The Jews’ time of miracles (Samuel Rubinstein, 12/19/25, Englesberg Ideas)
It is not hard to see why non-Protestant Christians thought 1 and 2 Maccabees bore the mark of revelation: the martyrdoms (including the elephant-slayer Eleazar’s) prefigured Christ on the Cross, and the wars gave them succour in their own battles with heathen enemies, whether Saracen, Magyar, or Dane. For Jews, however, the story posed a problem. It was difficult to celebrate the ancient recovery of a homeland when that homeland had since been lost, or the consecration of a temple that the Romans were later to destroy. Hanukkah was a celebration of Jewish cultural and national independence: it did not fit the needs and realities of a scattered people. The festival in diaspora had to be rethought and redefined. The Talmud made popular a story that does not appear in the books of Maccabees: the miracle of the oil, which Jews commemorate by lighting the Hanukkiah. There was a shift in the meaning of Hanukkah, as Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks put it, from a celebration of ‘military power’ to one of ‘spiritual strength’.
But the more martial themes of the Maccabees story resurfaced in Jewish thought, much as they once had been put to use by Ælfric.