The Message of the Hanukkah Lights

A sermon from

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

Dave Weissbard

12/14/03

Opening Words

“From the Dark of the Year to the Light of the Soul”

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

When the moon turns dark and the sun turns dark, we light a growing blaze of candles: Hanukkah

When the world turns dark because a Great Government is threatening our freedom, our autonomy, our community – or a Great Corporation is threatening our jobs or poisoning our earth and air and water – or a Great War is threatening our lives and shattering our hopes – we light a growing blaze of candles: Hanukkah.

When our lives turn dark because we have lost someone beloved, or lost a loving relationship, or lost our sense of purpose in the world – when we have no hope of changing, we light a growing blaze of candles : Hanukkah.

When our sense of hope and change darkens, we think our selves hopeless; but then as we light the candles we remember the Maccabees and the Rabbis who faced a power much greater than their own. . . .

In darkness, be light!

And in your light preserve

a spark of darkness

a spark of the Mystery

from which light grows.

The Children’s Story

Who can tell me what this is? That’s right: it’s a menorah. What is it used for? Yes, Hanukkah. What is “Hanukkah?” A holiday celebrated by Jewish people. It starts next Friday night. Why are there eight candles plus one extra?

The story behind this is a complicated one, but let me tell you the important parts.

There have always been strong countries and weaker ones. More than 2300 years ago, the land of Judah, which is part of what we know today as Israel, was being run by the Syrians who modeled themselves after the Greeks. Antiochus, the ruler for that area tried to make the Jewish people act more like Greeks, and some of them did, and others didn’t like it. The king gave an order that the Jewish people had to bow down to statues of him. The Jews believed it was wrong to do that, and finally a man called Mattathias began a revolt and his sons, Judas Maccabeus and his brothers organized an army that fought back against the powerful Syrian army. After three years, hard as it is to believe, their little army drove the big army out of their capital, Jerusalem, although the war continued for another 25 years before the Syrians finally gave up.

The Jews decided to celebrate their victory by rededicating the Temple. The Greeks had trashed the place, but the Jews cleaned it and decided to light the oil lamp that they burned, like our chalice -- except they burned it all the time. They only had enough holy fuel to burn it for one day, and it was going to take seven more days to get more fuel. They lit it anyhow and they thought it was a miracle when it kept burning for eight days until the new fuel arrived.

Every year, Jewish people remember how they won back their freedom from the tyrants, how they got back the right to decide for themselves how to live, instead of living the way more powerful people told them they had to. Each night, for eight nights, they light the menorah - one candle on the first night, two on the second, three on the third, until they have all eight candles burning. They remember how even people who live in little countries have the right to decide for themselves what they will believe and how they will live.

It’s important for us, living in a powerful nation, to remember the story of Hanukkah and to remember that power does not give us the right to take away the freedom of people who live in weaker nations to choose for themselves.

THE READING

A Call to Israelis, World Jewry and Friends of Israel

Avraham Burg, 09/17/2003

Avraham Burg was speaker of Israel's Knesset from 1999 to 2003 and is a former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel.

The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.

There is time to change course, but not much. What is needed is a new vision of a just society and the political will to implement it. Nor is this merely an internal Israeli affair. Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out. If the pillar collapses, the upper floors will come crashing down.

The opposition does not exist, and the coalition, with Arik Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there's nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.

It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. . .

It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. From the window you can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway takes you from Ramot on Jerusalem's northern edge to Gilo on the southern edge, a 12-minute trip that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.

This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.. . .

Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.

We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption.

If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative. . . .

The Sermon

[a morally ambiguous story]

Hanukkah is not a major Jewish holiday. Interestingly, the Books of the Maccabees, in which the historical story is told, were not included in the Hebrew Bible when it was decided which books were in and which were out. Later, some Christians decided to put them in their collections of the left-out books, the Apocrypha.

The whole story is more morally ambiguous than the kids’ version. The Maccabees were right wing religious fanatics - like our religious right, only with weapons. They were not only angry with the Hellenistic Syrians – they were particularly furious with their fellow Jews who decided it was more civilized to follow the Hellenistic ways. The Books of the Macabees make it clear that they went around killing a lot of liberal Jews, whom they referred to as “renegade Jews, ” to persuade people it was wiser for them to return to the old ways. Through the use of guerilla warfare (terrorism as we call it today when it is practiced by those we wish to control), the mighty Syrians decided that the body count was not worth the prize, and ultimately the Syrians withdrew. Briefly, the people of Judah were triumphant and again independent, until they invited the Romans in to help them.

