Unraveling the Story of Hanukkah for Children

Unraveling the Story of Hanukkah for Children

When I think of Hanukkah rituals, I see my loved-ones bathed in the warm glow of candles, as we sing an ancient prayer (off-key) and grow drowsy from the fat of latkes. The story behind Hanukkah is less warm and fuzzy. I struggle with which parts to share with my small children.
The traditional version of the Hanukkah story is bloody.  It goes something like this: long ago in Jerusalem, a cruel emperor, Antiochus IV, forbid the Jews to practice their religion. He slaughtered the Jews who continued to observe Jewish rituals, and desecrated the Temple of Jerusalem with the sacrifice of pigs.  Judah the Maccabee (or Judah “the Hammer”) and his brothers had the courage to stand up for their rights: they formed an army and drove the followers of Antiochus from Jerusalem. When the Maccabees sought to rededicate the temple, they only had enough oil to light a lamp for one night. But God sent a miracle, and the light burned brightly for eight days.   
It’s not just violent. This often told version of the Hanukkah story diverges from the historical account.
Modern scholars believe the Maccabean revolt was actually a civil war, a struggle between the urbane, Hellenized Jews of Jerusalem who were taking on Greek customs, and the Macabees, traditionalists from the hills, as David Brooks points out in his wonderful editorial on the “adult” complexity of the Chanukah story. Antiochus’ persecutions happened, but this rebellion was also a case of Jews fighting Jews. It’s hard to make an elegant children’s parable out of that, and it feels dishonest to make unequivocal heroes out of the Maccabees.
All of this complexity makes it tempting to sweep the story of Hanukkah under the rug and just get to the presents. I needed help to sort out the Hanukkah story for young ears! So I called Rabbi Steven Kushner, the spiritual leader of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ.  Rabbi Kushner explained, “It is important to understand that this story is not about genocide or inquisition; but civil war. The miracle of the oil does not appear in the literature of the Maccabees.   Many generations later, the rabbis added the miracle of the oil to transform the holiday into something transcendent and eternal. For Jews, this became a story about religious freedom, and the light became a symbol of the banishment of persecution, hatred, and ignorance; the triumph of enlightenment and tolerance.”
Generations of rabbis have changed the Hanukkah story into a parable that unites Jews and reminds us not to take our freedoms for granted. Sometimes a culture’s fictions contain their greatest truths. Knowing this makes it less intimidating to insert my values and inventions into the Hanukkah story as I tell it to my kids.
This year, I’ll tell the story from the perspective of two fictional Jewish children who lived in the time of the Maccabean revolt, so I can take the emphasis off military heroes and put the focus on communal resistance to religious persecution.   I will tell my children that it is our responsibility to speak out against intolerance, even when it is directed at others. The story I tell my children will be full of opinions, omissions and fictions, yet it will still be, in a way, the truth.