Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
Chanukah is kind of lucky because everyone just loves
Chanukah, which is why everyone and their dog wants to borrow Chanukah
and use it to express themselves however. Take Second Gentleman
Doug Emhoff. He thinks Chanukah is about people hiding and running out of oil
and such. You know the tweet I’m talking about—the one from 2023—the one ole
Dougie had to delete because it was stupid and made up and betrayed his
ignorance about his own religion and heritage.
“The story of Chanukah and the story of the Jewish people has always been one of hope and resilience. In the Chanukah story, the Jewish people were forced into hiding. No one thought they would survive or that the few drops of oil they had would last,” said Doug E. “But they survived, and the oil kept burning.”
Oh my. People like Dougie Emhoff really shouldn’t just make
stuff up about Chanukah and distribute it to the masses. Because people were bound to see it and make fun of him and his ignorance. Which they did. Because Chanukah
is definitely not about people hiding and running out of Wesson.
But Doug wasn’t done putting his foot—instead of say a jelly
donut or even a latke—in his mouth, “During those eight days in hiding,” said Doug, “they
recited their prayers and continued their traditions.
“That’s why Chanukah means dedication. It was during those
dark nights that the Maccabees dedicated themselves to maintaining hope and
faith in the oil, each other and their Judaism.”
“In these dark times, I think of that story,” added Emhoff.
Uh huh. Sure you do, Dougie. I can just picture you late on the night of November 5, 2024, thinking of Chanukah. It would have been a very dark moment for you, for sure. I can’t even imagine how loud and long Kamala screamed and pulled her hair out and blamed everyone but herself on her poor showing in the election. But you had faith in the oil!
Old Doug would not have been bothered one bit about Kamala's stunning loss. Not Doug. Doug E. would have been thinking about Chanukah and about hope and about how to squeeze out a few more drops of canola so he wouldn’t have to go to the store and pay out the nose for another bottle because of Biden-Harris inflation.
I jest.
But it has long been the way
of progressive Jews like Emhoff to use and distort the holiday of Chanukah to
suit their agenda—an agenda that has nothing to do with religion. In 2012, for
example, writing for the Portland
Press Herald, Rabbi Akiva Herzfeld, an “orthodox” rabbi, tied Chanukah to gay
marriage. “With my very own eyes, I have seen a great miracle this year right
here in Maine. A small group of people, homosexuals and their supporters, stood
up for their equal rights in marriage.”
Wait, whut??? Chanukah isn’t about standing up for gay
marriage. The complete opposite of that. Chanukah is about RELIGION.
Specifically about Jewish fidelity to the Jewish religion.
Writing about Herzfeld’s idiotic op-ed, Rabbi Steven
Pruzansky was clear, “The demand for same-sex
marriage is personal and political, but not at all religious.”
Herzfeld, writes Pruzansky, “inverts the story of Chanukah on its head in order to make a political point that is shockingly shallow and entirely bereft of Torah wisdom.”
What makes the irony even more pungent is that the Greeks – against whom the Maccabees fought and prevailed – were avid supporters of and indulgers in homosexuality. It was just one of the immoral practices of the Hellenists that the faithful Jews found so repugnant, and therefore went to war in order to purge the land of it. In other words, to be faithful to the Chanukah story, the rabbi should have opposed same sex marriage. I.e., rather than succumb to the morality of the dominant culture and wrench the definition of marriage from its traditional moorings, he should have stood with the faithful Jews of yesteryear (and today) and preached the truth of Torah even if – particularly if – he would thereby remain in the minority. That is, after all, a dominant theme of Chanukah historically: that the Jewish people have survived not by mimicking the fluid morality of others but by clinging tenaciously to our own timeless moral norms. Surely the rabbi knows this.
Back in 2014, my piece, The
Truth About Hannukkah, was yoinked and
printed word for word on a website with an evangelical readership. The piece
was an attempt to explain Chanukah in simple terms, in order to combat this
rabid infection of everyone abusing the holiday in support of their current
ideological flavor of the month or minute. It was irritating the heck out of
me. So I explained Chanukah and the history of the holiday as I saw it, in
simple terms, a kind of Chanukah for Idiots:
Those flickering Hanukkah lights have nothing to do with equality, integration, and multiculturalism. They have nothing to do with coexistence. They have nothing to do with charity. They have nothing to do with peace.
