Lighting Candles for Liberty Today’s fights for political and religious freedom lend an added resonance to Hanukkah celebrations. By Ruth R. Wisse
http://www.wsj.com/articles/lighting-candles-for-liberty-1449272738
Modern human accomplishments seldom outstrip miracles of the past, but those who light the candles for Hanukkah beginning Sunday night are involved in an even greater struggle for political and religious freedom than the Maccabees in their time.
The festival commemorates the recapture and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem almost 22 centuries ago, initiating eight decades of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. Today’s defenders of Israel fight not only for their own restored political and religious freedom but for the right of all nations to freedom from increasingly violent and maddened enemies.
Jewish political history is well represented by the emblematic legend of the oil that was required to consecrate the Temple after its defilement at the hands of the Hellenistic Seleucid rulers. Thought to be enough to last only a single day, the oil burned for the eight days needed to obtain a new supply.
I was amused recently to find this caution on a Jewish website: “Note that the holiday commemorates the miracle of the oil, not the military victory: Jews do not glorify war.” Yet obviously the miracle of the oil corresponds to the improbable victory of the Maccabees over insurmountable military odds. Hanukkah celebrates not war but the self-rule that was unattainable without it. Like Judaism itself, the festival fuses religious and national experience.
If Jews celebrate for eight days the war they won against the Greeks, they mourn for three weeks the war they subsequently lost against the Romans. The extended period of national grieving in the Hebrew summer month of Av commemorates the destruction of both the second Temple in the year 70 and the first Temple by the Babylonians six centuries before that. Taken together, the biblical Book of Lamentations and the Book of Maccabees show how important political autonomy was to the Jews and how harrowingly they felt its loss.
Nonetheless, unlike nations that disappear upon conquest, Jews proved uniquely able to live among other peoples both within the land of Israel and outside it. In the almost two millennia when the land was under foreign occupation, Jews pursued their way of life wherever they were allowed to do so. This ability of Jewish minorities to accommodate themselves to non-Jewish majorities tested the latter’s ability to tolerate and coexist with Jews—successfully doing so has everywhere been a sign of political maturity, just as failure has been a harbinger of repression.
All the spiritual-intellectual resources and creative powers of adaptation that Jews had cultivated in their centuries of dispersion were not enough to protect them from anti-Semitism, an ideology that held Jews themselves accountable for the aggression against them. Where Greek and Roman rulers had tried to crush the Jews by ravaging their way of life, modern European leaders, including those who had made the greatest claims for human progress, scapegoated Jews for their own societal failures and applied their ingenuity to new methods of persecution and, in the end, mass murder.
Here begins the modern miracle. On that same continent, European Jews mobilized a movement of Jewish self-emancipation that would replenish and repossess the land of Israel. Had Zionism organized earlier, or Nazism later, millions more Jews would have propelled the return to Zion. But just as oil that sufficed for a day lasted as long as it had to, Jews in numbers scarcely sufficient to win a battle held off the entire Arab League in the 1940s. Within three years of their mass destruction, the Jewish people had reclaimed sovereignty in their too-long-occupied land.
How good it would be if we could do without miracles. Instead of organizing their unity against their Semitic brethren, Arab leaders might have chosen coexistence, if not peace. In the years following the establishment of modern Israel in 1948, many new Arab states came into being—Bahrain (1971), Comoros (1975), Djibouti (1977), Kuwait (1961), Mauritania and Somalia (1960), Sudan and Tunisia (1956), United Arab Emirates (1971) and Yemen (1990). With Lebanon having been formed in 1941, Jordan in 1946, and Libya in 1947, and with Algeria gaining its independence in 1962, this means that most Arab League countries emerged at the same time as the Jewish state or afterward.
Had Arab leaders accepted the partition of Palestine in 1947 and negotiated the exchange of Jewish and Arab refugees, there would have been no need for history’s most lopsided war—their war against the Jews—and no need for spectacular proofs of Jewish grit.
The endurance of Jews as a self-accountable people is rendered all the more remarkable by the record of nations incapable of accepting their existence. Arab and Muslim leaders who fomented anger, grievance, blame and aggression against the state of Israel unleashed a violence they can no longer contain, one that has spread across the globe. Israel applies its ingenuity and resources to helping to stave off the resulting carnage and safeguard the civilized world. One could do without this miracle, but a miracle it is.
Ms. Wisse, a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007) and “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor” (Princeton, 2013).
Comments are closed.
