"The Discipline of Hanukkah"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 13^th of December 1998

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

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Opening words

First Reading: Zechariah

Second Reading: Linda McCarriston

Hanukkah Prayer

Sermon: The Discipline of Hanukkah

The Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here

a community gathered in peace
to worship in peace.
to worship in peace.
Circling with the circling stars,
circling with the generations,
circling with the eyes of all who live on earth,
together in deliberate peace.
we turn toward deeper peace,
we turn toward visions of deeper justice,
we turn and turn until compassion is native to our hearts.
Praise for the world! Praise for life!
Praise for the opportunity to circle together again in peace.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]

The First Reading comes from the scroll of Zakarya, called in English Zechariah. He wrote his oracles and visions in 416 BCE. This is the haftarah, or the prophetic reading for the days of Hanukkah in the rabbinical tradition.

Then the messenger came to me again. It was as if I suddenly awoke from the deep sleep.

The messenger asked “What do you see?”

I said “I see a menorah, the golden lamp-stand from the temple, with seven oil lamps upon the branches, and seven wicks. And I see two olive trees on either side of the menorah.” Then I asked the messenger “What are these?”

“You don’t know?” asked the messenger.

“No, sir, I don’t.” I said.

“These flames on the menorah are the eyes of the Eternal which range around the whole earth.”

“And the olive trees?”

“These are the prophets anointed to preach peace, those who take the Eternal’s side on this earth.”

So, with this vision in his heart, I said to Zerubabel, “This is the word of the Eternal for you. ‘Not by force of arms, not by power and might, but by my spirit!’ ”

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]

The Second Reading comes from the anthology of sacred poetry called Burning Bright. It’s a poem of Alaskan poet, Linda McCarriston, written in the early 90’s.

Riding out at Evening

At dusk, everything blurs and softens. From here, out over the long valley, the fields and hills pull up the first slight sheets of evening, as, over the next hour, heavier, darker ones will follow.

Quieted roads. Predictable deer browsing in a neighbor’s field, another’s herd of heifers, the kitchen lights starting in many windows. On horseback I take it all in, neither visitor nor intruder, but kin passing, closer and closer to night, its cold streams rising in the sugarbush and hollow.

Half aloud, I say to the horse, or myself, or whoever: let fire not come to this house nor that barn, nor lightning strike the cattle. Let dogs not gain the gravid doe, let the lights of the rooms convey what they seem to.

And who is to say it is useless or foolish to ride out at evening in the falling light, alone, wishing, or praying for particular good to particular beings on one small road in a huge world?

The horse bears me along, like grace, making me better than what I am, and what I think or say or see is whole in these moments, is neither small nor broken. For up, out of the inscrutable earth have come my body and the separate body of the mare: flawed and aching and wronged.

Who then is better made to say be well, be glad, or who is better to long that we, as one, might course over the entire valley, over all valleys, as a bird in a great embrace of flight, who presses against her breast, in grief and tenderness, the whole weeping body of the world?

Hanukkah Prayer [Next] [back to top]

N’vakeysh et nitzotzot hanefesh matzitey m’orey ha’eysh
Let us seek the unseen sparks that kindle the greater lights.

1. The spark of just one person beginning to forgive himself or herself, and behold, that person begins to light up with peace.

2. The spark of just one person beginning to forgive another, and behold, two people begin to light up with peace.

3. The spark of several persons getting together to address an issue of injustice in the neighborhood, and behold, the neighborhood begins to light up with peace.

4. The spark of the neighborhoods taking the city that cradles them seriously, taking the city as a whole, not fragments… and behold, a whole city begins to light up with peace.

5. The spark of religious people cooperating with each other, and learning to work side by side despite their very real differences, and behold, the whole county begins to light up in peace.

6. The spark of compassion tempering legislation meant to shore up the powerful, and behold, the whole state begins to light up with peace.

7. The spark of the people actually determining to take their national government seriously, so that they are not ashamed to begin to expect honor, quality and respect instead of cynicism, tawdriness, apathy, and legalism, and behold, the whole nation begins to light up in peace.

8. The spark of nations and peoples daring to embrace each other and cooperate, rather than hating each other on principle, and behold, the whole world would be brighter than a whole sun of peace.

