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Nehemia: …but it was like, this was your chance, Josephus, tell us about the miracle of oil. And he gives some other explanation, a metaphorical meaning of the light.

Paul: It’s not mentioned at all.

Nehemia: So how do you explain that? Did the miracle of oil happen?

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here today with Rabbi Dr. Paul Shrell-Fox. He has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York, and a rabbinical ordination from Machon Shechter in Israel. Shalom Rabbi Dr. Shrell-Fox.

Paul: Shalom, you can just call me Paul, that’s great.

Nehemia: We’re going to go with Paul for the rest of the time.

Paul: That’s great.

Nehemia: So Paul, what got me interested in talking to you was that you had some information online that I had read and watched talking about the pagan origins of Hanukkah. And what got me so interested is, I’ve actually done a program on the pagan origins of Christmas with someone who’s an expert in ancient Roman and Greek religions.

You know, it’s interesting. People who watch that program come to different conclusions. Some say, “Clearly, he proved it’s pagan.” Others watch it and say, “No, actually, the proof isn’t so clear.” Obviously, aspects of it are pagan, no one disputes that, I think, but there may have been some early Christian form of that celebration. I don’t know.

We’re going to stay out of that today. Let’s talk about Hanukkah. Why don’t we start with something really basic? What is Hanukkah? Let’s assume the audience knows nothing, and tell us what Hanukkah is.

Paul: Hanukkah is a holiday that comes, basically, at the darkest time of the year in the Jewish calendar in the northern hemisphere, which is probably an important thing to point out, as I imagine the guest you spoke to about Christmas and thinking about the people who live in South Africa and Australia and South America, if they dream about a white Christmas, then they’re probably doing it backwards. But we should say that most of the holidays that we celebrate in the Judeo-Christian – including the Muslim - traditions, emanated and developed and evolved over time in the northern hemisphere.

So when I say Hanukkah comes at the height of the darkness, it comes at the height of the darkness in the Jewish calendar as it developed probably around 100 to 200 to 600 CE, maybe a little bit before, maybe as early as 70 CE, that’s not exactly clear. You know, it depends on how you want to date certain things. But it’s a holiday that lasts for eight days, beginning on what’s on the Jewish calendar the 25th of Kislev, which usually comes sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas on the Gregorian calendar. And again, I’ll say specifically, that it happens at the time when the days are shortest and the nights are longest.

Nehemia: And that’ll be significant, but... even before that. You’re coming at this, I understand, from the perspective of someone with a PhD in Clinical Psychology, and you mentioned to me before the program that your perspective is evolutionary… what was the term you used?

Paul: Evolutionary psychology.

Nehemia: Evolutionary psychology. So I’ll be honest, I don’t entirely know what that is. I’ve heard of evolutionary biology; I took it in high school. I’ll let you explain what that is in a minute. Before that, my PhD is in Biblical Studies. I’m a philologist, I deal with history. And coming at it as an historian, I’ve got the events that took place between 168 to 165 BC, or BCE - Before the Common Era. That is, the Greeks wanted to stamp out the Jewish faith and impose upon the Jews, more importantly... I don’t know that they necessarily wanted to stamp out the Jewish faith, initially. Their main thing was to get the Jews to worship the Greek gods, so they’d all have one culture. It was assimilation.

And the Jews resisted, famously under Judah the Maccabee, the Jews eventually defeated the Greeks, which was a big shocker. The Greeks were this massive empire, Jews were not even what Israel is today, was Judea at the time. And they defeat the Greeks, and they rededicate the Temple, and then you have Hanukkah, which is actually khanukat hamizbe’akh - the dedication of the altar. That’s the historical aspect.

And then you have Hanukkah today, which is about lighting the candles for eight days, which isn’t mentioned in 1 Maccabees, and it’s not mentioned in 2 Maccabees. So how did we go from that historical event which was a dedication of the altar to celebrating... I say this is a very Jewish holiday - they’re celebrating eight days of free oil. Or maybe you could say it’s seven days of free oil.

Paul: Seven days was a given, yeah.

Nehemia: What’s the evolution that went from one to the other? How did that happen?

Paul: I think there’s a whole lot of things that happened between the 2nd century BCE into the 1st and 2nd and 5th century CE. There is a story in 1 Maccabees, and there is a story which is reflected in one of the prayers that we say regularly on Hanukkah, called Al HaNisim, which talks about a military victory.

