(RNS) This year I am imposing a personal restriction on my family and friends. They may not attend Hanukkah parties, light the festival candles or receive gifts unless they can first pass a holiday exam.
Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish festival of light, begins at sunset on Dec. 1. Special prayers are said each night as the colorful candles are lit in the synagogue and at home. Jews around the world will exchange gifts and indulge in calorie-heavy potato pancakes and jellied donuts.
It’s all meant commemorate an ancient struggle that ended in 165 B.C. when Judah Maccabee’s Jewish guerillas, after three years of fighting, defeated the larger Greco-Syrian army of Emperor Antiochus IV, who had tried to prohibit — even annihilate — Jewish ritual and observance.
Historians say that Hanukkah may have been one of the first battles for religious freedom. Some scholars even believe that without the Maccabees’ victory and the preservation of Jewish life in Israel, Christianity may not have emerged 200 years later with its roots deeply embedded in Judaism.
When Judah recaptured Jerusalem, he rededicated the Temple to the service of God. The tiny amount of oil that was deemed sufficient to fuel the Temple’s Eternal Light for only one day miraculously lasted for eight.
The Hanukkah story appears in the two books of the Maccabees that form part of the Roman Catholic Bible and some Protestant Bibles. Ironically, it’s not included in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Now, about that test.
Who uttered the following five quotations? Where did they first appear?
Here’s a hint: Some selections are from the original Hanukkah text, while others (both positive and negative) came later. Answers appear below, but fair warning: cheaters will be denied latkes and jelly donuts.
1. “The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could be broken only by relentlessly using all our forces and energy by day and night … I therefore decided to destroy the entire Jewish residential area … The Jews then emerged from their hiding places and dugouts in almost every case … A great number of Jews who could not be counted were exterminated.”
2. “He entered the sanctuary. And he took the golden altar and the menorah, with all its lamps for light … the cups, the bowls, the golden censers… And he took away the gold and silver and precious vessels. He also took all the hidden treasures he could find. Now taking all of this, he returned to his own country having committed murder and spoken with great arrogance.”
3. “Justice demands that the barbaric superstition (Judaism) should be opposed; and it is to the interest of the state not to regard that Jewish mob which at times breaks out in open riots.”
4. “Let everyone who has zeal for the Torah and who stands by the covenant follow me!”
5. “Oh, never, never bow we down to the rude stock or sculptur’d stone. We worship God, and God alone.”
The answers:
1. Nazi General Jurgen Stroop sent this report to Adolf Hitler during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943.
2. Antiochus’ actions, as recorded in First Maccabees 1:23-24
3. Roman philosopher and orator Cicero, around 63 B.C.
4. Mattathias, Judah Maccabee’s father, in First Maccabees 2:27.
5. George Frederick Handel’s 1746 oratorio, “Judas Maccabeus.”
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published “Christians & Jews, Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future.”)
