Hanukkah is supposed to be a joke holiday. Semantically and pedantically, it’s not even a holiday; it’s a festival. A festival that celebrates the pre-modern Israel Israelites not being slaughtered en mass (just kinda sorta slaughtered) by an occupying army.
A brief history lesson for you. After Egypt (in which country we were, quite possibly, not slaves but contract laborers or the people who did the whipping, and left because we weren’t getting paid enough), the Israelites wreaked havoc across what would be today the Sinai Peninsula, Israel, and Lebanon. And then, after settling down a bit after a few plagues that may or may not have been sent to crush the uppity Israelites by a somewhat bi-polar God, Israel had a kingdom.
And then, because if you put three Jews in a room you’ll have four opinions, the kingdom split and became extremely weak. And then, because this is the way the world works, the area was conquered several times by empires that had their shit together. One such Empire was the Hellenistic Greco-Syrian empire, the head of which decided it’d be a neat idea to sacrifice pigs in the Temple.
If you know anything about Judaism, you know that we, as a religion, have a thing about pigs. We don’t like em. They think they’re smart, they’re dirty, and I hear that they are working on the power of flight. So, after learning that pigs were about to bleed in their Temple, a group of Jews lost their shit, holed up in the mountains, and attacked armies. And, surprisingly, they won.
And so today, that’s why we have Adam Sandler’s SNL skit as the theme song for Hanukkah for everyone under the age of fifty.
Aaron C Simon 