Hanukkah's neglected heroine and the invention of silence
Finding the meaning of darkness in the Festival of Lights
I am a Jew who needs reasons. I need a reason to abandon one commandment but not another. I need a reason for the nusach and a reason for the holidays.
I have struggled, this year, with Hanukkah. I posted lately about taking this time of year to commemorate crypto-Jews and I also wrote there about my discomfort with some actions of the Maccabees.
In the last few weeks, I became tempted to just abandon Hanukkah altogether in my own home. I enjoy getting presents, of course. I also appreciate the happiness that the holiday brings to the Jewish children and families I know. Yet I felt that the holiday had nothing for me; I started to doubt its parallel to Purim, a holiday that is particularly meaningful to me. Why should Hanukkah, such an ethically ambiguous and minor holiday, receive the same honour as Purim, which celebrates a more ethically comfortable model of Mashiach?
Since Hanukkah is not based on Tanakh, unlike Purim and most other ancient holidays, I felt less need to wrestle with it, as we sometimes refer to our struggles with Torah. I don’t want to bother struggling with a bunch of Greek histories. Sooner would I exert such effort over the Alexiad than 1 Maccabees.
I don’t like 1 Maccabees
To summarise my issues with the Maccabees for hypothetical readers who understandably don’t feel like returning to my short back catalogue: in 1 Maccabees, Mattathias begins the famous revolt by killing a Jew who is about to sacrifice to the pagan gods, as per the Greek king’s command. Mattathias receives no divine instruction to do this. Nor does his son, Judah, to whose extermination of apostate Jews the book dedicates poetic praise, which I quote from Sidney Tedesche’s translation of chapter 3:
He was like a lion in his deeds,
Like a lion’s whelp roaring for its prey.
He sought out and pursued those who broke the Law
And exterminated those who troubled his people.
Law-breakers cowered for fear of him,
All workers of iniquity were thrown into confusion,
And deliverance was accomplished by his hand.
He angered many kings,
But gladdened Jacob by his deeds;
So forever will his memory be for a blessing.
My beef with 1 Maccabees concerns its glorification of the purging of Jews who may well have been doing what crypto-Jews have often had to do. And I find it somewhat ironic that heterodox Jews are among those who are fondest of the holiday, incorporating plot points specific to 1 Maccabees into their otherwise diversely-sourced Hanukkah celebrations. It’s a holiday about not integrating, about maintaining strict observance of halakha, and about enforcing the purity of Jewish tradition - with the death penalty. I don’t think Judah Maccabee would’ve liked heterodox Judaism, but I do.
I do like 2 Maccabees!
The Maccabees of 2 Maccabees are quite a different type of hero. This work covers essentially the same events as 1 Maccabees but with numerous differences, chief among them that the Maccabees do not slaughter apostates. The work does describe an instance of apostates dying for their sin, but the death is at the hands of G-d, not the Maccabees. This situation occurs in chapter 12:
On the next day Judah’s men, as it was by that time appropriate and necessary for them to do, went to recover the bodies of those who had fallen in order that they might lie with their relatives in their ancestral tombs. Then it was that they discovered under the shirt of each of the slain, consecrated objects to the idols of Jamnia, which the Law forbade to the Jews. It then became clear to all that this was the reason that these men had fallen.
So yes, (crypto-)apostates do die for their transgression in this book, but by divine rather than mortal sentencing. Still more notable is the Maccabees’ response:
They all then blessed the ways of the Lord, the Righteous Judge, the Revealer of that which is secret, and turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be completely blotted out. The noble Judah called upon the people to keep themselves from sin, after seeing with their own eyes what had occurred because of the sin committed by those who had fallen. He also took up a collection from each and every one to the amount of two thousand drachmas of silver and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. In doing this he acted excellently and properly, showing that he took resurrection into consideration.
The author of 2 Maccabees approves greatly of Judah’s kindness toward the souls of the deceased and bases his praise on the grounds of tradition - Judah acted the way he did out of apt concern for the prophesied resurrection of the dead.