Scholars report that the ancient rabbis, “ill at ease and frightened by the triumphalist militarism of the Maccabean revolt (165 BCE) enshrined in the Hanukkah story . . . purposely excluded the books of the Macabbees from the Hebrew Bible [and] invented the miracle of the lights story to de-politicize the holiday.”

[romanticized history]

Like most people, Jews have greatly romanticized their history. When one looks closely, it is clear that Israel as a united and independent nation, existed for only a very brief time. David was declared himself king about 1000 years before the time of Jesus, but it is not clear that there actually was a coherent kingdom for him to rule. Solomon, who followed his father may have been the only ruler to actually control the whole of the united kingdom, it divided again under his sons.

As realtors say, location is everything, and the Hebrew people settled in an area that was always of strategic importance to the major empires, thus they spent much time dominated – by Babylonia, by Persia, Egypt, Syria, and by Rome. They were sometimes allowed the kind of puppet governments we install in our client nations, that are free to serve so long as they don’t assert the rights of their people over our economic interests. There was a revolt in 66-70 which resulted in the destruction of the temple by the Romans. The final revolt led by Bar Kokhba in 132 of this era was the last straw, and the Jews were evicted by the Romans from their homeland and dispersed over the globe.

For almost two thousand years, Jews have lived as a minority in a variety of nations. They have successfully clung to their identity as a people, in part through the remembering of their romanticized history and their dream of the coming of the Messiah who would set things right. Because of their identity, they have served as convenient scapegoats for whatever ailed the nations in which they lived. Even when they have tried to successfully assimilate, they have been vulnerable to attack. They have been used and abused. The history of Western culture is replete with abuses of the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust.

[what to do?]

After the defeat of the Nazi’s, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors living in camps for displaced persons. What was to be done with them? They did not want to go back to live among the neighbors who betrayed them. The British didn’t want them. The Americans didn’t want them. The French didn’t want them. One proposal was to create a state for them by taking land away from the defeated Germans, but that didn’t fly.

At the end of the 19^th century, there had been an emigration of Jews back to their fabled homeland under the encouragement of the Zionist movement, which was supported by some anti-Semites as a way of getting the Jews out of their countries, as well as by Jews who were seeking security from persecution. That movement was opposed by many orthodox Jews as a human attempt to do God’s work - when the time came, the Messiah would recreate the Jewish state. Some Arabs expressed alarm at the number of Jews arriving in what they saw as their land. Lord Balfour, who had some anti-Semitic tendencies - issued a somewhat ambiguous Declaration that said the Jews were to be free to emigrate to Palestine and recreate a homeland, while acknowledging the civil and religious rights of the Arabs. Tensions grew as more Jews moved in and began secretly to buy land. Jews began to seek to recreate what they believed was rightfully theirs, since it had been their unifying dream for two thousand years. There were recurring tensions between the Jews and the Arabs who saw what was on the horizon.

The Arabs sided with Hitler during World War II, so it appeared to the Allies that the best way of resolving the problem of what to do with the displaced Jews was, in fact, to create a Jewish state in the land where their hearts lay.

[Israel is a fact]

There are those who debate whether the creation of Israel was, in fact, just. We would be hard pressed to acknowledge that ancient occupation and religious beliefs are grounds for returning land to former occupants, or the Native Americans might seek to get the United Nations to expel us. But that is a moot issue. Israel does exist. It has existed since 1948 – 55 years. It is a fact, and there is no scenario under which the Palestinian dream of its disappearance could or should be realized. Let me say it again: the existence of Israel is a fact.

A declaration by the United Nations is one thing. Actually creating a country is another. There has been a constant state of tension throughout Israel’s existence – sometimes with open warfare with its neighbors, sometimes with terrorism. Something like 300,000 Arabs who had been living there left when Israel was created – most expecting to return when the Jews were driven out. The strange thing is that they have not, for the most part, been permitted to integrate into the surrounding Arab nations. They have been kept miserable in camps. A good case can be made that the Palestinians have been a useful distraction from the injustices of life in the dictatorships that prevail in most of the Arab states, many of which we support. It always helps to have an enemy, and Israel has been that enemy on which the Arabs could focus their anger.