Barukh atah, Source of Life, origin of the mystery of light! As a great and illuminating fire begins from one small spark, so may a great light come from these small candles, and our little lives. Amein.

Sermon: The Discipline of Hanukkah [back to top]

It’s been very difficult this week thinking about Hanukkah. Or Christmas. Or the coming New Year. I have found that a lot of my sermon synapses were misfiring, since they were spending so much energy trying to take in the spectacle on the television set.

It’s not every Sunday that caps a week when the American public is treated to the sight of their elected representatives voting on articles of impeachment bound on unseating a second term President. I watched the recaps on Friday evening, and found myself just staring at the screen blankly, only able to breathe through my wide-open mouth. It was like watching a terrible traffic accident in slow motion and not being able to turn away.

I found myself strangely glad to have been born after the painter Salvador Dali had perfected his art, and not before. Not just because I felt my heart melting like one of his famous watches, as I looked upon the spectacle, but because I could make comforting use of the term “surrealism” in regard to what I was seeing and hearing.

To think about religious things, when political things are getting more twisted and turgid by the minute, is just not easy.

To think about ancient stories of faithfulness, when faithlessness runs the very nation in which I sit, thinking is just not easy.

To think about spiritual things, when I am feeling dispirited, is just not easy.

But then, in the midst of all this uneasiness, I find the words of the very faithful Mr. Gandhi rising up inside me: “Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

Ah, he’s right once again, the amazing man.

For example, have you ever noticed how political the Christmas legend is? Newspaper columnists still excoriate destitute unmarried girls for having babies “out of wedlock,” girls very little different than the 14 year old Maria, mother of Jesus. King Herod may be dead two thousand years, yes, but the murder of innocent children continues unabated in the Balkans and in Central Africa, no less than in mythic Bethlehem.

And the story of Hanukkah itself is filled with the names of men so political as Alexander the Great and Antiochus Epiphanes. Hanukkah appears to be a story of blood, not spiritual illumination, a story not so much rooted in the charming wonder-tales of religion as it is in the polis, the city, the center of human welfare and woe, the ground of politics.

Of course, this very bloody political reality was an embarrassment to many later rabbis. And because it was, throughout most of the history of the Jewish religion, Hanukkah was treated as only a minor festival. It hardly merited a mention in the Talmud. According to one of the Gospels, written sometime before the end of the first century, Jesus the Galilean teacher, did indeed celebrate Hanukkah. But he did not do this by lighting a little brass Menorah in his house...that would have been too expensive in his day. He just went to pray in the temple where the “real” Menorah was. I don’t even know if he knew who the Maccabees were. No one told the stories of the Maccabees as much back then…after all, the books about them were written in Greek, not Hebrew. You can understand why the Jews in Palestine might have been a little touchy about keeping Greek scriptures in their collection. The major thing that the rabbis stressed about Hanukkah was the legend of the Menorah. They told the story of how the oil lamps in the temple Menorah remained lit for 8 days, despite the small amount of oil the priests had found in the desecrated sanctuary.

In short, they stressed the story of the so-called “miracle.” There were no Hanukkah presents, back then. There were no Hanukkah songs, no Hanukkah fried foods like latkes (potato pancakes) or the Sephardic doughnuts becoming more popular now, no Hanukkah “gelt” or coins. And there certainly was no frenzied competition with Christmas, which, after all, was not even celebrated by the Roman Church until the fifth century CE.

The rabbis just did not want to stress the armed revolt of the Maccabees.

Oh, they agreed it was wrong for the Greek King Antiochus to force the Jewish people to assimilate.

They agreed that it was wrong for the Greeks to say that their culture was superior.

They agreed that it was sheer, infuriating megalomania for the Greek king to force people to worship a statue of a god with his face on it.

They agreed that it was enough to make anyone mad enough to get violent.

But they still did not encourage violent solutions to problems. And so they told only the story of the Menorah that had somehow had enough oil to burn for 8 days. They stressed that G-d made the oil last for 8 days, and G-d, they said, makes peace come, not violence. To underscore their point, they made sure that on Hanukkah the great vision of Zechariah was recited in the schul, or synagogue.

You remember the first reading, where the Prophet Zechariah, using the language of his era, describes the Menorah in the temple as a sort of a sculpted representation of the burning bush, with the “eyes of the Eternal” looking out upon the whole world. Then he sees two olive trees, which to this day are known as symbols of peace the world over, even in places like Japan where no one even knows what an olive is.

