By: Mark Moffa
ROOSEVELT – Is Hanukkah a holiday of diversity or a holiday of national pride?
That’s the question Shalom Gittler, religious director of the Congregation Anshei Roosevelt posed to a group of approximately a dozen people during a talk last week at the synagogue.
"Hanukkah and Christmas, coming at the same time of the year, have been linked in popular culture," he said.
With several holidays coming at this time of year, Mr. Gittler said, people tend to celebrate diversity.
But, he went on to argue, Hanukkah – which begins at sundown tonight (Thursday) – should be a holiday for Jews to celebrate their heritage.
Hanukkah is the celebration of the Jewish victory around 165 BCE over the Syrian Greeks, who controlled Israel at the time.
Mr. Gittler delivered a comparison between the Jewish and Greek culture.
"The Jewish culture and the Greek culture were diametrically opposed," he said. "You didn’t have many religious fanatics back then – except for us."
He talked of the Jews’ unusual degree of learning and study, the Jewish faith and the Jewish mission.
"Our mission is to bring holiness to the world," he said. "The pillar of all wisdom is to know that there was a first being."
The Greeks, however, did not share the same definition of wisdom, Mr. Gittler said.
The Greeks were interested in laws of science and believed Aristotle’s philosophy that a Prime Mover created the world but remained completely separate and uninvolved in it.
The Greeks also glorified the body, he said, whereas the Jews glorified the soul.
As the Syrian Greeks ruled over the Jews, they tried to convert them to the Greek way of life, Mr. Gittler said, even stripping them of the rights to follow the Jewish laws as decreed in the Torah and prohibiting sacred acts such as the circumcision of Jewish boys.
By stopping Jews from declaring the new moon, or celebrating the beginning of a new Hebrew month, the Greeks tried to strip the Jews of their connection with God, Mr. Gittler said.
"Declaring the new moon was, in essence, our connection with God," Mr. Gittler said.
It is that connection that makes the Jews unique, he said.
In the Hanukkah story, a day’s worth of oil lasted for eight days as the Jewish soldiers waited for a messenger to return with more oil.
The oil allowed the Jews to keep the eternal flame in their temple lit, and marked the defining moment in their victory over the Greeks.
But the Hanukkah celebration should not be focus on the military victory, Mr. Gittler said.
"The miracle here was liberating the temple and being able to worship God there," he said.
The authors of the Torah, he said, didn’t give much attention to Hanukkah because they wanted Jews to focus on living by God’s hand.
"The authors did not want us to get too enamored of the idea of the military victory," he said.
The moral of the story then, Mr. Gittler said, is that although the story of Hanukkah contains messages of diversity, Jews should focus on their national pride.
"What’s really important for us is to realize that the deeper message here … is not to have a Jewish Christmas," he said.
