Hanukkah is often described as a festival of light, warmth, and resilience. That description is not wrong – but it is incomplete. And when Jews are targeted for celebrating openly, dangerously so.
The shooting targeting a Hanukkah observance in Sydney, Australia, is a stark reminder that Jewish visibility remains contested. Lighting candles in public, wearing Jewish symbols, gathering openly to celebrate – these acts still carry risk. That is not paranoia. It is history repeating itself with different accents.
Which means this moment demands more than mourning. It demands clarity – about contemporary antisemitism and about what Hanukkah itself actually commemorates.
The defiance of the Maccabees
Hanukkah is not a story born of comfort, safety, or tolerance. It is a story born of persecution. It marks a moment when Jews were forbidden by imperial decree to practice their religion, teach their children, or live openly as Jews. Jewish visibility itself was criminalized.
The response was not quiet endurance. It was defiance. The Maccabees were not symbols. They were warriors. They resisted enforced assimilation, fought a vastly stronger power, reclaimed their sacred space, and insisted – violently when necessary – on the right of Jews to exist publicly as Jews.
This was not a story about allies. No sympathetic Greeks intervened. No coalition of the concerned arrived in time. The Maccabees did not wait for permission or protection from others with power. They seized agency themselves. Hanukkah celebrates Jewish strength, Jewish self-defense, and Jewish refusal to depend on others for the right to exist.
Yes, Hanukkah also commemorates the rededication of the Temple and the miracle of oil that burned for eight days. These elements matter. But focusing only on the miracle while ignoring the conditions that made it necessary sanitizes the story.
The oil burned because the Temple had been reclaimed. The Temple was reclaimed through armed resistance. The miracle we celebrate is not only supernatural – it is survival achieved through refusal to disappear.
That matters now.
Jewish strength
For many Jews, especially in places like the US, where we have known safety, Hanukkah has softened into something cozy: candles in the window, gifts for children, and familiar foods. These rituals matter. But they can obscure the harder truth. Hanukkah celebrates Jewish strength, not Jewish fragility; resistance, not accommodation; visibility, not retreat.
Hanukkah does not teach that hatred dissolves if we shine light gently enough. It teaches that survival sometimes requires the willingness to fight for who we are.
What does that mean today? It means several things, all uncomfortable – and all necessary.
It means physical self-defense: preparation, training, and security at synagogues and Jewish institutions. Not hoping someone else will protect us. Not assuming allies will arrive in time. The Maccabees’s lesson is not that the world saves Jews when conscience is stirred. It is that often, Jews must save themselves.
It means political and legal resistance: challenging institutional failures, confronting incitement, and insisting that Jewish safety is not negotiable.
It means refusal to hide: mezuzahs on doorposts, menorahs in windows rather than back rooms. Jewish life lived visibly, unapologetically.
It means cultural resistance: demanding Jewish history be taught honestly, resisting sanitization, and rejecting narratives that recast Jewish self-defense as aggression.
The Maccabean refusal
The Maccabees did not prevail because they were numerous or powerful. They prevailed because they refused erasure – militarily, culturally, and spiritually. Contemporary Jewish survival requires the same multi-front refusal.
That refusal is the core of Hanukkah.
Hanukkah’s lights were meant to face outward – not to reassure the world, but to declare something simple and unyielding:
We are still here.
That is not a gentle message. It is a necessary one.
The writer is a professor at Stony Brook University of the State University of New York.