The candles, in fact, have everything to do with insulating the Jewish people from outside influences which might contaminate them and draw them away from their God.
The story of Hanukkah, the real story, and not the pretend stories that people tell you, begins in 174 BCE when Antiochus IV decided to consolidate his reign by imposing a single culture and religion on those who lived in the region of the Seleucid Empire. Seeing Judaism as a threat, Antiochus outlawed Jewish practice and installed Jews who had come under the influence of Greek culture (Hellenism) in positions of Jewish influence in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.
Torah scrolls were burned. Many Jews were killed for refusing to give in to Antiochus’ decrees. They would die rather than give up their God and their faith in favor of Hellenism.
The altar of the Temple was defiled by a Hellenist Jew and that was the tipping point. Matthias killed this man with his sword and then it was all-out war. The Jews formed legions and fought back against those who would destroy their faith.
They fought against integration.
They fought against multiculturalism.
They fought against coexistence.
They fought assimilation—the outside influences that would drown out the voice and spark of the Jewish soul within.
And won.
The evangelical website plagiarism was only the start of what proved to be a very strange phenomenon in which churches distributed the article among their parishioners, and homeowners all over America found copies left outside their doors. At any rate, some two months after the Chanukah (or “Hannukkah” as we were spelling it that year) piece, I had an odd encounter on Twitter, which led to the following email exchange with a Jewish woman in California:
I saw your tweet about getting in touch with you about your interest in my blog with this address. How may I help you?
Varda Epstein
Hi! Yes I don't have a twitter account, but my daughter tweeted you for me with my email address. I was at an upscale outdoor shopping mall in Berkeley CA on Friday, and when I returned to my car, your flyer, "The Truth About Hanukkah" was on my windshield and plastered on all the cars in the lot.
It befuddled me!! When I read it, I thought it was a Christian doctrine, as it read like that. These days there is so much antisemitism that I was concerned about who did this and why?
(name withheld)
Ten years ago, I sat in my living room in Israel, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where a Christian slips a
flyer about Chanukah under your windshield, and your mind goes to, “Is it
antisemitic?”
Today, I no longer want to tell anyone about Chanukah, what it is, or how they
should observe it. I’m not a rabbi and it’s not my place. What I do want is for
Jews to show more intellectual curiosity! Don’t take his
word for it when an “orthodox” rabbi tells you that the message of Chanukah is
that community support for gay marriage is a “great miracle.”
In general, when it comes to Jews mouthing off about Judaism, if
what they say sounds shockingly cool, it likely isn’t. More probably it’s just
someone saying stuff they made up to get attention. That’s the kind of person
who, for instance, is going to tell you that Chanukah is about the miracle of
abortion, or the fight for human rights in some third-world country. Don’t listen
to that person. See through them, please.
Even if you don’t have a rabbi, or much knowledge of Judaism, you can question
what people tell you about Chanukah. Don’t be satisfied with a recitation or a narrative.
Press them for sources. Get the facts about Chanukah and don’t allow others to
use this Jewish holiday to get you to believe whatever they want you to
believe.
Doug Emhoff used Chanukah as a platform to issue platitudes. His words were meant to be some kind of sweet message for the public, something to post on social media on a Jewish holiday, just generally. “Poor” Doug. He didn’t realize that it was important to be accurate about the Chanukah story and its meaning. From his point of view, that tweet was just a season’s greeting, for crying out loud. He was doing something NICE, and look how they treated him. Sheesh.
And yet, Doug ended up deleting that tweet. He came to understand that, indeed, some folks genuinely care about these matters—about the accuracy of it all, and about what Chanukah means. Perhaps Doug Emhoff views these individuals as religious zealots, failing to see that he himself unwittingly represents the very Hellenized Jews that the Maccabees themselves were forced to confront.
Chanukah Sameach to all my readers!
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