Are those one and the same military victory? The rabbis of the Talmud will tell us that they are.We have no way to know that for sure, and we don’t really know whether at that military victory was there that one cruse of oil that lasted for eight days even though it was only supposed to last for one, or whether those two stories are conflated and not really clear.

Nehemia: Explain what that means by “conflated”. So we’ve got the historical event with the military victory and the rededication of the altar. And even today, it’s not called the holiday of miraculous oil, it’s called the holiday of Hanukkah, which is the dedication of the altar - khanukat hamizbe’akh. So explain the conflated thing. What do you mean by that?

Paul: So what seems to have happened historically... also look at Josephus a little bit, and he seems to mention more of a military victory and not so much about the cruse of oil, is that there seemed to be a holiday that was being celebrated around that time, which is where the evolutionary psychology piece will come in in a few moments.

And it also seems to be that the Maccabees were saying, “Since we were prevented from offering sacrifices in the Temple at the time of Sukkot, which is an eight-day holiday earlier on in the autumn in the northern hemisphere, then this is in some sense coming instead of that holiday, and we’re now doing those sacrifices that we would have done in the Temple, on the mizbe’akh, on the altar, in Tishrei, which was about two-and-a-half months before that, and we’re now making up for that holiday that we missed, because at that point, the Temple was not pure, and it was held by somebody else other than the Jews. There were Greeks... it will be whoever the historians will say it was.

The way the story is told is that they went in - and there is some mention of this in the Talmud - they saw and they put their spears into the ground and then they made what looks like a khanukkiah, or a Hanukkah menorah, and then they did this Khanukkah. Now we’ll get to the conflation - in more modern Hebrew, Hanukkah is called Khag Ha’Urim - the Festival of Lights. Alef-Vav-Resh - ohr meaning light. And that also happened to be, as it were, around the time of Hanukkah, which is again at the height of the darkness, during the winter.

Nehemia: And look, Josephus is the first one, as far as I know, that mentioned this idea of the Festival of Lights. And Josephus, on the other hand, says not a word about the oil.

Paul: Right.

Nehemia: 1 and 2 Maccabees say nothing about the oil.

Paul: Right.

Nehemia: But Josephus knows that it has something to do with light, and he actually has this incredible statement, where he says, “I suppose it’s because our eyes were enlightened with freedom,” or something like that, I forget the exact phrase, but it was like, this was your chance, Josephus, tell us about the miracle of oil. And he gives some other explanation, a metaphorical meaning of the light.

Paul: Right. It’s not mentioned at all.

Nehemia: So how do you explain that? Did the miracle of oil happen?

Paul: Oh, I don’t know what miracles happened or didn’t happen. I wasn’t there.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Paul: So then, what might have happened sometime later is... The most highly edited religious and/or societal documents, the Talmud had to worry about who they were dealing with. So the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud, which was from about 70 or 100 CE to about 600 CE, were worrying about not so much the Greeks, but they’re worrying about the Romans as well, and saying, “We don’t want to put in their face this military victory, so let’s come up with some other type of miracle. Yes, it’s a miracle that we can pray about in our Amida, in our daily prayer, and we can pray about it when we say the grace after meals, Birkat Hamazon, and we can talk about how we had this big military victory. But when we are studying our documents, we’ll leave those things to other places in the text, and when we’re going to say what we know about Hanukkah, we’re going to make it a holiday of lights, because in the depth of the darkness what you need is light into the darkness. And so, we make this holiday, as well as all sorts of holidays that happened at this time of the year, having to do with lights.

And this is where I come to the theory that likely what was going on in this part of the world - I’m sitting here in Jerusalem - when the days were getting really short and the nights were getting really long, and people didn’t understand as well as we understand scientifically that that’s just olam keminhago noheg- the world goes according to the way it goes, that they wanted to offer some type of sacrifice and make the darkness safer.

So there were likely around the time of 200 CE, plus or minus, there were likely all sorts of holidays having to do with lights, and since the only people who were around then, other than the Jews and Christians, were pagans, that’s where I come to my supposition that Hanukkah is a conversion or Judaification of pagan holidays that were going on around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, plus or minus.

Nehemia: Wow. We’ve got to stop there for a second. I want to be careful; I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Are you saying that there was a holiday related to a military victory, and there was this other holiday related to bringing light at a time of darkness, and they were conflated into a single holiday, or maybe they were the same holiday, but two different explanations for the same holiday? What’s your take on that?

Paul: Certainly today, and certainly from, let’s say 300-400 CE, we are talking about two different reasons for celebrating a holiday. It’s not really clear whether Hanukkah was celebrated between the time of the First Temple and the Second Temple in its time period that it is now.