2 Maccabees, then, alleviated much of my distaste for the Maccabees, and there are historical reasons for the differences between the two works that I won’t go into here. I want to finally move into the main topic of this post. Since I only decided to write this post because of my shift in perspective on the holiday’s heroes, I think it makes sense to start with that shift.
A preamble on 4 Maccabees
No, I’m not accidentally skipping from 2 to 4. I’m not that bad at math. 3 Maccabees is simply not relevant to my discussion here.
4 Maccabees is a philosophical work that blends Greek stoic ideas of the power of reason over emotion with Jewish thought and prooftexts. The author does not distinguish reason from religion, which may be unintuitive for modern readers.
The heroine of 4 Maccabees also features in 2 Maccabees: she’s a Jewish mother of seven sons, all of whom refuse to eat pork and instead choose to suffer torture and death. In the end, she, too, chooses death.
In both 2 and 4 Maccabees, the mother remains unnamed. In Eikhah Rabbah, she is called Miriam bat Baitas. She is the subject of a series of short narratives before the one in which she faces the situation laid out in 2 and 4 Maccabees. Eikhah Rabbah should probably boast more weight of authority, but the author of the mediaeval Sefer Yosippon (traditionally thought to be Josephus) dubs her Hannah. That seems to have been the name that’s stuck in the general imagination.
Hannah, inventor of silent prayer
Hannah appears most prominently in the Jewish tradition as the name of the Prophet Samuel’s mother, who is herself one the Seven Prophetesses. She appears at the very start of 1 Samuel. Her story is, like that of many other women in Tanakh, one of barrenness, devotion, and miraculous fertility. Like in the story of the Matriarchs Leah and Rachel, Hannah is one of Elkanah’s two wives. His other wife, Peninnah, has borne children while Hannah remains childless. As Rachel had been Jacob’s favoured but childless wife, Hannah is Elkanah’s favoured but childless wife. Unlike in the story of Leah and Rachel, however, Peninnah mocks Hannah for her childlessness:
Moreover, her rival, to make her miserable, would taunt her that the LORD had closed her womb. This happened year after year: Every time she went up to the House of the LORD, the other would taunt her, so that she wept and would not eat.
I quote this passage mainly because, as someone who struggles to eat when stressed, it packs more than a bit of an emotional punch. Hannah is immediately a fleshed-out character. We know how she reacts to distress, which is a relatable experience, even before she delivers her famous prayers.
Her most famous prayer - of gratitude for her eventual conception and delivery of a son - is found in 1 Samuel, chapter 2. But the prayer that is of central interest to me here is her prayer for fertility and how she delivers it.
After they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose [and stood before the LORD].—The priest Eli was sitting on the seat near the doorpost of the temple of the LORD.—In her wretchedness, she prayed to the LORD, weeping all the while. And she made this vow: “O LORD of Hosts, if You will look upon the suffering of Your maidservant and will remember me and not forget Your maidservant, and if You will grant Your maidservant a male child, I will dedicate him to the LORD for all the days of his life; and no razor shall ever touch his head.”
The phrase I have put in brackets is an additional few words included in the Septuagint. I like the addition and think it adds some depth to the passage - at worst, it doesn’t contradict anything from the Hebrew version we now have. At any rate, the content of this prayer isn’t particularly unusual. Even in Genesis we see the Matriarchs pray out of desperation regarding childbearing.
The unusual aspect of this prayer is that Hannah delivers it silently.
As she kept on praying before the LORD, Eli watched her mouth. Now Hannah was praying in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard. So Eli thought she was drunk. Eli said to her, “How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Sober up!” And Hannah replied, “Oh no, my lord! I am a very unhappy woman. I have drunk no wine or other strong drink, but I have been pouring out my heart to the LORD. Do not take your maidservant for a worthless woman; I have only been speaking all this time out of my great anguish and distress.” “Then go in peace,” said Eli, “and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of Him.” She answered, “You are most kind to your handmaid.” So the woman left, and she ate, and was no longer downcast.