At the same time, the nation of Israel has not had perfectly wise leadership – the Biblical dream notwithstanding, the leaders have been imperfect and have operated under, at best, trying circumstances. Their focus has, from the start, been on creating security, because it is security Israel has most lacked. The problem is that sometimes the things people do in the name of security result in its decrease rather than its increase.

[Critics ≠ Anti-Semites]

The whole issue has been clouded by the history of anti-Semitism, and the sensitivities created by it. Essentially, for many years, Jews in Israel and those who chose not to move there, have taken the public position that the governments of Israel may not be criticized. Anyone who has been critical of anything done by the government of Israel must be an anti-Semite. In fact, some critics are. There is such a thing as anti-Semitism and one can hear in the tone of some criticisms that are offered. But it is dangerous to throw the label anti-Semite around too readily. If all Jews are called upon to support everything Israel does, as they have been, and if a government in Israel acts in a manner which is inconsistent with the teachings of the prophets, as most of them have at one time or another, then it logically follows that Jews around the world are in danger of being held responsible for Israel’s acts. That may not be fair, but it is not anti-Semitism, it is logic.

The charge of anti-Semitism, which most of the world despises, has been used as a shield to immunize the governments of Israel from facing criticism for their policies. Israel is the largest recipient of American aid, $4 billion annually, and that aid provides very significant support of Israel’s military budget. By implication, the United States is responsible for what Israel does, and much of the world sees it that way. But the ability of Americans to debate the rightness or wrongness of what is being done with our money is sharply curtailed by fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.

In a column in the British newspaper, The Guardian, earlier this month, Brian Klug wrote:

What is anti-Semitism? Although the word only goes back to the 1870's, anti-Semitism is an old European fantasy about Jews. The composer Richard Wagner exemplified it when he said, “I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it. An anti-Semite sees Jews in this way: they are an alien presence, a parasite that preys on humanity and seeks to dominate the world. Across the globe, their hidden hand controls the banks, the markets and the media. Even governments are under their sway. And when revolutions occur or nations go to war, it is the Jews - clever, ruthless, and cohesive – who invariably pull the strings and reap the rewards. When this fantasy is projected on to Israel because it is a Jewish state, then anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. . .

Klug goes on to say:

But Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is no fantasy. Nor is the spread of Jewish settlements in these territories. Nor the unequal treatment of Jewish colonizers and Palestinian inhabitants. Nor the institutionalized discrimination against Israeli Arab citizens in various spheres of life. These are realities. It is one thing to oppose Israel or Zionism on the basis of anti-Semitic fantasy; quite another to do so on the basis of reality. The latter is not anti-Semitism.

[critics from within]

We are in a difficult place to judge what is happening in Israel because most of the news we receive is strongly slanted because of the fear by our media of being attacked as anti-Semitic. CNN, which has attempted to be fair to the Palestinian side, is indeed labeled just that by many Jews because what it reports is more critical of the Israeli government than most of what we read. The interesting thing is, because Israel is a democracy, one can read much harsher criticisms of the government and its actions in Israeli papers on the internet, than anything CNN reports.

As we all know, and as I already acknowledged, since its inception, Israel has faced threats to its very survival from its Arab neighbors who have worked for its destruction. In response, the governments of Israel have undertaken Draconian steps which not only have failed to increase its security, but in reality have increased the animosity. The common definition of neurosis is continuing to do something that doesn’t work with the expectation that the outcome will change. Defenders of Israel maintain that it is held to a higher standard than many other nations, and that is probably true. The reality is that Israel claims to live to a higher moral standard than most nations.

In the piece that I read from earlier, Avraham Burg, speaker of Israel's Knesset from 1999 to 2003 , former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, son of Dr. Yosef Burg a prominent leader of the National Religious Party, and currently a Labor Party Knesset member, maintained that:

In an open letter to the president of the American Jewish Congress who claimed Jews need to unite to defend Israel, Rabbi John Rayner, a lifelong Zionist, pointed out:

the measures Israel felt compelled to take . . . [have] included collective punishments, house demolitions, curfews, and daily humiliations at the checkpoints. All this intensified the resentment still further —— how could it not? —— and by September 2000 it was like a powder keg. Then Arik Sharon, by his Temple Mount walkabout with a huge police escort, ignited it and so triggered the Second Intifada.