Nehemia: Wait, back up. The First Temple and the Second Temple. You’re saying there’s a possibility they kept it in the First Temple?

Paul: It’s possible that they just started celebrating their military victory. It was, let’s even say it was an eight-day celebration, and then they didn’t celebrate anymore. We don’t have any particular historical, at least, from what I understand - you’re the historian - we don’t have any historical...

Nehemia: What I would cite is there’s a document that goes back to the Second Temple period called Megilat Ta’anit - Scroll of Fasting. And what’s significant about it is it lists a bunch of different days that it’s forbidden to fast; those are days of celebration. And these are things that to us seem archaic, because nobody celebrates any of these. One of them is Yom Nicanor, the day of the celebration of the defeat of the Syrian general Nicanor on the 13th of Adar. But one of the things in the list is the eight days of Hanukkah. So someone was celebrating it in the 1st century before the destruction of the Temple.

Paul: Well, we don’t know whether, again... Megilat Taanit is a Second Temple document, plus or minus. So when did it actually start to celebrate Hanukkah as an eight-day holiday now? I don’t know how to date it, because I wasn’t there for this miracle, I wasn’t there when they started it. But it’s clear that the rabbis of the Mishnah, in, let’s say, 70 or a little bit before that, knew about holidays being celebrated at this time of year. We don’t know if during the First Temple or when the Jews were exiled and before they came back. We don’t know whether there was a celebration of Hanukkah at this time of year. I don’t know all the historical documents from Bavel, from Babylonia, but I don’t know of holidays being celebrated at that point within the Jewish calendar.

Nehemia: Okay. I would say that since there’s no evidence to say they did celebrate it... although it’s a bit complicated, because in 2nd Maccabees there’s the celebration of the naphtha. So there is some pre-existent form of a celebration related to light, a miraculous light in particular, a miraculous oil, even. That’s described in 2nd Maccabees, and it’s when Nehemia, my namesake, dedicated the altar according to 2nd Maccabees. It’s not in the Tanakh, but it’s described there in 2nd Maccabees that they poured this liquid on the altar, and it ignited when the sun shone upon it, and therefore they have this idea of celebrating for eight days based on that.

Explain the evolutionary psychology side of this.

Paul: In evolutionary psychology, the way we try to look at human behavior and human practice is we say, “What might be going on that would... that humans might... what behaviors might humans have adapted in order to exist and survive best in their native surroundings?”

Generally speaking, a lot of evolutionary psychologists will look at religions in general as some type of adaptation - sometimes it’s sort of taking a hitchhike, or hijacking - but an adaptation in order to strengthen a sense of community between people who are otherwise unrelated kin. If you go back 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 years, people sort of moved around in groups, and they were probably related no more than second cousins to everybody who they were interacting with. And those groups had probably about 150-170 people. Once they got to be too big, let’s say 250-300, they would split, and likely the splits would go according to people who were actual kin.

But then at some point we had to exist in bigger groups, so we created this thing called religion, which then allowed us to say, “Okay, even though I can’t identify any of my genes in you as it were, because I don’t know how we are related biologically, I can look at you and say, ‘Okay, you are Jewish, or you are this pagan group, or you’re Christian,’ and then we know how to trust each other even if we live on two different sides of a country.” That’s how evolutionary psychologists typically look at religions.

Nehemia: Let me stop you there. You used the word “supposition”, I think that’s very important, I appreciate you laying the cards on the table of what we have as fact and what is the supposition. So your supposition, I think, then, would be that religion grows out of these psychological social structures. Meaning... maybe the word is presupposition... the assumption here is that God didn’t call down from heaven and establish any particular religion, right?

Paul: Right.

Nehemia: Okay, I want to establish this. So if there’s someone listening out there, who says, “I believe that God commanded the Jewish people through the miracle to light the Hanukkah candles,” you can’t say anything about that, because that’s a religious belief, right? Meaning that what you’re offering is - and I’m not sure anybody says that exactly, because obviously it’s takanat rabanim, what we call takanot. But if somebody believes in their heart that the miracle really happened and that’s why we celebrate Hanukkah, you’re not really saying anything against that, right?

Paul: No, absolutely not.

Nehemia: You’re looking for something in human nature, I guess, and in human society, that would spawn different religious expressions.

Paul: Right.

