood huddled in a corner. What good were they who were the cause of this trouble? Smart uniforms, smooth tongues, loud protestations of loyalty. Better in games of skill than any of his soldiers, on the field of battle, could they do a tenth as well as those uncouth farmers who were now approaching Jerusalem? That army of farmers and their leader, Judah, by what power were they able to defeat a Syrian host? ... Their mysterious God? ... The captain knew a moment of fear.
Before the walls of the city, Judah the Maccabee and his army halted. The great moment had come; Jerusalem was before them. No resistance was to be expected to their entrance into the city. The Syrian garrison was small; even with the support of the somewhat larger number of Hellenist Jews, the best the invader could hope to do would be to defend the Acra, and perhaps make an occasional sortie. To the attack, therefore! His own followers knew Judah's plan: it was to take the Acra by assault, and thus cleanse the city entirely of all foreigners and apostates. The command was to move forward. With an exultant shout the Judeans crossed the ruined wall. As it began its march through the city, the army ofjudah sang.
Silent streets, deserted houses! Is this Jerusalem, the joyous, the populous city? In the poorer section, into which the army first entered, the streets were covered with weeds. The inhabitants had been dispersed long ago by the invading Syrians. Some had remained to become martyrs. Some of the army, themselves fugitives, recalled Eleazar, the aged scribe, and Hannah and her seven sons. The singing began to subside; the army was saddened. Onward they marched, through wider streets, by handsomer houses. Here, too, a stillness as of the grave. The residents had but recently fled; this time before the conquering Jews. Here and there, in front of a home, stood a low, carved stone table. Angry mutter- ings now began to rise from among the army. They knew these stone tables; these were altars, altars upon which Jews had offered sacrifices to pagan gods. The marchers cursed them and called for vengeance.
To reach the Acra it was necessary to pass close to the Temple. No word of command was spoken, yet officers and men gravitated toward the center of holiness. They came close; they stopped. They saw dilapidated walls, doors torn from their hinges and hanging awry, curtains in tatters, grass, weeds. Over all hung a deathly stillness, and in the center, above a gold altar, the statue of a god — a dead god in a dead sanctuary. There could be no further talk of an attack upon the Acra. Against his better judgment Judah yielded. He did not even argue.
The Temple became a beehive of activity. Fighters became builders. Feverishly they worked to repair the walls, the doors, the curtains. They gathered all the utensils and put them aside, for these had been desecrated. The idol was taken out of the Temple area and stepped upon by thousands of feet until it was ground into a fine dust. But what to do with the altar? Upon it sacrifices had been performed by pious priests; its stones were therefore sacred even though defiled. It was taken apart, stone by stone, and put away into a corner. Pious hands built a new altar. Pious hands prepared bread for the table inside the hall. Pious hands prepared new utensils.
For weeks this activity went on. No one thought any longer of fighting against the Acra. Judah barely persuaded the men to take turns watching the fortress, lest the foe within break out and undo the work that had been done. Finally all was ready; all, that is, except the menorah, the sacred candelabrum for whose replacement no material was at hand. A celebration was in order. But for what day should it be set? A happy thought occurred to someone. The twenty-fifth of Kislev was but a few days off, and it marked the third anniversary of the desecration of the Temple. Indeed, what could be more fitting than that the rededication should take place on that day?
The day came, and it was celebrated gloriously. Priests were found in the army, and they performed the sacrifices. As some of these soldier-priests entered the chambers they discovered some old and obviously long-unused iron spikes. They attached small torches to them and made a menorah — a rough, soldier-menorah, but in a proper setting. Palm branches were held by hands that had held swords. Hallelujah was sung by throats that had shouted a battle cry. A new poem was recited by the Levites: "I extol You, O Lord, for You have lifted me up, and not let my enemies rejoice over me."
Not far off, the Syrian captain stood on the watchtower of the Acra, relieved and puzzled.
That was the first Hanukkah.
The Origin of Hanukkah
How did Hanukkah come to be and how does it fit into the history of the Jewish people? Who are the men mentioned in the story, and why is it so important that we still remember it after twenty centuries? This is a much longer story. To tell it we must go back some centuries before the event, and follow the changes among the Jewish people in relation to the transformation of the Near East. For the story of Hanukkah reveals why they alone — and none of the petty nations who were their jealous neighbors, none of the great empires that contended for dominion over them — survived as a conscious and historic group.
Alexander the Great will be the focal point for the first part of our story, since his coming to the East marks a definite era in the history of that part of the world. The touch of his conquering sword awakened Asia. New administrative methods, new men, new ideas replaced the lethargic system of the unwieldly, loosely bound, though benevolent, Persian Empire. The Eastern world was ready for this change, and not even a generation of warfare, which followed upon the conqueror's death while his generals were dividing the spoils of the conquest, did anything to hinder the spread of Greek civilization. The very soil responded to the new manner of life and, because of the modernization of the methods of agriculture, began to produce more abundantly. Commerce began to flourish because of the intimate connection between East and West. The population of the Asiatic lands bordering on the Mediterranean increased rapidly.