Israel's counter-measures became increasingly harsh, incited the Palestinian terrorists to step up their murderous activities, including suicide bombings, and caused the general Palestinian population, even though most of them continued to disapprove of violence, nevertheless to sympathise with them and to become a source of recruits for them. Hence the vicious cycle of attack, reprisal and counter-reprisal which we have witnessed in the last two years.

All this was sensationally, and not always fairly, reported by the world's media and so brought the escalating conflict graphically to the attention of the general public. Most people were horrified by the tactics, especially suicide bombings, of the Palestinian terrorists, but scarcely less so by the brutality of Israel's reprisals, including helicopter gunship raids and targeted assassinations. Considering, further, Israel's persistent defiance of UN resolutions, relentless colonization of occupied land, vast military superiority, and the consequent disproportion between Israeli and Palestinian casualties, it is hardly surprising that many came to see the conflict as a grossly unequal one and to sympathize with the underdog.

This climate of opinion, in turn, gave the dormant forces of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism an opportunity to express themselves with a new brazenness, further feeding the growing animosity towards Israel to which you rightly draw attention. However, what this phenomenon calls for is not blanket denunciation but sober analysis. Not all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Still less is all condemnation of Israel's present policies anti-Zionism. (On the contrary, much of it is pro-Zionism in the best sense of that word.) Consequently your assertion of a worldwide conspiracy to destroy Israel is a gross exaggeration.

[The Fate of Zionism]

One of the most fascinating books on the subject is the new one from Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who was on NPR’s Fresh Air earlier this week. Its title is The Fate of Zionism. Rabbi Hertzberg is a Zionist, a former President of the American Jewish Congress, and vice-president of the World Jewish Congress. He is also a founder of one of the major Israeli peace movements. Rabbi Hertzberg does not wear blinders as he considers the history, the present, or the future of Israel. I believe that his account of the development of Israel and the tensions with the Arabs is very fair and balanced. He is concerned with justice – for Jews and Arabs alike, because he realizes that there cannot be lasting justice or security for one without the other.

Rabbi Hertzberg observes that following the 1967 war when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip, David Ben-Gurion, considered to be the George Washington of Israel, at a celebration of the victory insisted that it was essential for Israel to immediately give back the territory it had just won - with only the exception of East Jerusalem. He proclaimed that to fail to do so would mean historic disaster. Ben-Gurion was prophetic, but not heard.

Rabbi Hertzberg, who is 81, has been through the ups and downs of peace processes and is not optimistic that any lasting agreements will be reached. It is his contention that the United States must face up to its responsibility in two ways. First, get tough with Israel regarding the settlements in the occupied territories, which are the most sensitive issue today. While we have repeatedly called for reducing or freezing the settlements, the Israeli governments have gone right on increasing them and we have not called them on it. Israel spends about a billion dollars a year supporting the settlements. Hertzberg says the US should reduce its aid by that billion, and put the money into a fund that could be used to resettle the settlers within Israel’s legitimate borders.

The second essential piece, according to Hertzberg is that we must put real pressure on Syria and on Iran to stop supporting the terrorists. While these two acts would not mean immediate peace, they would, together, make for a significant reduction in the tensions that could, eventually, lead to peace.

[“Geneva Accords”]

It is possible that Hertzberg, because of his long experience and many disappointments, is to limited in his vision. There are many around the world who are truly excited by the new peace plan which was developed by an unofficial group of Israeli and Palestinian leaders under the auspices of the Swiss government. Among the main creators of the plan were former Israeli justice minister Yossi Bellin and former Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. Officially announced on December 1^st in Geneva, the document is 50 pages long and includes very specific concessions by both sides. The problem with the previous peace plans was that they side-stepped the difficult challenges and put them off for the future in order to attain agreement. The Geneva Accord, as it is known, addresses them directly. It calls for the recognition by the Palestinians of the State of Israel, and the recognition by Israel of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. The Israeli’s would grant Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians would acknowledge the right of displaced Palestinians to return only to the Palestinian state, not to Israel, which is a whopping concession. Israel would compensate the Palestinians for their lost properties.