Then he interprets this poetic dream with these words, words which he addresses to the local political leader Zerubabel: “Not by force of arms, not by power and might, but by my spirit.”

This is a clear challenge to anyone who tries to lift up the story of Hanukkah as a summons to use violent means to solve human problems…even those as insulting and severe as the cultural destruction initiated by Antiochus the Greek.

However, the world being the amazing mixed-up place that it is, a multi-cultural string of events helped to change the traditional peaceful stress of Hanukkah. The Catholics preserved in their Bible several Greek books that had no Hebrew originals as far as we know. Protestants called these Greek books “the Apocrypha,” a fancy Greek word meaning basically “those obscure, other books.”

Among this collection were the First Two Books of the Maccabees. These two scrolls were filled with stories about Alexander the Great, Antiochus Epiphanes, and the violent revolution that overthrew the Greek regime there. Tales of martyrs and heroes and sheroes fill the books with undeniable drama and excitement.

Now, during the Nineteenth Century, many liberal Jews, especially in the nascent Reform movement, began to enter into interfaith dialogue with Christians. When they talked to Catholics about the scriptures they supposedly had in common, they renewed their acquaintance with the Greek version of the stories that had not often been stressed for many centuries in the synagogue.

At the same time as this interfaith dialogue came an intensification of anti-Jewish attitudes among Gentiles, represented by the terrible pogroms of the Russian Tsars, the Europe-wide fascination with the sick and perverse book, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and finally, the inconceivably horrible Nazi persecution. Slowly, but surely, some Rabbis began to rethink their stress on non-violence as the preferred solution.

For example, when Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Martin Buber about the possibility of using his methods among the Nazis, Buber was not convinced. As I remember, he wrote back to Gandhi something like this: “You sat in front of an English tank. Of course it did not run you over. But you have to remember that the Nazis are not the English. The Nazis would not think twice about running us over…every last one of us.”

The idea of armed resistance became understandably more palatable to many Jewish people as they watched their families die before their eyes.

But of course, this is not the only thing that helped to change the Jewish understanding of Hanukkah. For, as you well know, here in the United States, Christmas has become a holiday so caught up in commerce and secularization that poor little Hanukkah (which also falls in December) just got lost in the sheer glittery shuffle. Jewish children increasingly felt left out of the public life in their own country. I, myself, have seen Jewish children being asked to sing “Born is the King of Israel” at the Christmas pageant in their local public school. Christian language about the Babe in the Manger was no longer considered “religious” in the fifties, just some familiar words “everyone” sang near the time of the winter solstice.

And then there is the story of the ancient Catholic Bishop of Myra, Nicholas, who got himself canonized, becoming St. Nicholas. St. Nicholas was pronounced Santa Claus here in the States. As you know, he is the gift-giving elf for all real Americans. Sorry, Jewish boys and girls. Forget about Santa coming down your chimney!

So in response to all of this, Hanukkah grew and grew and grew in defiant importance. And boy, how it changed! The Menorah was still lit, to be sure, and Zechariah’s words of peace were still read, but now gifts were wrapped in fancy papers and given, sometimes a “Hanukkah Bush” was raised and decorated in imitation of the Christmas Tree, and new Hanukkah songs were composed, some of which, like Mi Y’Malel which you heard this morning, sound an awful lot like a Christmas carol to me. Furthermore, the stories of the Maccabees began to circulate among the children, too. Children relished hearing the tale of how Yehudah the Hammer and his gang overthrew the Greeks, clearly not so much by the power of G-d, but by their own “might” and “force of arms.”

Note how this is in direct contradiction to Zechariah. But this is understandable. Many Jews during the fifties also noted that G-d had not been very helpful during the Shoah, the so-called Holocaust, so they could not even bear to hear talk of “the wonder” of the oil lasting for 8 days. “Where is the real wonder, the true miracle?” they understandably asked. “Where is my grandmother living her whole life of 80 years in peace instead of being killed and burned in 8 minutes? I want my grandmother, my mother, my cousins, my brothers and sisters back, living out their lives. That’s the wonder, the ‘miracle’ that I want!”

