Betrayed Again

Like most readers, I suspect, I was upset—but not that shocked—by the decision of the Naftali Bennett government to go back on the P.M.’s unambiguous pre-election promise to implement the 2016 agreement to create a space for non-Orthodox (i.e., non-gender-segregated) prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That agreement, which took years to hammer out, was suspended first by the Netanyahu government in 2017. But many of us, apparently naively, expected P.M. Bennett to be a man of his word and to unfreeze—and actually implement—the agreement when he came to power. And, indeed, after the initial announcement was made, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid did issue a statement in which he vaguely promised—without using anything remotely like the language of real commitment or intention—to implement the agreement sometime within the next four years. We’ll see. I certainly wouldn’t bet on it. In fact, I’ll be amazed if the current government follows through on its own commitment.

The responses were entirely as any savvy observer would have expected. Yes, it was almost amusing to watch members of the government scrambling for cover by blaming their own lack of moral backbone and commitment to their own commitment on anyone other than themselves. (For a survey of those efforts, I recommend David Horovitz’s Times of Israel article on the topic, which you can access by clicking here.) From the leadership of the Conservative/Masorti and Reform movements in Israel came the expected statements of outrage, some more angry and others more wearily depressed. From the leaders of those same movements outside of Israel, some statements issued were more disappointed and others more self-righteous (i.e., in the you-expect-our-unwavering-support-yet-you-feel-free-to-stab-us-in-the-back mode). But the common theme that surfaced in them all were intense irritation at being confronted with yet another broken government promise and, yes, a sense of true betrayal.

I personally feel trapped by decisions like this one: eager to be as supportive of Israel as ever and yet, at the same time, unable to explain to myself how the leaders of Israel’s government can betray their commitments so callously. And this from a government that spends a fortune to maintain an actual Diaspora Affairs Ministry headed by an actual cabinet official, M.K. Omer Yankelevich. At the very least, she should have resigned in protest. But I could not find a single statement from her office responding directly to the Bennett government’s decision to abandon the Kotel agreement.

To explain how the Bennett government can behave so callously towards the very people on whose unwavering support it also wishes to count, I would like to draw my readers’ attention to a historical personality only rarely considered a player in modern Israeli politics: Napoleon Bonaparte, whose two-hundredth yahrtzeit fell just this last May.

There’s a lot to say about Napoleon’s 1797 series of battles in today’s Israel. To understand what the man was doing in the Middle East in the first place, however, it is necessary to step back far enough to take in the larger picture of world politics at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1796, Napolean became the leader of France after undertaking successful campaigns against the Austrians and their Italian allies. But the real objective of French expansionism was neither Austria nor Italy, but England. Nor was the French government unclear about its ultimate objective, talking openly about the idea of a march on London. But invading the British Isles was something that was beyond the capacity of the French forces of the day and they knew it. And so Napolean, then not even thirty years old, was dispatched to fight the British elsewhere than on home soil by making the Mediterranean into a “French lake” that would not tolerate incursions by British ships, thus ruining Britain’s capacity to trade freely in southern Europe and northern Africa. And so ensued a three-year campaign to wrest control of Egypt, and today’s Israel, Lebanon and Syria from the Ottoman Empire.

There were pitched battles in Egypt itself, but also at Jaffa, Akko, Gaza, El Arish, Haifa, and in the Galilee. The whole campaign was a disaster for the French—1,200 killed in action, 1,800 wounded, and another six hundred dead from disease (click here for some fascinating details about that last number). Napolean returned to Egypt and was victorious in some sea-based battles there, but he was ultimately unable to dislodge the Ottomans or the British from the Eastern Mediterranean and finally returned to France in defeat.

