I have no doubt that Hitchens is correct and Hanukkah is as much a commercialized holiday tradition as Christmas. Many of its traditions began with medieval Jews living in Europe and its celebration has probably been most strongly observed, at least in Western capitalistic countries, since the latter half of the Twentieth Century, in order to provide beset-upon Jewish parents with an equivalent to Christmas’s Santa Claus retail tie-in.
I also cannot disagree with the proposition that we need to have publicly funded Menorahs brightening conspicuous spots in our fair cities, town squares, and country sides any more than we need similarly funded displays of crèches, over-sized Christmas trees, or even pagan Yule logs.
Where I must respond with a “so what?” is at Hitchens’s tendency to characterize Hanukkah as the triumphal celebration of hyper-zealous reactionary traditionalism over progressive enlightenment. Here my quibble is not so much with the thesis as its supposed impact. Surely, Hitchens does not seriously mean to suggest that the defeat of the Maccabees would have stopped or even significantly postponed the conquest of Palestine by the Romans along with the rest of the Hellenistic world?
Even more transparently facile is his statement that “the development of the whole of humanity was terribly retarded.” Palestine was only slightly less a backwater in those days than it was before the end of the Second World War. Certainly the Kingdom of Israel had not been a world power for centuries before the Maccabean revolt ever began. And all subsequent Western religious fundamentalism is supposed to have derived or at least been reinforced by it? Please.
But perhaps the place where Hitchens makes his greatest error is his assertion that “You would only be bitching about the darkness if you didn't have a candle to begin with.”
I am reminded of a classic Peanuts cartoon that begins with Charlie Brown happening upon Linus, standing in the darkness, holding a candle. “What’s this?” asks Charlie Brown. “I have heard it said,” observes Linus, “that it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.” Charlie Brown nods. “Yes, I’ve heard that saying too,” he says. “Of course,” he adds, “there will always be those who disagree.” Cut to the last panel in the strip, which features Lucy, standing alone in the darkness, first upraised, and shouting out angrily into the void, “YOU STUPID DARKNESS!!”
This reflection by Charles Schulz on human nature causes me to conclude that Hitchens, while not completely off the mark with his attacks against organized religion, could be characterized by the same term that Schulz often used to describe Lucy. He is a “fussbudget” a word the dictionary defines as a “needlessly fault-finding person.”
Hitchens is so thrilled about being able to legitimately criticize religion for its non-rationality in some aspects, particularly its often-suspect origins and traditions, that he refuses to grant five thousand years of organized intellectual endeavor any value whatsoever. Instead, he prefers to nitpick and then use anger to perform a miracle transformation, equivalent to that attributed to any Old Testament prophet, in which the sum of his nits, subtracted from the whole, leaves nothing.
Hitchens seems to miss what a miraculous oil lamp, the glow from the manager in a crèche scene, a brightly lit Christmas tree, and a burning Yule log all share in common – a celebration of the victory of light over darkness. There are plenty of other examples too. The Festival of Diwali is observed by Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs alike. There is Chahārshanbe-Sūri, a Persian festival dating back to Zoroastrian times. The Chinese Lantern Festival also goes back millennia. Yet another is the French Fête des Lumières, which dates back to 1643.
Yes, in some cases we might disagree with what a particular holiday’s creators chose to see as light (i.e. “goodness”) versus darkness (i.e. “evil”). And yet even if mores change over times and between cultures, it is remarkable how many ignorant, ancient peoples chose to celebrate, at heart, the very thing that Hitchens champions as a relatively modern invention – the triumph of rational insight over anger and fear. The fact that so many of these affirmations of light have their earliest origins as solstice observances strikes me as especially heartening. At the darkest hour of Nature, humankind has steadfastly sought to celebrate its faith in the return and triumph of light.
One wonders why the fussbudgets like Hitchens and Lucy are so determined to ignore this particular candle. I think the reason may be simple pride. They simply cannot stand the fact that the simpler, less educated, more superstitious people who came before them made and lit the candle. The candle was sometimes misused to burn down cities as an act of war or light the pyres of martyrs, so better to extinguish it altogether they reason.
Maybe they have a point. There is wisdom to be found in refusing to embrace the foolishness of our ancestors. Yet to turn away from any wisdom that does exist within the flame – not matter how imperfect – seems the greater ill. As Eleanor Roosevelt once noted, “If we endeavor to be the light of the world, then we must also consign ourselves to endure the burning.”
But at least cursing the darkness is foolishness the fussbudgets can commit all by themselves. Maybe someday they will find they are not the pioneers in a brave new world of their own creation but rather are simply re-discovering the wisdom in creation that so many have known for so long.
