The Maccabees Were Not the Taliban. Or Che Guevara. Or the Irgun. Let’s Celebrate the Miracle.

Eventually, I began to understand our Rabbis’ approach to the holiday as a celebration of a miraculous deliverance at the hand of God rather than as a commemoration of military might.  Of course our Rabbis, under the ruthless Roman yoke in Eretz Yisrael and, later, under the relatively benign protection of the Persian Empire in Bavel, had practical reasons to demur from celebrating political rebellion.

But there’s more to it than that.  Our Rabbis understood the Maccabean story less as a fight for Judean political sovereignty and more as a crucial tipping point in the construction of what would become the Judaism-as-religion that we have inherited.  They incorporated the holiday into our spiritual heritage, a candle that would light our way no matter where the Diaspora might take us.

There is an historical basis for their understanding.  Antiochus Epiphanes, the tyrant who tried to impose Greek worship on the Judeans/proto-Jews, was a Seleucid, a successor to Alexander the Great.  When Alexander arrived at Jerusalem, he was flattered, he was given his tribute/protection money—and he left the Temple alone.  It was when the Seleucids attempted to force their way of worship onto the Hebrews that everything exploded.  The discovery of this bottom line was, I believe, a key moment in Jewish self-understanding, one of those foundational events that enabled the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism out of the ashes of our Temple when it fell.