There are bits and pieces of Napolean’s legacy scattered around Israel, particularly in Akko. But the key to understanding the larger story—which is far more complicated than the scaled-down version offered above (click here for more details)—is that none of this had anything to do with the Jews of France…or of Israel. This was where Napoleon tried—unsuccessfully—to annihilate the forces arrayed against him. But to try to explain the whole episode as something of tactical or even spiritual importance for the Jews of the Land of Israel, or for the history of the Land itself, is to miss the point entirely: it happened there, but it wasn’t about the place in which it happened. This was about France and England mostly, and a little bit about France and the Ottoman Empire. It just happened in Israel, that’s all.

And the same could be said of the campaign of the British and Australian troops in today’s Israel during the First World War. The Battle of Beersheva is mostly forgotten today—but anyone who visits the Australian War Cemetery in Beersheva and sees the graves of more than 1100 young men, all of whom died on the same day in October 1917, will never forget the experience. Joan and I were there a few years ago and it was beyond chilling and, in its own way, just as suggestive to me of the horrors of war as were my visits to Gettysburg or Antietam. But the Battle of Beersheva, fought on Halloween in 1917, was just one of many battles fought by the British against the Ottomans and their German allies during the course of the First World War. Mostly forgotten or ignored today—when was the last time you read anything about the Battle of Raffa (January 1917) or the First or Second Battles of Gaza (March and April 1917, respectively) or the Battle of Mughar Ridge (November 1917) or even, most amazing of all, the Battle of Jerusalem, fought in the final two months of that same year, 1917?—these were the battles that changed the face of the Middle East permanently and irrevocably. (The best book on the topic I can recommend is David R. Woodward’s Hell in the Holy Land, World War I in the Middle East, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2006.) But the point is that this had nothing to do with the Jews of Israel or of anywhere, and even less to do with the Holy Land itself: this was just where the Brits encountered the Turks and fought to the finish, not unlike the way that same place served as the setting for Napoleon’s war against the Ottoman Empire.

So that’s how I’m feeling about this week’s betrayal by the Bennett government of the Kotel Agreement: it’s a huge slap in the face of all non-Orthodox Jews and yet it’s not really about us at all and has to do far more meaningfully with the nature of the coalition that brought Bennett to power, a coalition that cannot survive if it alienates the dark forces of ḥareidi fanaticism too seriously…but which sees only benefit to appearing to side with them on an issue that matters to them far more than it does to most secular Israelis. Like Israel itself in Napoleon’s day, we Masorti Jews are just the backdrop to the real drama playing itself out—not the actors with speaking parts and certainly not the playwright. Nonetheless, explaining the repudiation of the Kotel agreement as a function of the Prime Minister’s need to grovel before the ḥareidim doesn’t make it sting less or hurt less. Nor does understanding that the government’s actions were far more cynical than hostile make their betrayal of their own promise any more palatable.

My deep attachment to the State of Israel is not based on any specific personality, political or otherwise. It is a function of my faith in God and my Jewishness on its most basic level. I find it perfectly possible to be disgusted with the government and, at the same time, to feel as allied as ever with the nation it purports to govern and with its people. That, of course, is what the Bennett government is counting on. But how else can I feel? 

They Paved Paradise

 All readers my age and older (and many younger too, I’m sure) know Joni Mitchell’s terrific song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” and its most famous quatrain: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot / with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hot spot / Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” (For Joni’s own comments on her 1970 song, click here.) And she’s surely right that the sites of most parking lots would be more beautiful if they were verdant squares of natural growth filled with wildflowers, leafy trees, and babbling brooks. But sometimes the asphalt of parking lots is actually more like the top of a treasure box that has the most interesting things hiding just beneath its spongy surface. It was, for example, just a decade ago that the remains of King Richard III were discovered beneath the Leicester City Council parking lot in Leicester, England, which at the time of his 1485 death in the Battle of Bosworth Field was the site of a church’s burial ground. (The king was later reburied in the Leicester Cathedral.) For more about this whole fascinating episode, I recommend Morris Mathew and Richard Buckley’s Richard III: The King Under the Car Park. Riveting!

