One of the classic tales of Chanukah is that of Hannah and Her Seven Sons. It is first recounted in the Books of II Maccabees and IV Maccabees (books that were never incorporated into the Hebrew Bible), in which the mother goes unnamed.  The story was retold through the ages, with the mother acquiring the names Miriam and, later in the Middle Ages, Hannah. Hannah’s seven sons endure tortuous deaths at the hands of the Seleucid (Syrian Greek) King Antiochus IV Epiphanes for refusing to eat pork at the king’s command.  A tale of martyrdom al kiddush Hashem (for the sanctification of God’s Name), it represents undiluted moral clarity—one should sooner die than compromise on God’s law.  Except, the circumstances are at odds with later rabbinic law, which would have required preservation of life even at the expense of violating kosher law.  The halachah specifies only three acts for which a Jew should rather martyr himself: murder, foreign worship, and idolatry.  So it is that in rabbinic retellings (which are not specifically placed in time)—in the Midrash and the Talmud—the boys die instead for refusing to worship foreign gods.  So much for clarity.

If the story of Hannah and Her Seven Sons has survived the ages, however, in our lifetimes it is likely that Hannah and Her Sisters is the better known.  Considered one of Woody Allen’s best films, it is a far more complex plot line involving (among its many twists) dalliances between Hannah’s current and ex-husbands and her sisters. One turns to Woody Allen movies for lots of things—sometimes their mirth and sometimes their depth—but I think never for moral clarity.  Certainly, had the Maccabean-era Hannah watched Annie Hall, she would hardly have been amused when Alvy found himself chasing lobsters around the kitchen.  We watch movies like Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters precisely because we are able to identify in them—no matter how much more outrageous than our own lives they may be—the emotional and moral complexity that besets our reality. In fact, forget moral clarity. In a Woody Allen movie, there is not even clarity that morality exists.

And what of Hannah Arendt?  A German-born historian and political theorist forced to flee her native land following Hitler’s rise to power, she was famous for numerous works long before one of her early books was published in the late fifties.  Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess recounted the life of a nineteenth century socialite torn between her Jewish and German identities—a tension with which Arendt identified as the Nazis dispossessed her of her German identity.  Arendt, whose interests, influence, and fame extended widely, retained a deep concern for matters Jewish.  And so she got herself commissioned by The New Yorker to travel to Israel to document one of the momentous trials of the twentieth century—eventually becoming her book, Eichman in Jerusalem.  One might expect that Arendt, a Nazi refugee, would be lauded for a study of Eichman’s atrocities.  But her criticism of the Israeli prosecutor’s tactics, recognition of Jewish complicity in aspects of the Holocaust (such as participation in Judenrats), and her discomfiting revelation of what the book’s subtitle termed “the Banality of Evil,” engendered a harsh reaction from the Jewish community.  Her quest for clarity seemed to undermine it instead.

Historically, the Maccabean revolt is entirely without clarity.  Many of the historical facts are clouded in uncertainty—certainly their interpretation.  Rather than being a simple story of faithful Jews rising against their oppressors, there was brutal internecine conflict between multiple factions ranging from religious zealots to accommodationists to ardent assimilationists.  The victory we celebrate on Chanukah was but one victory in a stubborn conflict that dragged on.  The heroic Maccabees gave rise to the Hasmonean dynasty of often-corrupt rulers.  To study the history of the holiday is largely to ruin it.

And in that, I think, is one of the miracles of Chanukah.  It is a testimony that shines more brightly each night with an utter clarity snatched from the clutches of confusion.  Our liturgy sums it up as follows:

. . . [W]hen the evil Greek kingdom rose up against Your people Israel to make them forget Your Torah and to turn them away from the statutes of Your will— You, in Your abundant mercy, stood by them in their time of distress, You defended their cause, You judged their grievances, You avenged them. You delivered the mighty into the hands of the weak, many into the hands of the few, defiled people into the hands of the pure, the wicked into the hands of the righteous, and the insolent into the hands of diligent students of Your Torah.

We can dismiss Chanukah as a fictionalization, but it rather represents our ability to plumb the depths of uncertainty to find certitude, to calibrate our moral compass, to remind ourselves that in the confusion of life and muddle of history, our charge is to dare to discern.

Have a very happy Chanukah and an early Shabbat Shalom.