Does Hannukah celebrate extremism over Western values?
On Slate.com today, writer Christopher Hitchens makes an interesting argument about Hanukkah - that the holiday actually celebrates religious extremism and the deaths of millions of people over the past 2,300 years.
http://www.slate.com/id/2179045/
In a nutshell, Hitchens says Hanukkah is a far more dangerous holiday than Christmas because of what the two days celebrate. In the case of Christmas, the holiday is a blending of Northern European yuletide and the birth of Jesus, which at face value makes it a rather benign holiday. But Hitchens argues that Hanukkah celebrates the victory of Jewish extremism (the Maccabees) over the Western values of the Greeks. If the hardcore Jewish element had not succeeded in throwing out the Seleucids, Hitchens believes Israel would have become a secularized nation that valued logic and reason over religious zealotry. Jesus would theoretically have become an enlightened philosopher in the tradition of Plato and Ovid instead of a religious figure; the Jews would never have been thrown out by the Romans for a religiously inspired rebellion; and likely Islam too would never have risen in a "westernized" Middle East.
As a person of faith, I see lots wrong with his theory, starting with the fact that I personally feel Jesus would not have become just a Greek philosopher. But I also think its disingenuous from a historical standpoint to say Hanukkah really celebrates terrorist bombings and Middle East turmoil, or that if the Jews had become Hellenized there would be no Intifada or Crusades or Israeli-Arab conflict. Curious to see what others think.
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Originally Posted by Exarch
. Thankfully my synagogue has always treated hannukah as a "fun" holiday just to leverage out Christmass.