But I have my mind on a different parking lot today, one connected to Jewish rather than English history. And also to the Fast of the Tenth of Tevet, a minor fast day ignored by most that fell just this last Tuesday. And the story of that parking lot, the Givati Parking Lot near the City of David excavations just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, is also fascinating, its surface too more like the top of a treasure chest than its status as a municipal parking lot would suggest.

 What we know about the siege of Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE comes mostly, but not entirely, from the Bible. (The siege is one of the few events in biblical history with corroborative sources from the other side, in this case the Babylonians.) And we know a lot, actually. We know that Babylonia—more specifically, the Neo-Babylonian Empire over which Nebuchadnezzar II (c. 642 BCE–562 BCE) ruled—became the most powerful nation in the world after soundly defeating the Egyptians at the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE. But we also know that that was only the beginning—and that in the years that followed Carchemish, the Babylonians were able decisively to extend their empire either by overrunning smaller nations and making them provinces of the Babylonian empire or, as in the case of Judah, by making less powerful nations into vassal states headed by servile kings set in place by their Babylonian masters. And, indeed, the last king of Judah, a man named Mataniah who took the name Tzidkiyahu when he was put on the throne by the Babylonians, was a mere twenty-one years when his nephew Yehoyachin (who was even younger—just eighteen—when he came to the throne and reigned for all of three months) was deposed and exiled to the east.

For a while, things were calm. But then Zedekiah was somehow convinced to rebel against his Babylonian masters. This is a terrible idea, not merely a quixotic one. He was warned by none other than the prophet Jeremiah that this course of action was sheer folly, that there simply was no way to win. And yet he persevered, entering into an alliance with Pharaoh Hophra of Egypt and choosing to ignore the prophet’s warnings and hope instead for some sort of military miracle. And it was this foolhardy act of national suicide dressed up as patriotic bravado that led to the Babylonians’ decision no longer to tolerate Judah as a vassal state but instead to make it a mere province of their empire. The siege began in the winter of 589 BCE and lasted almost thirty months. And the end, the city was overrun, its king and surviving citizens (or at least thousands of them) taken off into exile in Babylon, and the Temple razed. And the day that siege began was precisely the Tenth of Tevet, the day we to this day commemorate as a fast in memory of the disaster that befell Judah when its kind decided that putting his trust in the king of Egypt would be a better plan than heading the word of God as conveyed to him over and over by God’s prophet in that place.

So that’s the background. And now we get to the part about the Givati Parking Lot. Or rather to the part about the parking lot as described in a remarkable scientific paper published by a team of six Israeli archeologists headed by Yoav Vaknin that came out in the online scientific journal PLOS One. It turns out that beneath the parking lot are the remains—not of a medieval English king—but of a large, two-story building that dates back to the siege of Jerusalem and which was apparently destroyed as part of the Babylonian campaign to bring Judah to its knees. Vaknin and his team found fifty-four fragments of stone flooring and were able to analyze them with respect to the coded information about the magnetic field of the earth in their day that they somehow preserved.

This is the part you need to be more of a scientist than myself (which is really not saying much) to understand. But the basic principle seems to be that when these buildings were burnt to the ground, the fantastic heat that consumed them—more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit—somehow locked into them data concerning the magnetic field of the world in their day—some 2600 years in the past. Maybe I should let Vaknin himself explain: “The floor of the structure,” he is quoted as saying in a Times of Israel article about his discovery, “is filled with magnetized minerals that absorbed the [magnetic] field that was on Earth at the time. Since the magnetic field changes all the time we’re trying to reconstruct it. Here, we have a little peephole, accurate to the day, of the ancient magnetic field from 2,600 years ago.”

