Davar Acher

I heard an interesting dvar torah this past Shabbat on the prehistory of Chanukkah. The speaker focused on the following Talmudic passage, which explains the origin of the Roman winter solstice festivals, Kalenda and Saturnalia:

ת"ר לפי שראה אדם הראשון יום שמתמעט והולך אמר אוי לי שמא בשביל שסרחתי עולם חשוך בעדי וחוזר לתוהו ובוהו וזו היא מיתה שנקנסה עלי מן השמים עמד וישב ח' ימים בתענית [ובתפלה] כיון שראה תקופת טבת וראה יום שמאריך והולך אמר מנהגו של עולם הוא הלך ועשה שמונה ימים טובים לשנה האחרת עשאן לאלו ולאלו ימים טובים הוא קבעם לשם שמים והם קבעום לשם עבודת כוכבים

The Rabbis taught: when Adam saw that the days were growing shorter, he said, "Oy! Perhaps because I sinned, the world is becoming dark on my account and returning to chaos, and this is the death that was decreed for me by heaven [Gen. 2:17]." He fasted for eight days. When the solstice arrived and he saw that the days were growing longer, he said, "It is simply the way of the world." He went and established eight days of festivity. The following year, he observed both [the eight days preceding the solstace and the eight days following the solstace] as days of festivity. He [Adam] established them for the sake of heaven, but they [the Romans] established them for the sake of pagan worship (B. Avodah Zarah 8a).

The speaker added a twist to the plain meaning of the text: They (the Romans) celebrate an eight-day solstice festival for their own reasons, but we (the Jews) have adopted the practice as a celebration of the Hasmonean victory.

Because Jewish holidays are fixed to a lunar calendar adjusted to the solar calendar, Chanukkah always falls around the winter solstace in the northern hemisphere, but it does not always accord with it precisely. Nonetheless, the parallels between Chanukkah and Saturnalia (later celebrated as Christmas and New Year's Day) are clear. Both begin on the twenty-fifth of a mid-winter month and last eight days. The practice of lighting an increasing number of candles on each successive night also has obvious resonance as a solstice ritual.

Could Chanukkah be based on a pre-Roman version of Saturnalia? A Google search indicates that the aforementioned Shabbat speaker was hardly the first to suggest a historical connection between the two. If this is the case, then by calling the holiday the "festival of Sukkot in Kislev" (2 Maccabees 1:9), the Jews of the second temple period were linking a pagan holiday to their own tradition, making it an appropriate context for celebrating the cleansing of the second temple.

Ma'i Chanukkah?

"What is Chanukkah?" With these words, the Talmud (Shabbat 21b) introduces its discussion of the holiday, which focuses on the "miracle of the oil" that most of us recall when we think of Chanukkah:

The Sages taught: On the twenty-fifth day of Kislev there are eight days of Chanukkah... for when the Greeks entered the Temple they defiled all the oil in the Temple. When the kingdom of the Hasmonean dynasty arose and defeated them, they searched but could only find one flask of oil that was set aside with the seal of the high priest. However, it contained only enough to burn for one day. A miracle took place and they lit from it for eight days. The following year they established them as festival days with praise and thanks.

The Talmudic story explains the form that Chanukkah takes today, with its eight nights of burning candles and foods fried in oil. Yet the "miracle of the oil" is not mentioned in the books of Maccabees, which were composed at a time considerably closer to the events commemorated by the holiday than the Gemara. These books describe the military victory of the Jews, led by the priestly family of Mattithias the Hasmonean and his son Judah Maccabee, over the army of the oppressive Seleucid monarch Antoicus IV. 1 Maccabees 4:52-59 and 2 Maccabees 10:1-8 describe an eight-day festival celebrating the purification of the temple, beginning on the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the very day on which Antiochus' troops profaned it by offering an impure sacrifice on the altar (1 Maccabees 1:59, cf. 2 Maccabees 6:4-5). 1 Maccabees does not explain why the celebration lasted eight days, but 2 Maccabees provides the missing information: the new festival of Chanukkah was modeled on the eight-day biblical festival of Sukkot (Lev. 23:39-43, etc.). The Jews had been unable to properly celebrate Sukkot at the appropriate time because of Antiochus' oppression (2 Maccabees 10:6), so they compensated now, even incorporating the lulav (palm frond) of Sukkot into their new holiday.