I can’t help but note that Hannah finally ate! Maybe I’ll write about eating issues and the Jewish tradition some other time.
The abnormal aspect of Hannah’s prayer is that it’s silent. She moves her lips, but doesn’t vocalise her words. Nowadays, silent prayer might not seem odd. We have silent prayer in our own services, after all, and many religions involve silent prayer. Thinking of silent prayer from the perspective of the priest is akin to reading Augustine’s Confessions, in which the saint is surprised to find that someone reads silently: “But when he was reading, his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest.” Today, we are as used to silent prayer as we are to silent reading, but in ancient times, Hannah’s prayer would have been counterintuitive.
However, Hannah refers to herself as speaking: “I have only been speaking all this time out of my great anguish and distress.” What could she possibly mean, given the passage’s focus on her silence? This isn’t a confusion of the translation, to be clear. What I take her to mean is that her peculiar method of prayer has to do with her particular grievances. Rashi quotes the Targum to clarify the passage: “because of much provocation and anger, I have prolonged my prayer until now.” The Targum takes Hannah to be explaining the length of her prayer, but to me, this reading helps clarify why she might have felt that silence was best. Anger is, in my mind, the opponent of silence; it is a noisy emotion. Hannah chooses to pray in silence because to counter her rage at Peninnah.
Hannah, then, is our inventor of silent prayer, and gives us a reason to value it.
The virtue of silence
Alan Morinis, founder of the Mussar Institute, discusses silence (sh’tikah) as a middah, or virtue. He summarises the key point of his chapter on silence when he writes: “Only in silence is it possible to hear.” As he notes, the rabbis have usually discussed sh’tikah as a virtue in opposition to lashon hara, or evil speech. In other words, sh’tikah has usually been considered a virtue in reference to controlling one’s speech, not being totally silent in the usual sense. I can’t help but plug one of the best contemporary pieces on combatting lashon hara (i.e., on sh’mirat ha’lashon) here.
Despite this, Morinis goes on to discuss silence proper as a virtue. As he writes compellingly:
Yet the soul needs silence as the body needs sleep. Sleep to refresh; silence to cleanse. Sleep to dream; silence to awaken to the deeply real…. In Jewish tradition, wisdom consists in penetrating the superficial layers of reality to perceive the essence of things, and I have found that silence is essential to making that happen.
I will return to Morinis’s excellent chapter on the middah of sh’tikah later. The question a hypothetical reader might ask at this point is: how is this tangent on silence going to matter for the Maccabees, not just for the Prophetess Hannah?
Hannah of 4 Maccabees
Why is the Hannah of 2 and 4 Maccabees named Hannah? This name for her doesn’t arise for centuries (per the scholarly perspective on the authorship of the Sefer Yosippon, anyway). The name does fit well, however, given part of Hannah’s second prayer:
While the barren woman bears seven,
The mother of many is forlorn.
Hannah refers to a blessed woman having seven children, like the mother in 2 and 4 Maccabees, which seems to be a useful connection.
But no, I’m not just connecting Hanukkah to the Prophetess Hannah because of a nominal coincidence. There are other important connections to make between Hannah, mother of silence, and the Hannah in 4 Maccabees. In Judaism, no seeming coincidence is devoid of meaning.
In 4 Maccabees, Hannah watches her seven sons stand strong while enduring excruciating pain. The author recounts their torture in nauseating detail. According to the author, Hannah herself is the strongest of them for not giving in to her maternal instincts while witnessing the pain of her sons. She also receives credit for her sons’ valour, as described in chapter 15:
Nay, more: because of her very nobility, and their ready obedience to the Law, she cherished an even deeper affection for them. For they were just, and united by fraternal love; and so loved their mother that in obedience to her they observed the Law even unto death. Nevertheless, though so many considerations affecting maternal love drew the mother to sympathize with them, yet in the case of none of them did their manifold tortures avail to sway her reason; but each child severally and all together the mother urged on to death for religion’s sake…. O thou woman, who alone did bring perfect religion to birth!
