This edition of the Conservative Yeshiva’s E-Shiur is made possible by a generous grant from Temple Zion Israelite Center, Miami, Florida. 

By Rabbi Hillel Hayyim Lavery-Yisraeli

Hanukkah Source Sheet – It’s Greek to Them (pdf)
Hanukkah – It’s Greek to Them (pdf, printable version of this webpage)

Sources of the Hanukkah Story
Today Hanukkah is perhaps the best-known Jewish holiday throughout the world. However, despite its popularity, Hanukkah is the holiday with the least textual basis. The story of Hanukkah does not appear in the Tanakh.  And while there is a Talmudic tractate named for the one-day festival of Purim (“Massekhet Megillah”),  only a few pages of the Babylonian Talmud (B. Shabbat 21b-23a) are devoted to Hanukkah, including one small paragraph describing the historical event, and a few pages dealing with the laws of lighting Hanukkah candles.

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By Shaiya Rothberg, PhD, Instructor in Bible and Philosophy

            The Maccabees rose up against their oppressors, attained freedom, and reinstated the Temple’s holy service. There was oil for only one day but miraculously it provided eight days of light.

This story contradicts a strictly rational world view. You might think I’m referring to the miracle of the oil. But the truly irrational element in the Hanukah story is freedom. There is a very compelling contemporary philosophic and scientific argument that freedom doesn’t exist. The argument says that everything we think and feel is encoded in the material processes happening in our brains. And these material processes mechanistically follow the laws of nature. Freedom makes no sense. However, we may reasonably object: even while the logic of that argument is solid, here, inside my head, I experience myself as free, whether that makes sense or not! But how can it both be true that freedom can’t exist, because matter – including our bodies and brains – simply follows the mechanistic laws of nature, and that freedom does exist, as in our subjective experience?

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By Rabbi Hillel C. Lavery-Yisraeli

CY Hanukkah Public or Private Observance E-shiur Sourcesheet (pdf)
CY Hanukkah Public or Private Observance E-shiur (pdf, printable version of this webpage)

Hanukkah is often celebrated as the holiday of “religious freedom.” More accurately, it is a holiday celebrating our ability to practice Judaism unhindered, without pressure or influence to do otherwise. At the time, in the second century BCE, many Jews attempted to combine their ancient Jewish practices with newly popular Hellenistic ones; the Maccabees sought to put an end to this.

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By Shoshana Cohen, Instructor in Bible and Jewish Law

According to popular Jewish tradition on the 25^th of Kislev the Maccabees defeated the evil Greeks and rededicated the defiled temple.  Hanukkah celebrates not only the military victory but also a spiritual one, of good over evil, of light over darkness.

Several non-Rabbinic sources (I&II Maccabees and Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews) tell the Hanukkah story in much greater detail, and more significantly, indicate that the story did not end on 25 Kislev.  In fact, immediately following the rededication that day, the Greeks recapturedJerusalemand were not defeated for good until 13 Adar, when the head of their leader, Nikanor, was cut off and displayed at the gates of the city. According to these accounts our Hanukkah was just a stage along the rather circuitous route to victory and independence.

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Rabbi Shmuel Lewis, PhD, Rosh Yeshiva

The Talmud relates the famous story of the pitcher of oil that miraculously burned for eight days and the mitzvah instituted by the Sages to light Hanukkah candles for eight nights.  When we perform this mitzvah we use the standard blessing formula – asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu (“who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us”) – as if this mitzvah were a Torah obligation transmitted through Moses to the children of Israel. The Talmud asks where God commanded us to light Hanukkah candles (Bavli Shabbat 23a). 

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