Hanukkah 2024

This year, Hanukkah starts on 25th December, and even though it will start after the Winter Solstice (Tekufat Tevet), it is still very much appropriate that this festival be known as the Chag Urim, or Festival of Lights. Every year though, I am asked the same question: what is Hanukkah actually about? 

The “simple” (though nothing is ever simple) answer is that Hannukah celebrates the lights of the menorah in the Temple, which were relit when the Temple was rededicated following the war between the Maccabees and the Syrian-Greeks - a war by the way which was also a civil war between rival factions of Jews!

During the course of the war, the Temple fell into the hands of the Syrian-Greek empire, and when the Maccabees rededicated the Temple to the God of Israel and relit the menorah, we are told that although there was only enough pure oil left for one day’s light, the oil burned for eight days, long enough to prepare new oil. A miracle!

Hanukkah though, also very much celebrates the lights of the sun and moon, and our hanukkiot are a symbol of the continually renewed sun. Winter is a season of little light, and long dark nights and mornings, yet the light always comes back; whether you consider this a miracle or not depends entirely on your understanding of miracles, but I think any of us would be hard pressed to not recognise it as something rather amazing.

Arthur Waskow tells us in his book “Seasons of Our Joy” that Hanukkah “falls at the waning of the moon”, and the centre of the holiday is at the very dark of the moon. The new moon comes just at the end of Hanukkah, and so Rav Kohenet Jill Hammer teaches that the lights of Hanukkah thus also celebrate the moon's waxing. The moon, she tells us, is a symbol of the wandering, immanent divine presence of Shekhinah, the divine presence on earth.

The very timing of Hanukkah brings these two lights together, and celebrates them both.

As the light of sun and moon rise and fall, and shine and fade together, my hope for us as a community this winter is that we come to recognise that we too are intertwined in ways that we may not fully understand, shining on one another and blessing one another simply by being part of the wider Shir Hatzafon community.

I wish you all a chag urim sameach, a very happy Hanukkah, filled with all the light and blessings you need.