In Megillat Antiochus, too, we see a woman lauded when her religious devotion overcomes her maternal interests during the revolt. She drops her infant off a wall before leaping to her own death in the same manner rather than abandon the Law.
There was also a woman who bore a son after the death of her husband, and she circumcised him when he was eight days old. And she went up on the wall of Jerusalem, bearing her circumcised son. And she cried out and said, “To you Bagris, the wicked, be it said ‘You plan to destroy the covenant that has been made with us, the covenant of our forefathers. Sabbath and the new-moon [festivals] and circumcision we will not abandon, neither we nor our children’s children.’ And she cast her son to the ground, and leaped down after him, and both died together. Many of the children of Israel did thus in those days rather than violate the covenant of their fathers.
Different versions of this unnamed woman’s story appear in other Maccabean works, too, but in this one, she’s in charge of her own actions.
It makes me uncomfortable to see these works devalue maternal affection in favour of religion/reason. Ours is a tradition that values the power of maternal protectiveness, as we read G-d say in Hosea:
Like a bear robbed of her young I attack them
And rip open the casing of their hearts…
Yet the Maccabean mothers’ maternal strength is present in their care for their children’s souls, rather than in what seems to us more intuitively protective ways. In 2 Maccabees 15:17-18 we read similarly of the male Maccabees:
They decided to take the offensive bravely, decide the issue, because the city and the holy Temple were in danger. Their concern about wives, children or even brothers and relatives, was of secondary importance. Their first and greatest concern was for the holy Temple.
As any parent knows, disciplining a child may not be pleasant for either party, but is necessary for the child’s good going forward, on a much grander scale. 2 and 4 Maccabees hold the protection of souls and religion to be more important than the protection of living bodies.
My own mother, whom I love very much, has said of herself that she lacks sympathy. I don’t totally believe her on that, but I am grateful every day that she raised me to work and study devotedly, to accept responsibility, to value moderation, and to have endurance in facing inconveniences or worse. This is not to say that I always live up to these virtues - hardly! I am saying that I appreciate that her focus in raising me was not just on me having fun and doing what I wanted, even if doing so might avoid a tantrum she’d have to weather. However, I don’t want to get into safetyism and antifragility, parenting methods, and all that here - read Jonathan Haidt instead of me on those topics. Or Abigail Shrier, if her work is your jam. I just wanted to bring up a firsthand example of what I’m talking about. And I like to brag on me mum.
Yet even G-d has difficulties with enacting discipline at times. G-d even has regrets about G-d’s own disciplinary actions. Famously, we read at the end of the argument between G-d and the Moon:
G-d saw that the moon was still not happy at the time. The Holy One said, “Bring an atonement on Me for I have diminished the moon.” And so that is what is meant when Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said, “What is the difference in how the New Moon offering is written, “A he-goat on the new moon, FOR THE LORD?’ Because the Holy One is saying, ‘Let this he-goat be an atonement FOR ME, for the diminishment of the moon.”
But that’s a tangent; I just wanted to seem less judgemental toward parents, acknowledge that I don’t know anything about parenting firsthand, and so on (in other words, please don’t strangle me, hypothetical parent-reader).
Anyway, in the context of Judaism, which holds to the notion that the dead will return in the Messianic Age, the mothers in the books of Maccabees and Megillat Antiochus must weigh their instincts and the agony of the flesh against eternity. As we read in 4 Maccabees, chapter 15:
And although she saw the destruction of seven children, and the manifold variety of their torments, that noble mother counted all these things as nought, because of her faith in G-d. In the tribunal of her own heart, as it were, she saw clever advocates - nature, parentage, maternal love, the torment of children; and she held in her discretion (a mother over her children!) two ballots: a doom of death, and salvation; yet she did not choose that favorable course which would bring safety to her seven sons for a brief space, but rather as a daughter of G-d-fearing Abraham bethought herself of Abraham’s fortitude.
The author of 4 Maccabees sets out to prove that reason/religion can conquer all emotion, and religious reason’s victory over maternal affection serves as the climax of the argument. The author holds maternal affection to be an extremely potent force; he is not disrespecting it, but rather, he is praising Hannah for using her religious rationality to prioritise eternity over that indomitable power of earthly, maternal devotion.
