To the Tribe

[ToddG]

Happy last night of Hanukah!

[jill546]

Thank you.

[RoyGBiv]

Rav todot!

[SecondsCount]

That reminds me, I haven't seen lunch lady land with Chris Farley in a while...

[Dagga Boy]

Okay kids, enough of Adam Sandler and the cute version. Here is what is discussed when lighting the candles at my house:

Chanukah

Tonight we remember the liberation of the Temple by the Maccabees… Chanukah is not about turning the other cheek, that is not a Jewish virtue, It celebrates victory in battle… 162 years BCE Israel was occupied by Greeks, The Seleucid Empire… They had a massive professional army of 80,000 men in arms occupying Judea… The Greek army was armed with the most advanced arms of the day including phalanxes of spearmen, heavy chariots , ballistae, and war elephants… It was an unbelievable force and nothing in Israel could stand against it in conventional battle…

One man and his five sons decided rather than live under the yoke of the Greeks, that they would take to the hills and fight… Others joined them and they began to train an army… They smithed swords and shields and used captured Greek weapons to arm themselves … They called their new army The Maccabees which is Hebrew for Hammer… The Greeks hunted them, and vowed their destruction, but the rigid Greek formations could not maneuver in the rugged broken terrain in the hills outside of Jerusalem. In battle the very mobile Maccabee Light infantry refused to charge the formidable the Greek front lines… Instead they charged the flanks, and they hit them like a hammer… When the Greeks would reform to face this new threat, the Israelis would fall back then attack from a different direction before the Greeks could react… Entire Greek columns were slaughtered to the last man this way in the hills surrounding Jerusalem… With every battle, The Maccabees were getting stronger and the Greeks were getting weaker… Soon bulk of the Maccabees were armed with captured Greek weapons…

As the Greek s losses were mounting, they soon realized that they were in danger of losing the city, so they called for help from their allies, the Syrians… The Syrian Army sent a relief column to assist the Greeks in Jerusalem but when the Syrian scouts saw how the tide had turned, the Commanding General of the Syrian column promptly returned to Syria with his entire army to deal with some urgent internal matters…

In a massively bloody battle, the Maccabees laid siege to Jerusalem and retook the city from the Greeks house by house, street by street, and block by block… As soon as the Temple Mount was liberated, the Cohens that were with the Maccabees set out to purify the Temple Mount even as the battle raged in the streets below… The miracle of Chaanuaka is when the only kosher lamp they had with them was lit by the Cohen on the Temple Mount… It burnt as the Maccabees slowly defeated the remains of the Greek garrison and liberated all of Jerusalem…

So when we light a candle we are remembering the warriors who died in battle fighting hand to hand in the blood soaked streets of Jerusalem for eight days and nights in the shadow of lamp light shining down from the Temple Mount … A lamp that with only one days worth of oil, stayed lit for eight days and nights until all of Jerusalem was free…

[SGT_Calle]

Awesome! Thank you Nyeti.


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[SecondsCount]

Good stuff nyeti. There have been quite a few attacks against Israel that have played out that way.

[SeriousStudent]

Thank you for the history lesson, Darryl. I did not know the full story.

[Mitchell, Esq.]

The Story of Chanukah - See religious civil war/insurgency, celebration of victory (of civil war/insurgent war) with religious overtones.

Let's eat.

(I got my Chanukah present yesterday when a Hezbollah commander got mysteriously dead of a brain illness.)

Am Yisrael Chai, baby! (Austin Powers voice...)

[LittleLebowski]

Thank you for the history lesson, Darryl. I did not know the full story.

Agreed.