Nehemia: That’s a very different approach than what I take. Meaning, as a philologist, I could hypothetically say... Let’s take Christmas, for example. Christmas, you’ll say as a historian or philologist, is a pagan holiday, and here’s a text I can point to that... First of all, I can point to a text that doesn’t have it, which is the New Testament. That’s kind of important. And then I can point to the what the Christians call the Church Fathers, which is the first... certainly the first century after Jesus, we don’t have Christmas. So where’d it come from?

And then I have this text, which is a Roman calendar, and on December 25th it says, “The birthday of the sun”. So from a philological perspective I’m pointing to concrete things. I’m saying there’s an absence of it here, and there’s a presence of it here. But that’s not the approach you’re really taking with Hanukkah, or is it?

Paul: Actually, it is.

Nehemia: Ah, that’s what I want to get to as a philologist.

Paul: Now we can talk. There are a couple of texts, a couple of midrashim. One is in Avoda Zara, idol worship, and one is in Taanit, where there is a Midrash about adam harishon, the first man.

Nehemia: So what the rabbis are saying here, if I understand correctly, is that they look at Saturnalia and Kolenda and they say, “These pagan holidays were originally...” we can’t call it Jewish, because Adam is before Judah. But let’s call it Jewish holidays. They were biblical, or...

Paul: I would say even they were holidays celebrated in Eretz Yisrael, in the Land of Israel.

Nehemia: Okay.

Paul: Probably somewhere around the Second Temple period.

Nehemia: Well, there are two ways of looking at this. One is that the rabbis are right here and there’s a pre-Hanukkah holiday that was being kept for eight days, and the other is the rabbis look at Kolęnda and Saturnalia and they say, “We understand where this came from.” And maybe even this is what’s going on; they look at all these different cultures that Jews are living in in the Diaspora. They’re in Israel, but also there are Jews in Bavel surrounded by Zoroastrians, and there are Jews who are interacting with Egyptians, with the Copts, and there are Jews who are interacting with all these different cultures, and they say, “Wow, something like Saturnalia and Kolęnda, these eight-day festivals around the equinox exist in all these different cultures. It must be something that goes back to adam harishon, to the first man, and what Adam established for good the pagans have turned into something pagan.

Paul: Right, and so, what I would say is, your presumption that all these different cultures were celebrating holidays of light at this time of year, whether we were in Egypt or Babylonia or as far north as we could have gotten at the time, in Mesopotamia, and there were also holidays of light celebrated at this time of year in Eretz Yisrael. And the rabbis understood that the Jews needed to celebrate too. But we can’t allow the Jews to celebrate a pagan holiday or a heathen holiday, we need the Jews to celebrate a Jewish holiday.

So now I remember what happened according to the history, or according to the history as I understand it, in Sefer haMacabeem. And I say, “Okay, there seems to be some celebration around that time 400 years ago, let’s put these two together. Let’s call it an eight-day festival, coincidentally or not, and let’s give the Jews what to celebrate at this time, where we need to chase away the darkness.”

Nehemia: So it could be, from what you’re saying, that there were Jews celebrating... we’ll call it proto-Hanukkah - Hanukkah, maybe before it was called Hanukkah.

Paul: Right.

Nehemia: For eight days, around the time of the equinox, and then when the military victory happened, they said, “No, this is a good time to celebrate eight days, we’re celebrating anyway, we’ll slap a new label on it.”

Paul: Right.

Nehemia: This is interesting. This is almost the opposite of what I thought we were going to talk about, that Hanukkah started out as a pagan celebration and then it was turned into an Israelite or a Jewish celebration - and maybe that’s even true - but before the time of Hanukkah it could have been a Jewish celebration. That’s very interesting.

Paul: It could have been that there was something going on with the Yehudim of Yehuda, or they were more Yisraelim. It could be that there was something going on, but that’s secondary to my point. If you wanted to say that there was a proto-Hanukkah going on to make it sound more Jewish... again, I wasn’t there, so I’m happy to say yes. But I’m assuming that everybody was celebrating at this time, and the rabbis said, because they had some sense of the geopolitics of the time, “At some point we’re going to be really in a diaspora. Let’s make sure that when the Jews go into the diaspora, they have a Jewish holiday to celebrate now.”

If you want to really get into something like that we will come back before Lag BaOmer and we can really talk about how to take a pagan holiday and turn it into a Jewish one, but we’ll get to that another time.

Nehemia: That’s a different program.

Paul: The idea of the way I look at it is that the rabbis had a very important task, and here... I remember one of my teachers who said it to me, although when I went back and said to him, “Did you ever say this to me?” He said, “I don’t think so.”

