As with the limits on darkness found in the solar and lunar calendars, there is a limit to the spiritual darkness in Jewish history – there is light within the Jewish people that cannot be extinguished. And like a pendulum, when the Jewish people reaches the extreme limits of darkness, that darknessstarts to recede. It is for this reason that the Jewish people is compared to the waxing and waning of the moon and hence noteworthy that Chanukah is the only Jewish holiday that encompasses both the waxing and the waning of the moon.
The story of Chanukah too is epitomized by a small light that would not go out. Once that light had been depleted to its lower limits, it had nowhere to go but up. And it was that light that was central to the religious and national rebirth that would follow on the heels of the Maccabean revolt.
The long exile, as we know it, has been marked by something that first reared its head during Chanukah – the self-imposed notion that the Jewish people no longer have a viable raison d’etre. Be it Christianity’s historical campaign to disenfranchise the Jews of their holy mission or contemporary trends to dismantle faith altogether, the leaders against the Jewish people have often been Jews themselves. Whether from Pablo Christiani, Benedict Spinoza or Karl Marx, the most significant attacks on Judaism have come from within. These attacks, however, can no more wipe us out than attacks on the sun itself.
In the twentieth century, secularization, assimilation and the Holocaust all brought us to a point at which the Jewish people was holding on to its light by a thread. If the second half of that century witnessed a rebirth of the Jewish nation in its land and around the world, we should not wonder that this came on the heels of one of the greatest catastrophes in Jewish history. This is the way God created the world and the way He created His people.
The regular patterns of nature serve as a model for human behavior. Indeed, much of enlightenment philosophy was geared towards the emulation of the harmony inherent in the natural world. Yet, there is an obvious difference between the natural world and the world of man; even though man is circumscribed by nature, he is able to fight against it. Similarly, though circumscribed by its nature, the Jewish people are also able to fight against it. In the end, the Maccabean revolt was only a temporary respite from the forces that would eventually sink the Jewish people into the even greater darkness of the long exile. The Jewish people failed to take advantage of the natural upswing of the pendulum represented by their victory over the Greeks. Thus, after the events of Chanukah, the Hasmonean heirs of the Maccabees led Jewish society away from the noble ideals of the revolt.
With the emergence of the new State of Israel and the strengthening of the Jewish people in its faith and numbers, a growing light is visible. What remains to be seen is whether this will only be a temporary respite; whether we will use our free will to cover over this natural light with a renewal of darkness.
God has given us a natural model of night and day, of winter and summer. He has also given the Jewish people a spirit that resembles these natural cycles. Yet, even as He has given us this nature that prevents our complete decline, He has also given us the ultimate choice to increase the natural growth of light or to hinder it.