Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

A Joyous Holiday Noise

Hanukkah seems almost anticlimactic this year. There’s been so much talk in recent weeks about the blurring of holiday messages and the proper place of religion in the public square that making a joyous holiday noise right now seems, well, a bit rude. Now isn’t the time to make trouble.

In a way, though, that’s just the point of Hanukkah. The holiday celebrates a famous refusal to go along and stay out of trouble. When the Maccabees raised the banner of Judean revolt against the Syrian-Greek overlords and their Hellenizing Jewish collaborators, they knew they were making life uncomfortable for the majority of their countrymen. Most of their fellow Jews might have preferred to let the mad emperor Antiochus IV rage on for a few years, knowing that his time would pass and that life in Judea would some day return to normal. The Maccabees believed the price to be paid while waiting was unacceptably high, and so they fought.

Readers will see an obvious parallel between those times and these. We can think of a few parallels ourselves — cutting in as many directions as Jews have opinions. The common denominator, and the most important, is this: Hanukkah is, above all, a time to celebrate who we are, and to insist on our right to be ourselves.

In that holiday spirit, we wish our readers, depending on their leanings, a very happy Hanukkah, a joyous holiday season and, to those who prefer, a merry Christmas.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.