This is important for several different reasons. First, it will allow archeologists to date artifacts from antiquity by measuring their magnetic field—a method that is far more accurate than carbon dating, but which until now lacked a secure baseline against which to measure new finds. But far more important are the implications here for future study with respect to climate change because the earth’s magnetic field serves as a kind of a shield that protects us from radiation and charged particles from the sun. The problem is that this magnetic field is in a state of constant flux, endlessly strengthening and weakening. Modern studies began only in the 1830s, when the initial research into the topic was undertaken by Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician and physicist, and lots remains to be understood. But the basic principle is clear and the NASA website says there are known to have been 170 of these reversals over the last seventy-six million years. (Click here for more details.) As a result, understanding the specific measure of the magnetic shield before detailed calculations began in 1830 has always been a wished-for but unattainable goal. And now these six Israeli archeologists have made a great stride forward towards saying what the shield was like in the sixth century BCE…which detail will provide scientists with the framework for trying to chart the vagaries of the earth’s magnetic shield into the future.

The upshot is that the next time someone speaks dismissively about the Tenth of Tevet as a fast commemorating something obscure that once happened two dozen and a half centuries ago, you can tell them that not only was the destruction of Jerusalem a seminal event in Jewish history the reverberations of which continue to influence the Jewish worldview heavily and meaningfully, but that the surviving remnants of that siege are providing scientists with the kind of data that could conceivably lead to understanding how the magnetic field that protects all life on earth functions.

The reasons I fast every year on the Tenth of Tevet are not specifically related to the earth’s magnetic field. But the thought that data from the siege that fast day commemorates could be crucial to the survival of human life on earth—that certainly makes me feel more, not less, committed to sticking with it, and with the other fasts that go with it: the Seventeenth of Tammuz (the day the walls of the city were finally breached), the Ninth of Av (the day the Temple was razed), and the Fast of Gedaliah on the third of Tishrei (the day the last flickering ember of Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel when Gedaliah ben Ahikam, the governor of destroyed Judah set in place by the Babylonians, was assassinated by vigilantes convinced that his death would serve the future of the Jewish people more ably than his efforts to hold onto something where there would otherwise have been nothing at all).

Pearl Harbor, Eighty Years On

For some reason, this last Tuesday—the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Naval Station Pearl Harbor—was skipped quickly by on most of the media platforms I frequent. But it’s hard to say why, since this was a truly pivotal day in the history both of our country and of the world. More than 2400 Americans died in Hawaii that day. Another 1,178 were wounded. Four U.S. Navy battleships were sunk. Four others were damaged, as were seven other ships. 188 airplanes were destroyed and another 159 damaged. It was, by any rational yardstick, one of the worst days in American history, a day that, as FDR famously said of it, “will live in infamy.” Our nation responded by declaring war on Japan the very next day. (Canada, we should also remember with gratitude, declared war on Japan even before we did, acting quickly on the actual day of the attack.) But others followed quickly: by nightfall on December 8, no fewer than eleven nations also declared war on Japan, including Australia, New Zealand, and China. And so was the battle joined: later that same day the Japanese attacked Shanghai and invaded the Philippines.

For Jews, the day has its own set of memories to offer the remembering public: December 8, 1941, was also the day that the concentration camp at Chełmno opened, a nightmare site at which more than 153,000 Jewish souls, starting with deportees from the Lodz ghetto, were eventually murdered. And it was also the day on which Hitler issued his infamous Nacht-und-Nebel (“Night-and-Fog”) decree, removing all arrested resistance fighters and political opponents of Nazism from the “normal” judicial process, where they might have had some sort of minimal opportunity to defend themselves, and handing the apprehended over to the Gestapo instead, where their fate was a foregone conclusion.

