REPOST: A Bupkes Chanukah story
When terrorist zealots attack pluralist secularism, we celebrate with socks.
Ed. This telling was originally published last year, but what’s a year in Jewish history? It has been lightly modified to reflect the cosmically laughable time elapsed.
Chanukah begins today at sundown, which in December in northern Europe is shortly before lunch. Even though this year the Israelite Festival of Lights will be over before the frankincense arrives, fear not: Your obligatory company Glühwein gathering will still be called a Christmas party, without the need to consider someone else’s excuse to buy stuff is ongoing.
So fry another latke, dear subscribers, and gather round the glow of the menorah1 because Chanukah is here. Again.
And so is storytime.
The Bupkes is crashing your dreidel sesh to share the true meaning of the holiday — a fanciful tale of underwhelming wonder and made-up importance, not to be confused with Jewish Christmas, which is when we finally enjoy Chinese food in some goddamn peace and quiet thanks to all the goyim being home with their ham. Or whatever it is they’re doing when appropriating paganism by putting nature in their living room.
Anyway, let’s get on with it. The oil is getting pungent.
It was a long time ago. How long? Like, Age of Antiquities long. Let’s say Greco-Roman, to be safe. Toga season always seemed to be in fashion.
Antituchus, king of the differently posteriored, ruled over the Holy Land. Back then, the Holy Land really did stretch from the river to the sea — and so much more. The Syrians had an empire that would make Assad weep and Israel’s land grab across the Golan look like
bupkes.
As far as emperors went, Antituchus wasn’t the worst. (He also wasn’t the only King Antituchus, due to the Great Naming Shortage sweeping that part of the world at the time.) He commanded a fearsome army and wasn’t afraid to wield it, but also ruled over a territory stretching from the Mediterranean to central Asia and the myriad peoples who lived there. They were largely free to go about their lives, as trade and culture grew and science and learning flourished.
What a time to be alive! Even the normative posteriored subjects were tolerated.
It ain’t easy holding your empire together amid such a patchwork of culture, language, and belief systems. Yet forging a common identity was essential for maintaining a sense of social cohesion across the vast land. Antituchus insisted that all those living under his rule be fully integrated into an overarching public space, grounded in Hellenism.
Hellenism, by the standards of the day, was a pretty good deal: philosophy, wisdom, and reason; literature, art, and cosmopolitanism; a robust exchange of ideas; and a commitment to intellectual rigor — all while finding ways to incorporate local traditions of conquered groups.
It was like a real-world TED Talk before TED Talks got commodified. You know, the good ol’ ancient days.
Just about everyone was cool with Hellenism. That includes the Jews of the Fertile Crescent, who were settling into life as a diasporic people and mostly OK with it — just one minority among many, living together and sometimes also dying together, going about their days as merchants or whatever, paying their hierarchically ascribed taxes, and doing their best to avoid getting enslaved.
Assyrian, Babylonian — what’s the difference? Honestly, being literate enough to read a book now and then was already an impressive feat of leveling up.
Unless, that is, you were a Maccabee, who had to ruin it for everyone.
The Maccabees were that weird family on your block that you don’t send your kids trick-or-treating to. Their kids went around keying horsecarts and burning papyrus with pyromaniacal glee. Adopting a hammer as the family symbol should have been a red flag from the get-go.
The Maccabees looked at Hellenism and were like, hell-(לא)no. These were the Tanakhites OG, after all — messianic fundamentalists with no interest in keeping up with the times, nostalgic for Israelite domination of the Promised Land.
Most of the empire’s other Jews thought their minority’s minority was totally meshugge and tried to avoid the association.
Not all Jews are Maccabees! Alas, no dice. This one family ended up being quite adept at defining who a Jew was and what that meant. So you know things would not end well, which suited these zealots just fine.
They were ready to fuck antiquity up.
The empire, doing what empires do, was more than happy to meet violence with violence. Mishegoss ensued, and suddenly Jerusalem was on fire and the Temple was covered in pin-up centerfolds of Zeus. This, of course, did wonders for the Maccabee narrative, which depicted them as pious victims of religious persecution whose virtuous resistance won out against impossible odds to defeat a cruel and omnipotent imperial master.
In reality, it was their own ethno-national state they were after — a lebensraum for the reactionary pure. Lucky for them, disunity among their proto-Arab enemies and getting in on the ground floor of a rising superpower helped the Maccabees get it.
Never mind those contingencies, though; as the telling goes, victory was divined — even if God plays no role in the Chanukah story.
Some Israels never change.
To be worthy of a holiday still celebrated thousands of years later, however, you need a miracle. Unlike the bad-ass ones of Pesach, which saw a haughty Hashem snuff out the sun, split the Red Sea, and give Moshe some speech therapy lessons, Chanukah’s doesn’t really rise to the level of a Charlton Heston blockbuster.
For, as it is told, when the Maccabees took back their besieged Temple, they needed to light its menorah to rededicate it. Just their shlemiel luck, it was their neighbors who had most of the oil.
But lo! They had forgotten that their candelabra, which they got a great deal on during Black Friday sales, by the way, was the new and more efficient kind. The oil, thought only enough to last one night, instead burned for eight2.
Hallelujah!
Perhaps had the Maccabees not rejected the Hellenistic education on offer at the time, they would have been better at counting. But because they weren’t, Jews now and forever more have to shlep through eight days and nights, asking themselves: “Is it still Chanukah?”
Yes, it is!
It’s plenty of time to ponder why a story that takes place in the Levant is celebrated with delicacies from central Europe: latkes, which are definitely not kartoffelpuffer.
Anyway, the real miracle of Chanukah is Christmas. Without the latter, the former would still be the minor and largely forgotten festival it was for most of Jewish history — until an almighty corporate deity of the one true religion, Coca-Cola of American capitalism, changed everything, posing the gravest threat to the continuation of the Jewish people until Hitler.
Jews had to come up with something to entice their kids not to jump ship, and Chanukah was the next best thing.
Like most holidays, Jewish or not, which fool kids into thinking the fun is for them, Chanukah gets way better with age. Because whereas socks are the lamest gift to get in the years before your Bar Mitzvah, you surprise yourself at how earnestly delighted you are to get them as an adult.
The thing is, though, not everyone gets socks. Some people have had their socks stolen from them, and it’s not nice having cold feet.
That’s why The Bupkes believes that everyone should have socks — no matter who you are or what group you belong to — and get to wear them without being eliminated.
Now that would be a real Chanukah miracle. חג שמח.
What kind of socks do you wish for this Chanukah? Let us know in the comments—and why not spread some light over darkness by sharing this with a friend (or enemy?
There has never been a satisfactory explanation for what happened after the eighth night. Maybe the menorah fuel inventory picked up.
Oh, cease your kvetching. Eight days of Chanukah doesn't sound anywhere as exhausting as 12 days of Christmas!
(P.S.: Thank you for linking to some Palestine fundraisers near the end. ♥)