Hanukkah

To all of our Jewish readers, Hag Hanukkah Sameach. This is the first night of Chanukkah, that minor holiday that got blown out of proportion due to marketing. Since Christmas got marketed to kids' greed, Chanukkah had to be so marketed as well.

Fundamentally, Chanukkah is a historical holiday. Although the clebration commemorates a supposed miracle (the use of one day's worth of oil for a full 8 days needed to purify the Temple) the underlying meaning is historical.

The ancient nations of Israel and Judah (probably never originally one nation despite what the bible says...though this is not definitively proven) had long ago been destroyed by Assyria and Babylon. They had been violently wiped from existence. Israel had believed in a multitude of shrines, the original Jewish way of worshipping, supposedly dating back to Abraham. But once Israel was destroyed, Judah did its best to centralize all worship in the Jeruselum Temple. So when Babylon razed that Temple and exiled the eleite of Judah, it was possibly the most traumatic experience in Jewish history at least up to that date. Though in the long and frequently traumatic history of the Jews, that may just be a matter of how the media spun the event.

Bottom line was, Judaism was slated for extinction by the Babylonian government. Arguably, Judaism was saved by the take over of Babylon by Persia. Babylon was the more brutal conqueror. Persia, despite the bad press it got from the Greeks who hated them, was among the most tolerant empires of history. They basically let local populations do whatever they wanted as long as they paid their taxes and provided troops for the army. To the jews this was liberation. They were given free reign, allowed to return from exile and allowed to rebuild their Temple. Persia was the good guy in much of the Eastern Medeterranean. Their religion, Zoroastrianism, didn't require conquered populations to adhere, so people could basically believe what they want and do what they want...as long as the Emperor got all the resources he needed to do what HE wanted.