So Hanukkah went from being a semi-holiday, a barely mentioned half-feast in the rabbinical calendar, to a holiday of its own. It became a holiday that many Christians started to bring up during the Christmas season, for example, by choirs singing Handel’s Judas Maccabeus instead of just turning to The Messiah.

Unitarian Universalists began to lift up the holiday every December going back to the fifties, setting up both tree and Menorah in the sanctuary. And, as for Hallmark and Toys R Us…well, they just cleaned up.

But that’s only in certain parts of the country, mostly on the two coasts, and in big cities. I had a hard time finding good Hanukkah cards to send to my Jewish friends, along with their gifts. I had to go to a synagogue shop to find a decent collection to choose from. And I have overheard not one, not two, but three so-called “Jewish jokes” told in public venues in town, just this week, so I am not sure that many Gentiles even imagine that Jews are among them all the time.

So, despite all the changes in stress and visibility, I certainly don’t think that Hanukkah has become the proportionate equal of Christmas in either respect or commerce. I doubt that it ever will.

But I do love to light the Menorah and gaze at it on an early winter’s evening. Just gaze at it, after the blessings have been said. That’s all you need do. No complex ritual. No hidden meanings. Just that ancient flickering representation of the burning bush, with a flame that flickers and refuses to stand still, just like life itself.

And that image made me think of the poem by Linda McCarriston, the second reading you heard this morning. Remember how she rides out at evening, (presumably in winter, because of the early sunset)? Remember how she watches the deepening dusk, and “the kitchen lights starting in many windows?” Did you catch that wonderful sense of warmth, the intimation of loving families gathering around the table? Did you catch the sense of how they are related to all the hills and clouds and deer around them… “kin passing” she writes, deeply related, yet passing, moving through and around each other, flickering like flames?

“And what I think or say or see is whole in these moments…” she writes, “neither small nor broken.” She has a rich experience in the early evening, watching, you could say on this day, the Menorah of the kitchen lights go on all across the valley, orange and warm, against the dark blue hills. And as she gazes at the spectacle, she knows herself connected to everyone and everything. She sees herself as an intrinsic part of the world. She feels a great care for all that is, which she calls, so tenderly, the “great weeping body of the world.”

Who says it’s foolish, she asks, to wish or pray “for particular good to particular beings on one small road in a huge world?”

She wants good for the world she loves, and everyone in it. She does not want to control things, bend things, shape things, or hurt things…like that Greek General who thought he was God and could make everyone the same by his “power and might.” She knows she is not the Whole, but just part of it. And she wants good things for all the parts of that Whole, seeing that every one of them is kindred to her.

And so, when, at dusk, I gaze at the slowly kindling lights of the Menorah, taking a whole eight days before it is fully lit, I feel like the poet on her horse, riding through a winter’s night and seeing all the ways I am connected to the world. Day by day, as the light grows brighter, I begin to get a sense of what Hanukkah might ask of me if I let it; even I, a Gentile, who although he knows and loves its history, is still not a Jew.

I think Hanukkah asks a lot of me. Sure, I think it asks me not to take my life or my freedom for granted. But, more importantly, I think it asks me to have a certain discipline of spirit in the living of my days. To wit:

1. It takes great discipline to note that there is wisdom in both sides of a dispute. It’s always easier if there is clearly a winning side and a losing side. A right and a wrong. For example, the Rabbis were certainly brilliant to shy away from violent solutions to human problems. The Rabbis, yes, including the itinerant Jesus, and including, eventually, the non-Jewish rabbis…teachers…Gandhi, King, Dolci, Thoreau, Dorothy Day, Julia Ward Howe, the Mothers for Peace, etc... all of them, are heroes and sheroes of mine. But support and encouragement for the principle of non-violence does not mean that all violence comes from a place of wanton evil. The Maccabees cannot be seen as cavalier marauders, but as folks who were up against a wall. They had had enough and could take no more. All that they loved and valued… their children, their culture, their way of life… were being taken from them. If I cannot judge as terrible the child who strikes back at an abusive drunken parent, or the woman who knees her attacker, I cannot simply decry the revolution of the Maccabees for its undeniable violence. Life is more complicated than that. Hanukkah asks me not to avoid the complexity of this issue by siding with either absolute non-violence, or siding with the seductive excitement of violence.

