<< Back to Reading Room

Chanukah - Festival of Lights

Around 2300 years ago, the Jews of Israel found themselves facing a dilemma that would confront them throughout their history, up to today: The battle for Israel 's soul.

Back then, Greek civilization was taking the known world by storm. Greece was the new light, shining a new world order into what had been a long Dark Age. All on whom this light shone had to choose between embracing the Hellenistic way of life, or opposing one of the most potent global trends of all time.

The people of Israel were bitterly divided in their responses to the Hellenizing of their people. While many of the more educated Jews sought to embrace Greece and assimilate its "daring" attributes into their way of life, others, among them those who clung more firmly to their religious heritage, vehemently opposed it.

In around 168 BC the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes (one of the Seleucids who succeeded Alexander the Great and built a realm in Syria and the surrounding lands) sought to force Greek culture on the Jews by introducing Hellenistic cults and doing away with the Jewish religious community.

The "mad King" as he was known, instituted laws forbidding circumcision and Sabbath day observance under penalty of death.

In 167 he occupied Jerusalem , plundering the Temple treasuries and desecrating the sacred building by sacrificing unclean animals on the alter of burnt-offerings. He then dedicated the Temple to Zeus Olympus and erected a statue of the Greek god.

A priestly family led by Judas Maccabeus and his brothers rose up in opposition to this abomination and in 164 BC threw Antiochus out of the city. The Maccabees established a small but independent priest-led state, and cleansed and dedicated the Temple anew to the God of Israel.

Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights or the Feast of Dedication, is an eight-day annual celebration of this event.

NOTE: Today Israel is torn over choosing between the ways of the "enlightened" world - which demands with ever increasing shrillness that the Jews shed their "archaic" religious traditions - and being labelled an intransigent obstacle in the path of globalisation and a unified world order of democracies.