Channukah and Christianity
There is a fascinating article on the origins of Channukah in the Jerusalem Post. The article points to ancient midrashic origins of Channukah:
Schauss felt that the true reason for lighting candles lay in the flames themselves. He was certain that that the Festival of Lights was originally a “nature festival, one of those semi-holidays with a heathenish background that was bound up with…folk beliefs.”
What sort of “heathenish” festival might that be? The answer actually lies in the Gemara (Avoda Zara 8:1), which relates a tantalizing but neglected Midrash, hinting at a Hanukka of both great antiquity and deep universality.
It describes Adam, freshly evicted from Eden, becoming increasingly anxious, as the days grow ever shorter: “When Adam saw the day diminishing, he wailed ‘Woe is me! Because of my sin, my world is turning dark, reverting to tohu vavohu [primeval chaos and void]. This is the death sentence decreed upon me in heaven.’”
Hoping to return to God’s good graces and stop the days from shrinking, Adam “fasted and prayed for eight days.” As the days begin to grow, Adam comes to recognize the yearly cycle of days that wax and wane as the “way of the world.” He promptly converts his eight days of contrition and atonement into an annual celebration.
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The Festival of Lights then is the Jewish cloak for a far more ancient festival commemorating that one fateful moment at winter’s start, when the advance of the darkness of tohu vavohu is finally halted and ultimately, happily, pushed back
There is a lot of darkness in our world, and certainly Christians see it as much as the Jews do (although, to be fair the jews have suffered through a lot of very intense darkness in the last 100 years!), its all around us in our world. At times the darkness in our world can seem so overwhelming, and at that moment, it is good to be reminded that God is not in the business of allowing darkness to win. That just as he called into the ‘tohu vavohu’ (the hebrew for ‘formless or empty darkness’) in Genesis 1 and created order from it, so he will soon call again into our world and remove the empty darkness in our world. That’s something both Jews and Christians can celebrate together.
Also, the article also points out that without the commonly held origins of Channukah (the revolt against the greeks lead by Antiochus by Judas Maccabee), the western world would not exist in the form it does. Christianity might not exist, the west would be profoundly different. A sobering though to be sure.