2. It takes great discipline not to be confused by the strange seasonal coincidence of all these winter holidays. I hear many people dismissing Christmas as just a dressed up solstice festival, or a pagan feast with Christian trappings. I dare say it’s a lot more complicated than that. And yet, even though the Christian roots of Christmas are clear to me, I can readily admit that Christmas (and Hanukkah) must be odd feasts to celebrate in the Southern Hemisphere. It must be strange to celebrate festivals of light closer to the summer solstice than the winter one. After all, who ever would suggest lighting candles on the 25th of June to be “a light in the darkness?” Obviously, there are pagan and Christian elements blended together in the holidays. And so what? I, for one, am convinced there is no real way to separate them out into neat and separate bundles.

Some wags also like to describe Hanukkah as merely a Jewish Christmas. This is also untrue. But it’s important to note that Hanukkah might not be what it is today unless Christians had preserved the neglected Jewish stories in their Greek canon.

No, all of these winter holidays inform and shape each other in many ways. They are not different forms of each other. They cannot all be reduced to eccentric forms of a Solstice celebration. And each holiday undeniably has blended elements…but each holiday is also unique. And each of these bunched winter feasts…Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Yule and Christmas offer their particular good to particular people.

3. It takes great discipline to acknowledge that peace is not a gift, but a struggle. It’s tough to admit that it ironically requires the same kind of organization and dedication that any soldier knows (although Gandhi reminded us of that, didn’t he?). It’s hard to admit that peace requires the careful planning of a strategist, and the attention to detail, and passion, of a good union leader, but it does. Peace does not come to the earth if we put on blinders and say, “There are no tyrants that need to be resisted. Antiochus is dead. Hitler is dead. Everything is OK. I can relax for the rest of my life.” No, Hanukkah, like the later holiday of Christmas, was born within a cradle of politics, not outside of it. And that political world asserts itself again and again and again.

On the other hand, too much time focusing on peace as a struggle will wear us all out, as if social justice is only marches and relentless projects. Gandhi warned us about this, too. Social justice work without a devotional life, a “prayer life” if you will, can grow shallow and self-aggrandizing in a short time. The rabbis would agree with Gandhi, except they might use another metaphor. They might ask us to stop thinking we are God and can do everything by ourselves, just like that fool Antiochus. The rabbis were not superstitious…they did not think that the candles were magical charms against the reign of violence. But they can be effective nonetheless. Their light needs to float in our children’s wet eyes, the chants need to vibrate in our hearts, the prophetic and poetic texts need to continue to urge us to always pray for particular good for particular people. Without a well honed sense of loving kindness, without good wishes even for the lives of our enemies, peace will only be a temporary and strategic truce, not a way of life. And we will perish exhausted. I can tell you right now that peace is not a species of exhaustion. This balance between action and devotion requires a great discipline to be sure, but it is worth it. It is necessary.

My foray into Hanukkah is over. It asks a lot from me, even though I am not technically a Jew. It demands a certain religious discipline to get me through its thickets. But once I get through those thickets, I tell you that the valley before me is beautiful. The kitchen lights are coming on. The last trace of the bronze sunset is darkening on the indigo horizon.

And, yes, I know that, eventually, I will have to leave this prophetic vision of the heartbreakingly beautiful world where I am kith and kin with all things around me, and return to my own house. There I will be thrown back onto the painful politics of the present era. With a congress and a president at odds, and my own heart beating for the families, friends, and loved ones of all concerned, I want to do something, but I don’t know what.

I can offer no instant solutions, for Hanukkah reminds me that the fullness of light takes a great deal of time indeed to come forth.

I can offer neither battle plans nor hopeful prayers, for Hanukkah reminds me that neither idea tells the whole story, or expresses the full promise.

And, sure, I’d like it if the whole thing on Capitol Hill wasn’t so painfully confusing. I’d like it if the sides were all pure and clean, like shadows sharp in the noon sunlight. But Hanukkah, bless it, reminds me that it’s evening now, the noon is past, and that nothing is pure, ever, especially anything having to do with the human heart, with religion, or politics.

I am a Unitarian Universalist who lights a Menorah every single night of the feast. By the eighth day, may I find that there is more light, not less; more clarity, if not perfect clarity; and greater peace in my dispirited heart. And may the same be true for everyone in this room. Amein.

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Last update: 05/02/2001