Mother, soldier of G-d through religion, Elder, woman! By your constancy you have vanquished even the tyrant; and by your deeds and your words discovered yourself more stalwart than a man. [16:14]
Still more, the author tells us that Hannah didn’t just do the right thing for her family. Rather, her endurance for the sake of Judaism is what destroyed the oppressive king himself. That’s also a beautiful passage in the Greek, if you’re a nerd like me who’s into that sort of thing.
The meanings of the eight candles (plus one)
As we know, for Hanukkah, we light eight candles with an additional candle, the shamash. That’s obvious but I wanted to emphasise the numbers involved.
I’m a Jew who needs reasons. This year, I wanted a firm symbolism for the candles and for their number.
At first, having reflected on 2 and 4 Maccabees, I decided that the eight candles could be Hannah’s sons and herself, making the final night the climax of Hannah’s commemoration. It is grimly ironic to light candles to remember the burned. But we do that anyway, all the time, for more recent historical remembrances. In this idea, the shamash would be the Shekhinah, G-d’s own Presence, igniting the faith of the eight martyrs.
However, it occurred to me that there had been another martyr in the story: Eleazar, an elderly man, who dies before the brothers. Thus, the eight candles could be the eight male martyrs and the shamash would be Hannah. Why? Firstly, because she receives credit for her sons’ endurance. But more directly there is a reason for this based on 4 Maccabees, chapter 17 (I’ve very slightly revised the translation):
Be of good courage, then, mother of holy soul, who keeps the hope of your endurance firm with G-d; not so majestic stands the moon in heaven, with its stars, as you stand; lighting the way to piety for your seven starlike sons; honored by G-d, and with them fixed in heaven.
The translator notes that this passage’s verb for “lighting,” photagagosasa, appears here for the first time and has a mystical - not merely physical - connotation. It’s a word that forces one to linger on that moment in the passage, its poetic qualities emphasising its mystical significance.
I think my reasoning for the candles’ symbolism, as based on this verse, should be apparent. Hannah lights the way to virtue; Hannah lights the other candles.
But I should probably get back to the topic of silence before wrapping up.
“…He made the night his ally…”
No, that line is not about Batman. Or Bane. I’ll get to it in a bit.
4 Maccabees brings us back to silence. In 4 Maccabees 10, the fourth brother utters the movie-worthy line, “By the blessed death of my brothers, by the everlasting destruction of the tyrant, by the glorious life of the pious, I will not deny our noble brotherhood.” More to the point, we read of him:
Upon hearing [the fourth brother’s speech], the bloodthirsty and murderous and utterly abominable Antiochus ordered his tongue to be cut out. But he said, “Even if you take away my organ of speech, yet doth G-d hear them that are silent.”
G-d did indeed hear Hannah when she invented silent prayer. Perhaps another way to commemorate the martyrs on Hanukkah is to engage in some silence, sh’tikah, of our own.
Alan Morinis writes,
People today can live their entire lives without a moment’s peace. We are so used to living with all the spaces filled by noise that quiet can seem threatening. A lull in the conversation feels intolerable. To have nothing to say is a kind of failure.
We often think of Judaism as requiring community. This is mostly true. There are guidelines and laws, for good reason, requiring communal study and prayer. But as Morinis writes, the tradition also values hitbodedut, or withdrawal. The goal of hitbodedut is to remove ourselves from distractions to allow better communion with G-d. Morinis quotes Rabbi Perr as saying, “Because when you are quiet a lot of things that will come into your mind will come not from your mind but min ha’shamayim [from heaven]. You grow from that. You become a different person from that.”
But what of darkness? Solitude and silence can be difficult. As Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra relates, “When aloft, I find myself always alone. No one speaketh unto me; the frost of solitude maketh me tremble.” Darkness is even less inviting to us. I think it’s intuitively reasonable to connect silence (absence of noise) and solitude (absence of company) to darkness (absence of light). But I want to connect them a little more deeply, and - ironically - a meme will help with this.
