Avi Shafran

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A 36-foot-tall menorah near the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan erected for Hanukkah. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Hanukkah — the Jewish “Festival of Lights” — is often dismissed as a minor celebration, artificially magnified by its proximity in the calendar to Christmas. The Jewish holiday is indeed not mentioned in the Torah, as the event it celebrates took place long after biblical times.

Minor, though, it is not.

On a superficial level, the Jewish winter holiday celebrates a Jewish rebel army’s routing of the Greek-Syrian Seleucid Empire’s forces, and its recapture of the Jewish Holy Temple in Jerusalem, nearly two centuries before the Common Era.

It wasn’t just an army, though, that was vanquished. Repelled no less significantly was a worldview, a way of understanding the human condition.…  Seguir leyendo »