In the territory under Greek influence lived a little nation, small in area and in population. Before the advent of Alexander to the East the Greeks had hardly heard of this people. The name the Greeks gave to its land was Philistia, after the Philistines, who lived upon the coast. Nonetheless, vague rumors had reached the Greeks of a people dwelling inland who were devoted to agriculture and to an invisible celestial God, whose law of life its scribes were expounding. Travelers brought word to Greece of this "nation of philosophers who worship the sky."
Two centuries before the arrival of Alexander, the Jews, this inland people, having returned from Babylonian exile, had reconstituted their nation under the milder overlordship of the Persian king. They rebuilt the Temple in the city of jerusalem, and, failing to reestablish the Davidic dynasty, they lived under the rule of the high priest of the House of Aaron, who combined autonomous secular power with his religious functions. Comparatively little is known about the history of the Jews during these two centuries. Their neighbors, the Philistines, Ammonites, and Samaritans, had tried to hamper the establishment of the nation, but the militant tactics of Nehemiah and the spiritual activity of Ezra repulsed their plots and set the small nation on the road to mental and physical independence.
Though we know practically nothing of what happened after these two leaders had done their life's work, it is clear that the age which followed their activity was highly productive spiritually. It was then that the prophetic books are said to have received the form in which we now have them. It was then that the small community was finally weaned away from those idolatrous practices against which the prophets had inveighed and which continued to characterize the religion of the peoples about them. Above all, it was then that the class of teachers known as scribes, soferim, was active, and so thorough was their teaching that when the avalanche of Greek civilization was sweeping everything before it, the Jewish mode of life was strong enough to offer successful resistance.
In fact, for a full century after the coming of Alexander, Judea continued to be unaffected by Greek ways. Their neighbors had succumbed easily. The cities in the district once known as Philistia, as well as those of Ammon, Moab, and Edom, had given up the very gods in whose names they had fought the Hebrews of Bible days; they had identified these gods with one or another of the gods of Olympus, adopted Greek dress and even Greek speech, and thus disappeared as entities from the pages of history. Thejews, to be sure, were also affected by the Greeks, but not in the same way. When the new Egyptian city of Alexandria was built, many Jews were taken there, and soon they became an important segment of that city's population and contributed greatly to its commercial development.
The Syrian emperors, in their turn, took many Jews out of Babylonia and settled them in the newly constituted cities of their empire. These Jews naturally learned Greek ways of dress and speech and other externals of Greek civilization. In the matter of religion, however, which played a central part in the constitution of the Greek city, the jews held aloof, though this complicated their life and led to friction with their neighbors. But in Judea proper, small and somewhat isolated from the world's great highways, the inhabitants were not subjected to such external influences, and therefore continued in the even tenor of their ways.
But a situation soon developed that made the continuance of such isolation impossible. It has ever been the fate of Palestine to be a bone of contention between whatever power controlled Egypt and whatever power controlled Syria. Soon after the death of Alexander, Judea fell to Egypt and the Ptolemy family that ruled over it. In the last quarter of the third century B. C. E. the rulers of Syria, descendants of Seleucus, one of Alexander's generals, began to reassert their claim to the land. They did, in fact, cast an avid eye upon Egypt, and the district of Lower Syria, of which Judea was a part, was the first step in the realization of their ambitions to be Alexander's successors. In the year 198 B. C. E. Judea was finally incorporated into the Syrian state, and the Seleucid kings were faced with the problem of making that incorporation permanent.
How did the jews themselves feel about this change in their overlord? When a nation attains international importance it is natural for the preferences of its people to be divided on the basis of public and private interests. United in religion, Jews the world over felt a sympathy for each other. Those of the Diaspora, that is, of the lands outside Palestine, were accustomed to sending their annual contribution for the support of the holy Temple in Jerusalem. Small as the individual contributions were, they added up to vast sums. On the other hand, the jews of Judea could not but feel flattered or outraged according to the treatment meted out to their fellow Jews in Diaspora lands. Initially, the Ptolemies of Egypt were favorably disposed to the jews of Alexandria, but for reasons we need not go into here, their policy underwent a change at the very time when the Syrian Empire sought to win Judean sympathy for itself. What is more, the high priest may have realized that, since the majority of the Jews of that day lived in Asia and under Syrian power, it was more to the advantage of the Temple for Jerusalem to be connected politically with this majority than with the comparatively smaller population then residing in Egypt. By and large, therefore, it would seem that the jews of Judea were satisfied with the change of rule. They little dreamed what troubles it would bring upon them within the short space of thirty years.
