What is Hanukkah?”

That is how the Talmud opens its discussion of the holiday. You would think their readers would know already. But it turns out that Hanukkah has so many different messages depending on who is telling the story, that it isn’t so simple. There is the message of the triumph of the oppressed over the oppressor. The importance of religious freedom. The power of miracles and the eternity of divine light.

So maybe the question is not “what is Hanukkah” but rather, what is the message of Hanukkah that speaks to you this year?

The message that is speaking to me at this moment lies in the name itself. Hanukkah means “dedication” in Hebrew, and refers to the Maccabees’ re-dedication of the holy Temple in Jerusalem after it had been seized and desecrated by the Seleucid empire under Antiochus IV in the mid-second century BCE.

The desecration of the Temple was extremely traumatic for the Judeans. The Temple was the most holy place in the world for them. The space where they believed the divine presence rested on earth. Yet after the Maccabean rebellion against Antiochus IV was won, the Judeans came face to face with the painful truth that their holy place had become a place of idolatry. It took courage for the Maccabees to re-enter that once-holy space, look at what it had become, and rededicate it so it would once again reflect the divine light.

This may seem like ancient history. Yet it is very much a moral and spiritual struggle for every generation. Paradoxically, it turns out that the things most vulnerable to idolatry are the very things that are the most sacred to us. This idea is related in the book of Exodus as part of the story of the Golden Calf.

When Moses was carrying the tablets of the Ten Commandments and started down the mountain, he saw that the Israelites were worshipping the Calf, and threw down the tablets engraved with God’s handwriting, smashing them to pieces. This is shocking! How could Moses have smashed these holy tablets?

One imaginative interpretation from Jewish tradition is that at the sight of the Calf, the letters flew off the tablets, leaving just the heavy stone. At that point, the tablets were no longer holy. They were just stone.

Holiness, in other words, does not reside in objects themselves, not even the tablets, but rather in the word of God that is heard, wrestled with and lived out in a holy way. When we put an object, a place, an idea or a relationship in its fixed form above the very values that gave them meaning, we end up with idols.

This is the struggle that Hanukkah addresses for all generations including our own. Hanukkah tells the story of the most sacred place becoming a place of idolatry. In this case it was because Antiochus IV worshipped his own power and military might as ultimate. In other cases, it is because of our own veering away from the values that made our spaces sacred in the first place. This is true in our personal lives as well as our collective and national ones.

What Hanukkah, teaches, however, is not only that the sacred can become an idol, but that an idol can be turned back into the sacred. And here is where the meaning of the name “Hanukkah,” or “dedication,” comes in. If we rededicate ourselves to what are truly our highest values, the values that the prophet Amos named as what God requires of us — compassion, justice and humility — we will again make space for the light. What was holy about the Temple was not the building itself, but the loving and just actions of the people coming in and out of it.

I believe this is what the prophet Zechariah means when he relates how an angel shows him a vision of a Menorah. Zechariah does not understand the meaning of the vision, so the angel explains it to him: “Not by might nor by power but by spirit alone” (Zech. 4:3). 

When we light our Menorahs or share in the light of other traditions this holiday season, may we rededicate ourselves to those values of compassion, justice and humility. May we put aside the worship of might and power and make room for spirit, love and justice to transform our whole world to a house of holiness once again.

Rabbi Caryn Broitman leads the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center.