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 for 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 Lights Go Out
First performed at Carnegie Hall in 1982 as part of Peter, Paul and Mary’s Chanuka/Christmas concert, Peter Yarrow’s song has since become a cherished part of many families’ Chanuka celebration, and it’s not hard to understand why.
Chanuka celebrates the victory in 165 BCE of the Jewish people’s struggle for national liberation against the oppressive power of the mighty Seleucid empire. The Seleucids turned Jerusalem into a polis — a Greek city-state. They desecrated the holy temple with idols and tried to stamp out Judaism. In commemoration of the victory and the rededication of the temple, the ancient rabbis created a new holiday — Chanuka — decreeing that lights be kindled for eight nights. Why eight nights? Because a couple of months earlier, the people had been hiding out in caves as they fought a guerrilla war against an overwhelming enemy and, therefore, had been unable to celebrate the eight-day festival of Sukkot (The Feast of Booths) at its proper time, so Chanuka also served as a kind of belated Sukkot celebration.
When the struggle for the modern state of Israel was being fought, Jews identified with both the ancient Maccabees and the brave revolutionaries who fought to free the American colonies from British rule.
This coming Tuesday night, Jews around the world will light the first Chanuka candle, adding one candle each night until on the last night, eight candles glow. But how many of us will connect the Jewish yearning for national self-determination with the current Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and for the same rights and dignity we claim for ourselves? What makes that struggle even more poignant and painful is the ironic fact that it is the mighty state of Israel that has now become the oppressor, with the support of some American Jews and the U.S. Congress, and underwritten by our own government to the tune of $3.8 billion a year.
Many of my fellow Jews will not be happy to read these words. They confuse legitimate criticism with self-hatred or anti-Semitism, or they mistakenly believe that the silence of most of the world during the Holocaust gives Israel a carte blanche to do as it pleases, or they fear that “washing our dirty linens in public” will encourage anti-Semitism. But most of them have never been to the West Bank; they know no Palestinians; they have not seen how the occupation oppresses, humiliates and dispossesses Palestinians with its calculated and systemic cruelty.
Criticism of Israeli policy and behavior is not anti-Semitism, any more than criticism of United States policy and behavior is anti-Americanism. The state of Israel is not to be equated with Judaism, which commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel, as well as being the capital of the state of Palestine. And the festival of Chanuka, which celebrates Jewish freedom, calls on us — in the words of another popular Chanuka song — to speed the day when “all go free, tyrants disappearing.”
“Light one candle for the wisdom to know when the peacemaker’s time is at hand.”
Dov Taylor is rabbi emeritus at Congregation Solel in Highland Park, Ill., and rabbi at Chavurat Ki-tov: A Gathering for Jewish Life and Learning in Woodstock.