It is well to bear in mind that the Jewish victories that are celebrated on Hanukkah were not only of political and religious importance, but of social significance as well. A social transformation was taking place within Jewish life that, in a very real sense, formed the basis for the religious and political uprising of the Maccabees. The beginnings of this social change were small. While Judea was still under Egyptian rule, a certain Jew of noble ancestry and related to the high priest, Joseph ben Tobias, took advantage of the anti- Egyptian inclinations of the high priest and of the Egyptian king's need for money to have himself appointed chief tax collector for the entire province of Syria. Supported by an Egyptian army he filled the hearts of the jews and pagans of Palestine with fear, and his own pockets with money. In the loose administration of the time, being a tax collector meant more than collecting taxes; it was tantamount to economic dictatorship. Joseph and his sons, generally known as the Tobiades, along with the officials he appointed, achieved two objectives: they caused Jews to be disliked by the gentiles, and they established Jerusalem as a commercial center with themselves and their henchmen as a powerful aristocracy. Thereafter Jerusalem was no longer on a bypath in the Greek world; Judea's isolation was ended.
The Jewish theocracy was now turned into an oligarchy. The priests had until now constituted the aristocratic element of the population. Their duties were in the Temple, and their income was from the Temple treasury. Organized into a gerousia, an advisory council to the high priest, they were the chief authority of the autonomous state. Now, as a result of commerce, a class was added to the Judean population whose claim to power rested on its wealth. Like the Tobiades, this wealthy class either became identical with the ruling powers or identified itself with them.
Commerce and wealth brought these people in touch with Hellenistic attitudes and manner of life. Individual material success was the order of the day. The common people during the period when the Tobiades were rising to power have left no documents from which their feelings about the changed order could be gauged. But in the wise words of Ben Sira, who wrote the book Ecclesiasticus, now a part of the collection known as the Apocrypha, some modern scholars see a reflection of the situation that then obtained. Thus in chapter 13, verses 18-20, Ben Sira says: "What agreement is there between the hyena and the dog? And what peace between the rich and the poor? As the wild ass is the lion's prey in the wilderness, so the rich eat up the poor. As the proud hate humility, so doth the rich abhor the poor." Again and again he returns to this subject. A class struggle was on the horizon.
For the most part, however, the jews were a peasant people, while wealth was centered in the cities. They must have heard of the ways of the wealthy, though their actual contact with them, while painful, could not have been frequent. Something in addition to economic pressure was needed to change social cleavage into actual revolt. This something soon appeared in the form of the hellenization of the upper stratum of Jerusalem society, a change so thorough as to shock the conservative and loyal population.
Their economic ambitions drove the Tobiades and their followers further on the road to hellenization. In order to increase their commercial opportunities it seemed necessary to place Jerusalem on an equal plane with other ambitious cities. Privileges of self-government were needed, none of which could be obtained unless Jerusalem adopted a thoroughly Greek constitution. No doubt a great deal of social prestige went hand in hand with these economic advantages. But all this could be done only after the conservative element of the population had been either won over or cowed, and especially after the actual rule over the land, lodged in the high priest, had been obtained by the elements favorable to the "reform."
Scandalized as the pious elements of the Jewish population, in and out of Jerusalem, were by the gymnasia that were now built in the city, by the new manners and the new Greek-style clothes affected by the young bloods of the aristocracy, and by the neglect on the part of the young priests of their sacred duties in the Temple, they still had no power to make their objection heard.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Hanukkah Anthology"
by .
Copyright © 1976 The Jewish Publication Society of America.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS,
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER,
PREFACE,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
1 Hanukkah and Its History by Solomon Grayzel,
2 Hanukkah in the Bible,
3 Hanukkah in Postbiblical Writings,
4 Hanukkah in Talmud and Midrash,
5 The Medieval Scroll of the Hasmoneans,
6 Hanukkah in Jewish Law,
7 Hanukkah in Modern Prose,
8 Hanukkah in Art by Joseph Gutmann,
9 A Hanukkah Drama,
10 Hanukkah in Many Lands,
11 Hanukkah in Poetry,
12 Hanukkah in the Short Story,
13 Hanukkah Oddities by Sidney B. Hoenig,
14 Hanukkah Sidelights,
15 The Hanukkah Cuisine,
16 Children's Stories for Hanukkah,
17 Children's Poems for Hanukkah,
18 Home Service for Hanukkah,
19 Hanukkah Programs and Activities,
20 Dances for Hanukkah,
21 Music for Hanukkah,
NOTES,
GLOSSARY OF HANUKKAH TERMS,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,