But anyway, either his memories failed, or my memory failed. But one of my teachers said to me, as I remember it, that the rabbis had a really important task, because they were setting up a religion that could be observed outside a native land. Because Judaism, as we practice it today, is Rabbinic Judaism. And I know Karaite Judaism is somewhat different.

Nehemia: Speak for yourself, but fair enough, by and large.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, I understand. Judaism as we celebrate it today is a Rabbinic Judaism. And so, Rabbinic Judaism only grew up... which is the turning point between Rabbinic Jews and Karaitic Jews, only grew up around 70 to 200, at about the same time that Christianity grew up. The laws of kashrut were very different. There was no waiting six hours, or three hours or even a short time between meat and milk. There’s no evidence that that existed beforehand. In the Torah it says, “Don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk,” that’s all.

Nehemia: Amen.

Paul: There’s nothing that says we have to have two sets of dishes or two pots or whatever. There’s a joke; how many times does it say in the Torah ‘don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk’? It says it three times. So the first time Moses says, “Does that mean we have to wait six hours?” God says, “No, don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” “Does that mean we have to have two sets of pots?” God says, “No! Don’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” “Does that mean we have to have two sets of dishes?” And God says, “Okay, have it your way.”

Nehemia: So, I’ve told this joke, and the way I’ve always told it, the way it was told to me is, “Do whatever you want.” Same idea. So how does lighting Hanukkah candles megaresh et hakhoshekh - drive out the darkness? Explain that concept. And look, you have this. The Zoroastrians have a similar thing where they light some kind of fires, Christmas candles, Hanukkah… originally lamps, now candles. What is the evolutionary psychology explanation for this?

Paul: So if you look at the original practice of where the rabbis said to the Jews in Eretz Yisrael at the time that they were supposed to light their khanukiot, their Hanukkah menorahs, outside on the street. And you’re supposed to start to light them at the time that the business ends in the shuk, in the market, and the latest time you’re supposed to light them is when the last people are getting home from the shuk. So the last people getting home from the shuk, it’s going to be pretty dark. And assuming that the candles are going to be lit for, let’s say, half an hour or an hour... they’re going to put enough oil on there for it to last a long enough time. The idea here is, “I’m going to make a great effort, take a very expensive oil that’s going to burn well, and make sure that I have very good wicks in my candle, even better wicks than one might use on Shabbat, and say I’m going to light this outside, so I’m going to make a great investment for other people so that therefore they can walk home in the dark with at least their paths lit.” So the initial halachot, the initial practices of lighting the Hanukkah candle, was to light the way for people who are making their way home at this very dark time of the year.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s interesting. I really appreciate what you shared there. I don’t know if I agree with you, but it’s very interesting. I love this perspective you’re bringing, of the evolutionary... This is an interesting tool that I can add to my toolkit of evolutionary psychology. As a philologist, the way I would look at it is there’s this principle called sympathetic magic. And you probably know about this from psychology as well. The form of it that I understand is... how do I put this...

Let’s take an example. You want it to rain, so you pour water out and you keep pouring water out, and that somehow helps it rain. It helps the gods of the heaven, the mal’akhim, the angels, whoever it is, it helps create rain. This is, you could say, a pagan way of thinking, but we do it today. And what do I mean by we do it today? And here we might have to edit this out, but hopefully we can leave it in. There are hundreds of millions of people who, when the man wants to get a little bit of help in the bedroom, he consumes the horn of a rhinoceros. And why does he consume the horn of a rhinoceros? It’s textbook sympathetic magic. To the point where rhinoceroses... rhinoceri? I don’t know, rhinoceroses are being made extinct because there’s over a billion people who believe that if you imbibe this thing that looks like what you’re trying to get to, then it’ll help you. That’s sympathetic magic.

Paul: And they say that if you eat that horn, it’ll make you horny?

Nehemia: Not that it’ll make you horny, but you’ll... I don’t need to spell it out, hopefully, for the audience. The children listening won’t understand. But you’re trying to recreate that horn, essentially, let’s put it that way. And so, I think the pagan way of thinking, the sympathetic magic way of thinking, would have been, “The sun is dying. The days are getting shorter and shorter, we need to help the sun. The sun is a god, but it needs our help. And how do we bring the sun back to life and bring about its resurrection? We light fires that kickstart it and help it come back.” That would be the, I think, historical or philological explanation, and they both might be true. I love your perspective.