This agreement appears to have the support of Arafat, but it has, not surprisingly, been rejected out of hand by the Sharon government as naive and even treasonous. Surveys have shown that its principles are endorsed by 52% of the Israeli and Palestinian people. Jimmy Carter asserted, “It is unlikely that we shall ever see a more promising foundation for peace. The only alternative to this initiative is sustained and permanent violence.”

[from the security establishment]

One of the most surprising developments has been the position taken by four former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli Government Security Service, who together had 20 years of service under varying governments. They condemned the policies of the Sharon government as making Israel less rather than more secure.

We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully," said Avraham Shalom, who headed the security service from 1980 until1986. "Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully . . . . We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools."

In a two hour interview with the leading Hebrew language newspaper in Israel, the four leaders, whose gathering was nothing short of historic, agreed that it is ludicrous to try to ignore Yasser Arafat who is the leader of the Palestinian people. "It was the mother of all errors with regard to Arafat," said Avraham Shalom. "We cannot determine who will have the greatest influence over there. So let us look at the Palestinians' political map, and it is a fact that nothing can happen without Arafat." These men are by no stretch of the imagination naive, idealistic dreamers. They speak from the most direct experience of what terrorism means.

We hear little or nothing of this debate in Israel through the American media. Our government’s policy is being steered in part by hawks whose dogmatic loyalty to Israel, and in some cases payment as consultants to the Israeli government, is a matter of record; and by the religious right which supports Israel because it wants to see a major conflagration in the “Holy Land” which they believe will usher in the second coming of Christ and result in the sending of all Jews who do not convert to Hell. [With friends like this, who needs enemies?) There is evidence that they all played a major role in our decision to invade of Iraq, and now it is coming out (including in this morning’s Register-Star) that we have been consulting with Israeli’s as to how to fight the terrorists – as if the Israeli’s have proven successful at that. We are now using their tactics of bulldozing houses, destroying fields, erecting fences around towns, and check point to impede travel – all of which have increased Arab hostility and decreased security in Israel, and are demonstrably doing the same in Iraq.

[Hanukkah]

I return now to where we began, to the celebration of Hanukkah and the meaning of its lights.

While I conceded at the beginning of the sermon that the events Hanukkah commemorates are more complex than is commonly acknowledged, what Hanukkah has come to mean is what is most important. It is seen as a celebration of freedom; of liberty; of the right of a nation to chart its own course, choose its own way of life. It is a celebration of the principles for which Israel stands, in contrast to the policies it has pursued. That is not so weird. We continually hope that America will be thought of more in terms of our principles than our actions. When we stand for our national anthem, we are not standing in support of the policies of the Bush administration, or any administration, but for the yet to be fulfilled dream which is America.

When we, in this church, light our menorah at our Candlelight Service, we are not celebrating or supporting the policies of the government of Israel, nor are we doing so when we stand, join hands, and sing “Shalom Havayreem,” which is, after all, a call for peace. On the contrary, may we use these occasions as reminders of the ideals which we share with the State of Israel, and may we thus be empowered to challenge its government, and our own, to live up to the demands of the prophets that we should “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

[“Light One Candle”]

Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, wrote a song for Hanukkah that is in our hymn book, and that we shall sing after we share silence together. It is a song of justice:

Light one candle for the Maccabee children

with thanks that their light didn’t die.

Light one candle for the pain they endured

when their right to exist was denied.

Light one candle fo the terrible sacrifice

justice and freedom demand.

But light one candle for the wisdom to know

when the peacemaker’s time is at hand.

Don’t let the light go out,

it’s lasted for so many years.

Don’t let the light go out,

let it shine through our love and our tears.

Light one candle for the strength that we need

to never become our own foe.

Light one candle for those who are suffering

the pain that we learned so long ago.

Light one candle for all we believe in,

that anger won’t tear is apart.

And light one candle to bring us together

with peace as the song in our heart.

What is the memory that valued so highly

we keep it alive in that flame?

What’s the commitment to those who have died

when we cry out they’ve not died in vain?

Have we come this far always believing

that justice would somehow prevail?

This is the burden and this is the promise

and this is why we will not fail.

Don’t let the light go out,

it’s lasted for so many years.

Don’t let the light go out,

let it shine through our love and our tears.