I was raised to think of Pearl Harbor as a day of singular terribleness, as a day of national disaster pretty much without parallel. And, indeed, my father, who was twenty-five years old in 1941, carried the memory of that day to the grave. He never owned a Japanese car, never wore a Seiko wristwatch, never owned a Sony television or radio. Even he thought he was behaving just a bit peculiarly still to be holding onto that grudge all those many years later! But I can also remember clearly him saying to me that whenever he did occasionally think of buying something made in Japan, there immediately barged into his mind images of those poor American sailors—more than a thousand of them—buried forever beneath the wreckage of the U.S.S. Arizona on the floor of the ocean, whereupon he just found something manufactured in the United States (or anywhere but Japan or Germany) to purchase instead. And while I think this policy of my dad’s will probably sound to most today somewhere between quaint and obstinate, I understand where he was coming from and I respected him—and still do respect him—for his allegiance to the memory of our nation’s war dead. Nor, as far as I know, did he ever eat in a Japanese restaurant.

But there is another side to Pearl Harbor, one most of us—and myself most definitely included—prefer to look past or, if possible, to ignore entirely.

By December of 1941, Germany had already occupied most of Europe—including Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Holland, Yugoslavia, and Greece—and either set up puppet regimes in those places to serve their German masters or else seized the reins of governance themselves. The battle for Great Britain was well underway. The United States, strongly allied emotionally with Britain and with most of the nations of occupied Europe, was still grappling with the strong isolationist tendencies at home that had kept American out of the war until the Japanese left even those the most committed to American neutrality with basically no choice but to support the idea of entering the fray. Forgotten by most today are the series of “Neutrality Acts” passed repeatedly by Congress—in 1935, 1936, 1937, and, after the invasion of Poland, 1939—with the express intention of making it illegal for America to become “entangled” in foreign conflicts. Yes, it’s true that these acts were largely repealed after Pearl Harbor, but that is precisely my point: the United States entered the war only after thousands of Americans were killed in the surprise attack in Hawaii and there really was no possibility to respond other than vigorously militarily. Nor, to cite another unpalatable fact, did declaring war on Japan lead directly to our nation declaring war on Germany: it was only after Germany first declared war on us on December 11, 1941, that Congress responded in kind and declared war on Germany as well.

If the Japanese hadn’t drawn the United States into the war and made neutrality impossible, would the U.S. eventually have gone to war anyway? Or would isolationism—and the fear of “entanglement” in foreign wars—have retained its power over the American people and kept us out possibly even after Britain collapsed and became yet another state occupied by Germany? No one can say, of course. But, frankly speaking, if neither the occupation of France nor of Holland moved us to intervene, why would the occupation of Britain necessarily have done so? Are our ties to Britain that much stronger than our ties to France? Or to Poland? Do the Jews who survived the Shoah owe their lives to whoever made the decision to bomb Pearl Harbor and made it impossible for American to stay out of the fighting? You could make just that argument…and cogently too. Needless to say (since we’re dispensing unpalatable facts anyway), there is no evidence at all—and, if anything, evidence to the contrary—that FDR would ever have proposed military intervention to save the Jews of Europe.

It’s also worth remembering that our nation entered the First World War on April 6, 1917, almost three years after the fighting broke out…and that it was only the specter of a German-supported Mexican invasion of American territory with the express aim of restoring Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico to Mexican sovereignty and the reality of an ongoing German submarine offensive aimed at sinking ships headed for East Coast ports—that finally gave President Wilson the political juice necessary to bring America into the conflict. So it would be fair to say we only entered the Great War once we began to fear for ourselves, not to support our allies.

The endless struggle between isolationism and engagement-ism continues to play itself out in the hearts of Americans. If China finally invades Taiwan, claiming that it is merely restoring a renegade island to its traditional place as part of China, will American go to war to preserve the independence of a long-standing ally? If Russia invades Ukraine, which possibility was a front-page story in the New York Times just this last week, will the U.S. go to war (with or without the support of other nations) on behalf of Ukraine? Israel is a tried-and-true ally of the United States. But if war breaks out again in the Middle East and a nuclear Iran threatens to intervene on the side of radical Islamicists seeking to destroy the Jewish State, how will our nation respond?