Paul: I even say I would agree with that 100%. And then the rabbis’ task was to turn that into something Jewish, Rabbinically Jewish. That’s the way they saw their job at the time. In order to preserve their... even just sort of the Pharisaic type of religion. They said, “We want to make sure that this is going to survive. And it’s not dead, it survived not with big numbers, but it survived for 2,500-3,000 years. We want to give these set of practices so that Jews, Rabbinic Jews, maintain their Jewishness, no matter where they are, and eventually they’ll come back to Eretz Yisrael and continue to do this. And we’ll come back, but we’ll have something to take along with us so that we won’t assimilate into the surroundings and celebrate all those other holidays, which are not Jewish.

Nehemia: Okay. Another thing the historians have pointed out, and I don’t know if this is correct, but this is what historians have argued, is that originally Hanukkah, let’s say from 165, where it was the military victory, and it was a victory in a sense that celebrated the victory of the Maccabees, who certainly from around the year 103 BC were Sadducees. And so some historians have suggested that shifting the attention from the military victory, especially when the altar has been destroyed, to the miracle of the oil was a strategy to essentially steal some of the glory away from the Sadducees and put it upon... not necessarily the Pharisees, but upon God.

Now, is that really what happens? I don’t know that we’d know enough to say that for sure. It’s definitely a possibility. What we can say for sure is that none of our Second Temple sources that mention Hanukkah... we have basically four sources - 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Josephus - which kind of relies on 2 Maccabees - and Megilat Taanit. None of them mention anything about the miracle of the oil. The first time we have that is what’s called the Skolion, the Gemara on Megilat Taanit, which is post 70 for sure.

Paul: Right, for sure. It’s given in a Baraita, which is an external source contemporary to the Mishnah, but there’s no way to know exactly when that was. It’s post 70. It’s certainly not most of the Second Temple, and it’s certainly not anything to do with the First Temple.

Nehemia: Now, on the other hand, the lighting of the candles - or the lamps, not candles - that does predate the story of the miracle of the oil. There’s a makhloket between Beit Shamai and Beit Hillel - assuming that actually is historical - which is in the Second Temple period. But within the makhloket, nothing is said about the oil.

Paul: Right.

Nehemia: The debate is do you start with eight and go to one or do you start with one and go to eight? And it has to do with Sukkot, which is exactly what we see in Second Maccabees, so that actually makes sense.

Paul: Right. And again, it’s lighting candles, and then the rabbis take it to lighting the Hanukkah candles, which is not clear whether that’s what it was or not. Also, again, I think that the rededication of the Temple, as I remembered in the description of that both in Maccabees and in the Gemara, is that the Maccabees take their swords and put them in and light a menorah. It doesn’t say how long they lit it for, it doesn’t say how much oil they had, but they create a six-pronged menorah, and that’s what they light, because that’s what was lit in the Temple.

Nehemia: I’m going to refer all the listeners to go and read 1 and 2 Maccabees. This is your opportunity to see what the historical sources say about what happens when they liberated the Temple and eventually rededicated the implements.

To end, maybe we can end with a Hanukkah vort. Do you have some words of wisdom to impart to the audience related to Hanukkah, or driving out darkness or something?

Paul: A good Hanukkah vort - and this, I think, will sort of mix all of the things that go on in this crazy head of mine - is that when we’re lighting the Hanukkah candles and we say “lehadlik ner shel Hanukkah”, and we say “sheh’asah nisim”, we’re commanded to light the candles, and the one who does the miracles, it doesn’t matter to me, Rabbi Dr. Paul Shrell-Fox, what’s in your heart as long as you’re doing it for yourself and for your community. You can believe that God commanded us, even though the question in the Gemara is, hekhan tzuvenu? Where did God command us this? Because it doesn’t exist in the Torah. Hanukkah certainly does not exist in the Torah.

But if we do this in the right mind, and if we do this in a way that says, “I’m being the part of my immediate community, which we can call family, my extended community, which we can call my neighborhood or my surroundings, my overextended community, which we call the Jews from north to south and east to west,” and then I would hope that we would take it as a modern Jew also to say, “Yes, we have our own particular rights, but living in 2021 we also have to look at it as universal.” I don’t believe that religions need to be universal, but I think all religions will give some type of universal message, and would that we could really find that universal message at Hanukkah time, at any time, not because I want to make a melting pot of everybody doing the same thing, but I think the mark of true diversity is that we each respect what each other does.

Nehemia: Thank you very much. Chag same’akh.

Paul: Chag same’akh.

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