Every December, Jews across the world retreat into the safest possible version of Hanukkah.
We talk about light over darkness. About tolerance. About spiritual candles flickering bravely against the night. We tell our children that Hanukkah is about being nice, being hopeful, being warm, being universal. Oil. Miracles. Doughnuts.
It is sentimental. It is soothing. And it is almost entirely false.
Hanukkah is the most uncomfortable holiday in the Jewish calendar precisely because it is not a story of light, but of power. Not just survival, but self-assertion. Not peaceful coexistence, but violent refusal to disappear.
That is why we soften it. That is why we universalize it. That is why we desperately turn it into Christmas-adjacent “Festival of Lights” rhetoric.
Because the real Hanukkah makes modern Jews, especially liberal ones, profoundly uneasy.
Hanukkah was a civil war before it was a miracle
We forget that the Maccabees did not initially fight Greeks.
They fought other Jews.
Assimilated Jews. Educated Jews. Jews who spoke Greek, read Greek philosophy, and believed that Judaism could survive by merging into the cultural mainstream. Jews who genuinely thought that full participation in Hellenistic civilization was not betrayal but evolution.
Sound familiar?
The Hasmonean revolt was not a clash of tolerance versus oppression: It was a civil war over identity. Over whether Judaism is infinitely adaptable or stubbornly particular. Over whether Jewish survival depends on blending in or standing apart, no matter the cost.
The Maccabees answered that question brutally.
They did not seek compromise. They did not negotiate cultural accommodations. They destroyed altars, enforced practice, and eventually established a militant Jewish kingdom that would make many Jews today deeply uncomfortable.
We light candles pretending the hardest question never existed.
Hanukkah was not pluralistic
Modern Jews love pluralism. We are proud of it, and rightly so. But it has nothing to do with Hanukkah.
Hanukkah explicitly rejects the idea that all cultures and values can be harmonized. It insists that when pushed far enough, Judaism will not bend.
Hellenism was not crude paganism. It was sophisticated, rational, beautiful. It gave the world philosophy, theatre, science, and universal human ideals. It offered Jews prestige and opportunity.
And the Maccabees said: no.
Not because Greek civilization was evil, but because Jewish civilization could not survive becoming merely another flavor of it.
Hanukkah is the celebration of a boundary. Of saying: this far and no further.
That message is deeply uncomfortable in a world that treats firm boundaries as moral failures.
Zionism finally took Hanukkah seriously
For nearly 2,000 years, Hanukkah was spiritually convenient but politically meaningless.
Then Zionism arrived and detonated the holiday’s suppressed core.
Suddenly, Jews with guns were not an embarrassment but a necessity. Suddenly, power was not something to apologize for but something to wield responsibly. Suddenly, Jewish history was no longer a sequence of candle-lighting ceremonies after defeats, but a story that included military victory, sovereignty, and self-determination.
The early Zionists understood Hanukkah instinctively. Not the miracle of the oil, but rather the miracle of agency.
That is why Hanukkah became a nationalist symbol. Why children learned about Judah Maccabee, not just about glowing flames. Why strength, not survival, was placed at the center.
And that, too, now makes us uneasy.
The contemporary Jewish angst around power
Here is the honest tension Hanukkah forces on us today:
We want Jewish power without Jewish assertiveness.
Jewish sovereignty without moral complexity.
Jewish survival without conflict.
But Hanukkah refuses that fantasy.
It asks whether Jews are allowed to insist on their particularism in a world that demands universal conformity. It asks whether Jews can defend themselves without being morally paralyzed by the expectation of perfection. It asks whether maintaining Jewish identity inevitably means frustrating someone else’s vision of progress.
This is not abstract.
It echoes in debates about Israel. About the army. About religious influence. About national identity. About how much assimilation is opportunity and how much is erasure.
Hanukkah reminds us that Jewish history does not reward those who avoid difficult choices.
Why we prefer candles to questions
We light candles because candles are safe.
Candles do not ask whether Jewish values sometimes clash with dominant cultures. Candles do not force us to ask whether boundaries are ever worth defending aggressively. Candles do not confront us with the fact that Jewish continuity has often depended not on persuasion but on resistance.
But Hanukkah is not sentimental spirituality: It is political theology.
It proclaims that Jewish existence is not justified by how pleasing it is to others, nor how well it dissolves into general humanity. Jewish existence is justified because Jews chose it, repeatedly, defiantly, and at great cost.
That choice is not always comfortable. It never was.
The flame we avoid looking at
The miracle of the oil is not that a small flame survived.
The real miracle is that a small people insisted on remaining itself when disappearance would have been easier, safer, and more respectable.
That same question confronts us now, in subtler, less violent ways.
Do Jews still believe in cultural stubbornness?
In saying no when assimilation looks like success?
In maintaining collective identity when it clashes with fashionable moral frameworks?
Or have we reduced Hanukkah into an aesthetic – eight nights of vibes, warmth, and reassurance, precisely because the original message demands too much courage?
Hanukkah is not a holiday of light. It is a holiday of uncomfortable questions demanding clarity of answers.
And that is why it still burns.
The writer is a rabbi and physician. For more of his work, visit: rabbidrjonathanlieberman.substack.com and youtube.com/@rabbidrjonathanlieberman.