Although mostly Pearl Harbor Day stirs of feelings of deep sadness in me as I contemplate our losses on that awful day, it also reminds me that our great victories across the world in both the Pacific and European theaters of war were triggered by Pearl Harbor and our subsequent entry into the Second World War. I’d like to think we would eventually have recognized Nazism for the evil that it was and gone to war to eradicate it. But that too is just so much conjecturing…and the reality is that, there too, none can say what might have happened. All we can do is hope! And that too is part of the legacy of Pearl Harbor.

 

The Miracle of Chanukah

At the heart of Chanukah is the concept of pirsuma d’nisa, the “publicizing of the miracle” that lies at the heart of the Chanukah story. The lighting of the menorah itself is explained with reference to that concept: we light our Chanukah lamps and then display them in a public place specifically to remind passers-by about the Chanukah miracle and presumably, in so doing, to make them sensitive to God’s role in the world as the Author of history. Nor should the way this works be obscure, for what are miracles really other than instances of direct divine intervention in the unfolding of human history to push the story along in a different direction than the one in which it might otherwise have gone off?

But what precisely was the miracle we exert ourselves so intensely to publicize? That sounds like a ridiculous question even to bother asking out loud—if there is one thing everybody knows about Chanukah it’s the story of the miracle that rests at the center of its best-known ritual. Even children in kindergarten know that story! Or do they?

Weirdly few and many at the same time are the historical sources from antiquity that relate the story of the Chanukah miracle. Few, because we are talking at most about five or six reliable contemporary (or nearly contemporary) texts written by authors who knew the events under consideration firsthand or almost firsthand. But also many, because none of the afore-referenced sources seem to agree—really not even slightly—about what the miracle actually was. And therein, as I hope to show, lies a very interesting tale indeed.

The story we all know has to do with the tiny cruse of oil that had somehow survived the Hellenists’ occupation of the Temple with its tiny seal—the seal of the High Priest of Israel—intact. When the Maccabees liberated the Temple Mount and began the process of restoring the Temple to its pristine state, they wished first of all to kindle the olive-oil lamps that sat at the top of each branch of the great golden candelabrum that stood—along with the golden incense altar and the golden table on which were displayed the weekly showbread—in the anteroom just outside the Holy of Holies. The jug of oil should have contained enough for just one day’s use, but—miraculously—there continued to be oil in the jug day after day no matter how much they poured out of it until, eventually, new oil could be prepared for daily use. It’s a good story, a famous one. But it only appears for the first time in the Talmud, a work finally published about seven centuries after the events under discussion. It is true that the Talmud presents the story as one deriving from the period of the Mishnah, so only two or three centuries after the Maccabean revolt. But it’s still a bit fishy, the whole idea: a remarkable story about a miraculous event that somehow avoided being mentioned by anyone in any surviving literary work for centuries upon centuries after it allegedly occurred.

And then there is Jason of Cyrene. Cyrene is on the Mediterranean coast of eastern Libya and there lived a man named Jason, known to us solely as the author of a five-part work that has not survived and the title of which also is unknown. In point of fact, we know nothing at all about Jason other than his name and his place. But the same cannot be said for his lost work because someone—whose name is also unknown—took on the job of creating a summary volume that would reduce the five tomes of the original to one, much shorter work. And that work, the summary volume, did survive and is known, confusingly, as Second Maccabees. (To make the matter even more confusing, Second Maccabees has no relationship at all to the book known as First Maccabees, an entirely different work.) 

And this Jason—who lived decades, not centuries, after the Maccabees seized control of the Temple—he also had a miracle in his story, just not the one we’ve all heard of.

In Jason’s book, the miracle has to do with one Nehemiah—not the Nehemiah who later became a book of the Bible, but rather the man, otherwise unknown to history, charged with restoring the Temple when the Jews returned from exile in Babylon.

