https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hanukkah-celebrates-victory-in-struggle-to-maintain-judaism-opinion-686901
At the end of the Second Temple period, Jews struggled against the influence of Hellenism and the cultures and armies of Greece and Rome. They struggled to maintain Judaism and Jewish values and to preserve their independence as a nation-state in Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel. Their struggle was not only against external enemies but also internal divisions in a society divided among religious and political factions. They had a Temple, the focus of religious inspiration – at least for many – wise rabbinic authorities, a thriving economy and a powerful army. What happened?
As noted in the ArtScroll book, Chanukah: Its History, Observance, And Significance, “the famous ‘miracle of the lights,’ when a one-day supply of pure olive oil burned for eight days, took place three years after the beginning of the Hasmonean revolt. That is the only miracle that the Talmud (Shabbat 21b) mentions in its brief description of the Hanukkah events. The Al HaNissim liturgy, however, which recounts the festival’s origin and which is inserted into the Hanukkah prayers, tells a different story. There, the eight-day miracle of the oil is not even mentioned. There, the emphasis is on the miracles of the military triumph.”
Rabbi Dr. Shubert Spero, in his book Holocaust and Return to Zion, writes that Hanukkah is “about the condition of basic unity and fraternity of Jewish society during the first century CE. The rabbis were referring to the disintegration of the Jewish people in Judea into a cluster of warring and bickering sects, of which Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and New Christians were only the major ones.
“These religious and political divisions were the background for the unjustified hatred that destroyed the national unity of the Jewish people. There no longer was a common purpose or a felt mutual responsibility to support a national Jewish polity. This was the underlying cause of the disaster.”