The text in the image reads:
I once saw the face of G-d, a vast and sudden silence among the noisy heavens.
That evening I dreamt I listened to one side of a conversation I should not have overheard.
I do not watch the skies anymore.
I do not look up.
Most often, the version of the image that gets shared around on social media is a lot darker, which seems fitting.
Here it is narrated excellently in a video.
Yes, if you (hypothetical reader) can’t tell, I love this meme. It’s so evocative, and its provenance remains obscure. I think it communicates something interesting about the divine: G-d can be seriously terrifying. I appreciate that the text doesn’t make G-d into some Lovecraftian Old God, a Cthulhu-like monster that can be made into a Funko Pop. The terror the speaker experienced in seeing G-d’s face is silence, a looming darkness in the sky. We know from Tanakh too that absence itself can be devastating: “With weights of emptiness.”
2 Maccabees 8:7, which discusses Judah’s tactics, is powerfully evocative: “Especially he made the night his ally for such sorties, and the fame of his exploits spread throughout the length and breadth of the land.” It is not the “heat o’ the sun” that aids Judah in this campaign; it is the darkness.
The revelations of darkness
A Christian song comes to mind here as expressing an idea contrary to this line in 2 Maccabees. Well, the song gives an image that contains an idea. The 2009 song “In the Dark” by Flyleaf refers to a time in which the speaker lived in sin, before converting to Christianity (or at least a time during which she did not adhere to the religion very intensely). Which sins Flyleaf’s lyrics often refer to is a topic better left for someone else to discuss and is not strictly relevant here.
At any rate, the song’s lyrics repeatedly say, “I’m scared to death of light and silence,” referring to light and silence as revealing one’s sins. The song refers many times to the issue of “idle words,” also a concern in the Jewish tradition, as we’ve seen regarding lashon hara. But this notion of light as the revealer of one’s “flaws” is not aligned with my idea of justice in our tradition. Per Flyleaf’s lyrics,
Glory shows up
Exposes us
I’m naked here, forsaken here
By the dark, by the dark
Damn the dark!
I’m going on for some time about a Christian rock song from 2009, but hey, I’m a millennial by some standards, of course I remember ‘00s rock. Gore. is my preferred substitute to Flyleaf at this point, though.
Self-loathing semi-millennial tangent aside, the idea that light is what exposes transgression is not accurate to me for at least three reasons.
Darkness forces us inward. It removes distraction and temptation. It is not hard to be in a well-lit room. It is easy to distract ourselves from our consciences and the nudging of G-d when we can see everything.
While darkness removes some distractions, it also causes us to hear more keenly (“Shema…”). We can hear G-d more clearly when we cannot see.
Too much light can block out the smaller lights that matter. Held in front of the sun, a candle is nothing; surrounded by utter darkness, a candle is visible from a great (if not clearly measurable) distance. We need to be surrounded by darkness to see the light of the candle.
Candles are useful for meditation, which of course requires silence. I prefer solitude when meditating, too. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan writes at length on the uses and methods of visualisation in the Jewish meditative tradition. Per Zohar, writes R” Kaplan, we should see a light blueness around a small flame, and the blueness symbolises the Shekhinah. And yet, he writes, “from the context of the Zoharic teaching, it appears that this color appears outside and beyond the black, which is the darkness around the flame.” He goes on to instruct us in how to meditate on the flame of a candle: place a candle in a dark room, “with the candle far enough from the wall so that it casts no light on it.” He continues, saying to
[Allow] the flame … to fill the entire mind. One becomes aware of the colors in the flame, the white, the yellow, and the red… One is aware of the heat and energy radiating from the candle, and … one reaches a level at which one can actually see these abstract energies.