He starts by recalling that “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.” That seemed unlikely to work—how could the fire have possibly burned for the half century the Jews were away? But, hoping for a miracle, this Nehemiah then sent the descendants of those original priests who hid the first to retrieve it. But when they went to that secret place, they found not fire but some sort of “thick liquid” instead. Not sure what to do, but somehow inspired to take a huge chance, Nehemiah then ordered the priests to pour out liquid on the carcass of a sacrificial animal that had been set atop the wood set atop the newly re-inaugurated altar. And, indeed, a great miracle did occur: as soon as the sun shone on the liquid, it burst into flames and consumed the sacrifice that had been set atop the wood. And so the miracle was that this thick liquid—which Jason tells us the locals called naphtha—somehow allowed the sanctity of the fire that had burned permanently atop the altar in the First Temple to be transferred to the Second, thereby creating an unbroken link of sacrificial offering interrupted only temporally, but not really physically. Later on, Jason tells about the restoration of the Temple in the days of the Maccabees, but he mentions the menorah only in passing, saying merely that they “purified the sanctuary, built a new altar and then, “striking fire from flint, they offered sacrifices for the first time after a lapse of two years, burning incense as well and lighting [the] lamps [of the great candelabrum] and setting out the showbread.”

So Jason has the Maccabees restoring the golden Menorah, but his miracle is the one that connects the First Temple with the Second. And that actually does make sense: the appurtenances in the Second Temple were all new, whereas the sacred appurtenances present when the Maccabees restored the Temple were the same ones present a few years earlier when the traditionalists lost control of the Temple. So for Jason the miracle is that the fire that illuminated the Sanctum of the Temple in his day went back—physically and not just theoretically—to the days of David and Solomon. Same concept, same elements (oil, fire, menorah)—just a different story entirely.

And then there is the anonymous author of a different book, the one known to us as First Maccabees. He almost definitely wrote in Hebrew, although his book survives only in Greek. He was a near contemporary of Jason of Cyrene, perhaps a bit older but still a contemporary. And he was closest of all to the events at hand: a Hebrew-speaking Jew living in the Land of Israel relating the story of the Maccabees as he knew it.

But he has no miracle at all in his account. Just to the contrary, for this author the victory of the Maccabees was itself a miracle…and, at that, one that did not need to be enhanced with other, lesser wonders. He writes that they weren’t sure what to do with the altar now that it had been defiled with impure worship (he almost certainly means now that pigs had been sacrificed upon it), but that they eventually decided to tear it down and replace it with a new one. And so “they rebuilt the sanctuary and the interior of the Temple, then consecrated its courtyards. Then they made new vessels, bringing [a new] Menorah, a new incense alter, and a new table [for the showbread] into the sanctum. They then burnt incense on the altar and lighted the lamps of the Menorah so that these  could light up the Temple.” And the first day they initiated the renewed service of sacrificial worship was, indeed, the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the day we celebrate as the first day of Chanukah.

So those are our choices. The story we all know is also the most distant from the events and in every way the least likely. (Of course, aren’t all miracles highly unlikely? Otherwise, in what sense would they be miracles?)  Jason’s story is charming in its own way, but is set a few centuries too early to be the point of Chanukah observance. And First Maccabees omits the oil/Menorah theme entirely and sees instead in the great victory of the Maccabees a true miracle. As, indeed, it truly was.

And then we the evidence of our prayerbook. Who wrote the Al Ha-nissim paragraph added to the Amidah during Chanukah, no one knows. But that liturgist sided with the author of First Maccabees, ignoring the Talmud’s story and speaking instead of the Maccabees merely “lighting lamps in the Temple courtyards” (which is specifically not where the great Menorah stood—which was inside the sanctum and not outdoors in one of the courtyards) and instead finding the miraculous in the woof and warp of Jewish history itself, in the story of how God “stood by the Jews in their time of distress, waged their battles, defended their rights, and avenged the wrong done to them.” That is the miracle we mention in our prayers daily. And it’s also the one on which to focus: the role of God in history—and specifically in Jewish history—is the miracle…and a far more impressive one than keeping the oil pouring out of a magic pot that just couldn’t run dry.