At first glance, the explanation in 2 Maccabees seems reasonable, but then an obvious question arises: if the temple was desecrated the previous year in the month of Kislev, then the Jews would have missed the opportunity to celebrate all three pilgrimage festivals: Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Why did the victorious Jews single out Sukkot for a late celebration? Perhaps because Sukkot was associated with Solomon's dedication of the first temple (1 Kings 8:2, 66). By marking their victory with a similar ceremony, the Maccabees recalled a time when Israel was strong, united, and independent, and they likened the newly purified, Hasmonean-controlled temple to the original Jerusalem temple, the legitimacy of which was (at least in their own day) unquestioned.

The new holiday was not immediately accepted throughout the Jewish world, and the book of 2 Maccabees opens with two letters exhorting the Jews of Egypt to observe the "festival of Sukkot in the month of Kislev." Both letters link the festival to the rededication of the temple by the Hasmoneans, but the second introduces a new element, a miracle performed in the days of Nehemiah, the governor of Judah who oversaw the construction of the second temple:

When our ancestors were being led captive to Persia, the pious priests of that time took some of the fire of the altar and secretly hid it in the hollow of a dry cistern, where they took such precautions that the place was unknown to anyone. But after many years had passed, when it pleased God, Nehemiah, having been commissioned by the king of Persia, sent the descendants of the priests who had hidden the fire to get it. And when they reported to us that they had not found fire but only a thick liquid, he ordered themm to dip it out and bring it. When the materials for the sacrifices were presented, Nehemiah ordered the priests to sprinkle the liquid on the wood and on the things laid upon it. When this had been done and some time had passed, and when the sun, which had been clouded over, shone out, a great fire blazed up, so that all marveled. And while the sacrifice was being consumed, the priests offered prayer -- the priests and everyone.. . .After the materials of the sacrifice had been consumed, Nehemiah ordered that the liquid that was left should be poured on large stones. When this was done, a flame blazed up; but when the light from the altar shone back, it went out (NRSV 2 Maccabees 1:19-23).

The letter goes on to relate the history of the sacred fire, which was carried into exile by the prophet Jeremiah, and the nature of the "thick liquid," which is called naphta (petroleum). The event is likened to the dedication of the tabernacle in the days of Moses, when a miraculous fire from the Lord consumed a burnt offering (Leviticus 9:24), and to a similar miracle said to have occurred at the dedication of the first temple by Solomon (2 Chronicles 7:1). Thus Nehemiah is implicitly compared to Moses and Solomon, the second temple becomes divinely sanctioned like the first (and like its predecessor, the tabernacle), and Chanukkah becomes a festival affirming the legitimacy of the second temple, which was never so severely threatened as in the Hasmonean period.

The legend also links the festival of Chanukkah to a miracle having to do with fire. One wonders whether this was not the original impetus for the practice of lighting candles on Chanukkah -- or at least the prototype for the rabbinic story.

For more on the convoluted history of Chanukkah practices, see last year's post on Judith and dairy products, or this reworked version, which includes a recipe for cheese latkes.

An Excuse to Eat Cheesecake

The RaMa (Rabbi Moses Isserles, c. 1525-1572) writes of a custom to eat cheese on Chanukah. The practice, he says, is meant to remind us of the milk that Judith served to a Greek general in order to put him to sleep, thus enabling herself to put him to death. This is curious, since the book of Judith (in its present form) has nothing to do with either Chanukah or dairy products. The story takes place during the reign of Nebuchadrezzar, over 400 years before the Hasmonean revolt commemorated on Chanukah, and the heroine lulls the enemy general to sleep with wine, not milk, before decapitating him.

The version of the legend involving milk is apparently the result of a conflation of Judith's story with that of Yael (Judges 4:17-31; 5:24-28), setting us back another 600 years or so. (Yael, according to the biblical narrative, lulled a Canaanite general to sleep with a bottle of milk before driving a tent peg through his head.) The Mishna Berura (Sh"A 670) harmonizes the two as follows:

She [Judith] was the daughter of Yohanan the High Priest. There was an edict that every engaged woman should sleep with a nobleman first, and she fed the head of the oppressors cheese to make him drunk, and cut of his head, and everyone fled.

The cheese apparently made the man thirsty, causing him to drink large quantities of wine.

Most scholars date the composition of the book of Judith to the Hasmonean period, and some suggest that it should be understood as an allegory for the Jewish struggle against the Syrian-Greeks. If this is the case, the story of Judith may be related to Chanukah after all, albeit not in the manner presumed by later Jewish tradition.

This, however, is not why I try to observe the custom of eating dairy on Chanukah. I do it because it provides an opportunity to tell the story of the story of Judith, a wonderful example of the continual re-creation of history within Jewish tradition.

That, and I really like cheesecake.

*Sort of. The author seems to have thought that Nebuchadrezzar was Assyrian, so one can't take the historical setting all that seriously.