But what about the blueness, the symbol of the Shekhinah? R” Kaplan explains:
The next step would be to concentrate on the darkness around the flame. When one contemplates the darkness of the room, it becomes a very profound, palpable darkness. One sees it as a velvety blackness that appears to radiate darkness…. However, when one gets deeper into the meditation, one will begin to see a sky-blue field around the darkness. The blackness will extend for a certain distance around the candle, but around this will be an experience of pure sky-blue…. The color will have an almost awesome beauty.… [A]ccording to the Zohar, the blue sensation is a revelation of the spiritual.
Thus, darkness is not only helpful for making the candlelight stand out. Rather, it is only from the darkness that we have access to deeper spiritual experience. The darkness and the light are necessary for us to access one another’s meaning, but ultimately, the darkness is the point.
I’m not going to pretend it’s unclear why I’m discussing meditations on candles, here. I lit a bunch of them earlier! Through the above contemplations, on the Maccabees and on silence and darkness, I’ve managed to find meaning in Hanukkah on my own terms, to my own satisfaction. I’ve managed to justify it to myself.
Hanukkah is not just about manly men and martyrs
Many people associate Hanukkah with warlike masculinity and aggression. This association is understandable, but it’s missing a lot of what’s made Hanukkah special throughout the millennia. Hanukkah has many associations with women and girls, too, and not just because of the women among the Maccabean martyrs.
Many Jews for many centuries have told Judith’s story on Hanukkah. I won’t go into Judith and her significance to Hanukkah here; hypothetical readers can click that link to the Jewish Women’s Archive article on the topic. Rabbi Jill Hammer mentions this tradition too after writing of a more unduly obscure set of traditions:
In North African Sephardic countries, the seventh night of Chanukah was set aside as Chag haBanot, the Festival of the Daughters. Chag haBanot falls on the new moon of the Hebrew month of Tevet. In Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco, Chag haBanot celebrated women and particularly girls. Mothers gave their daughters gifts, and bridegrooms gave gifts to the brides. Girls who were fighting were expected to reconcile on Chag haBanot. Rabbis gave sermons about the heroism of women. Another tradition was for women to go to the synagogue, touch the Torah, and pray for the health of their daughters. There might also be a feast in honor of the Chanukah heroine Judith, who saved her town from attackers. This holiday, probably a very old one, acknowledged Jewish girls and blessed them as Maidens.
Again, as it often does, my mind returns to its irritation with our recent neglect of almost all of Jewish literature and of traditions that honour women and girls. I’ve mentioned Hannah of the Maccabees before in a similar context, so I won’t go into that again here.
I’ll summarise and describe in more concrete terms how I’ve made Hanukkah meaningful for myself. Perhaps I’ll have given hypothetical readers some useful ideas, or perhaps not. As always, I’ll emphasise that I’m not a rabbi. So take all of what I write with a grain of flaky finishing salt.
I now think of the candles on the hanukkiah as memorialising the martyrs from 2 and 4 Maccabees, with the shamash as Hannah.
I choose words to read from what Eleazar and each of the seven sons say in 4 Maccabees on their respective nights. Sadly I hadn’t fully mulled this over in time for Eleazar’s night, but there’s always next year. Well, there’s usually next year. 4 Maccabees has some truly gorgeous passages, and many of them are the ones from and in praise Hannah; I’ve mingled such passages into each night, since the shamash is relevant every night. Next year I’ll probably come up with a more consistent personal liturgy for this.
Having lit the candles, I use the hanukkiah as a focal point for meditation, as per R” Kaplan.
It’s also easy to inwardly visualise a candle flame against a dark background at any time for meditative purposes. I seem to recall this form of meditation playing a large role in the Wheel of Time series, but someone more dedicated to fantasy would have to check my teenage-vintage memory. I think the water visualisation from that has worked better for me. Anyway, imagining a candle flame helps with meditation, and Hanukkah has been a good time to visualise one even when I’m not in a dark room with actual candles.
I’m still pondering what to do for Chag haBanot. I’m not certain I’ll come up with anything for it - as I wrap up this post, it’s the sixth night of Hanukkah, so I don’t have much time left and I only started thinking of doing anything for it a day or two ago. But there’s still a day and night to consider it, and usually, there’s next year.
Chag urim sameach!
