 All right, Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday that the first day of Hanukkah starts on Sunday, I think. A lot of what I'm going to tell you about Hanukkah, I know a lot of it, but some of the details I got from, I'm on an email distribution list, which I think is really good, by a columnist by the name of Jeff Jacoby. Jacoby, J-A-C-O-B-Y. He is a Boston Globe columnist and has been for decades, I think. I've met Jeff. He moderated a debate I did once on inequality, not an inequality on maybe on charity and morality at the Fort Hope Forum years ago. He's one of the best writers in America today, I think, and one of the few columnists that I actually watch, that I actually read, and I find him really interesting. And he sends out an email regularly called, Auguable. Auguable with Jeff Jacoby. So look it up. I don't know how you search it. Just look up Auguable, Jeff Jacoby, and I'm sure you'll find it and sign up. It's a really good column. He sends out an email, I think, once a week with his thoughts, and I find them really, really interesting. Somebody is questioning my spelling of Hanukkah. I have no idea how you spell Hanukkah. I know I can spell it in Hebrew. I have no idea how you spell it in English. I took it from Jeff Jacoby under the assumption that he was both a good Jew and a columnist for the Boston Globe and he wouldn't have the right spelling. So if the spelling is wrong, it's Jeff Jacoby's fault. I'm sure there are many ways to take a Hebrew word and to spell it in English. So there's a variety of different ways you can do it. So what is Hanukkah about? It's interesting. Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday that is rooted in a military campaign and in military victory. And yet the holiday itself is all spiritual, although it has gained some material aspects to it because of its competition with Christmas. So Hanukkah used to be a pretty minor holiday, pretty low-key, not that important. And it wasn't that popular, but Hanukkah falls most years, almost because it's not the same date every year because it's based on the Hebrew calendar, which is a lunar calendar in Christmas and of course on the, what do you call the calendar that we use? Anyway, the modern calendar and it's based on the sun and therefore they go out of sync for one another. But they're basically in the same part of the year. Usually there's some overlap and a lot of Jewish kids would complain, would complain that, hey, wait a minute, I mean, the Christians get presents, they have a tree, they have lights, they celebrate, it's happy. We want to celebrate Christmas. The kids would pound the table and yell and complain and the parents would go, oh, well, we can't celebrate Christmas because we're Jews and we have to stick to our traditions. But our traditions are dull, the kids would say. This is boring stuff. So what has happened over the years, particularly in the U.S., but it's also true, you know, Israel makes a big deal out of Jewish holidays because it's Israel, but in the U.S., what's happened in the U.S. is as over time, Hanukkah has become a bigger and bigger and bigger holiday basically to compete for kids' attention and to be able to maintain like a Jewish family life without succumbing to a Christmas tree. So it's become this joyous holiday where gifts are given and where, of course, they're lights because they light the menorah, we'll get to why there's a menorah in, you know, what do you call, I don't know what you call a menorah in English. And it's become this big holiday. It's like, and it's seven days, so it's a long holiday and you get like little gifts every day instead of one big gift under the tree and there are parties and there's music and there's decorations and there's a big deal made out of it. Now, of course, both holidays, you know, observed that time of year because that's when all holidays in pagan times were observed at the end of winter. This is why Christmas is then and this is why Hanukkah is there. Hanukkah is not a Jewish holiday rooted in the Old Testament. There's nothing in the Old Testament about Hanukkah because it's really more of a modern holiday, although it was celebrated during Jesus' time. So it is mentioned in the New Testament as the feast of dedication. Hanukkah is the dedicate, lachnoch, so Hanukkah comes to the word dedication. And, you know, I guess in the Gospel of John it says at the time of the feast of dedication, it took place in Jerusalem, da-da-da, Jesus did this on that. So there was such a holiday even back then in the time of Jesus, but it's not mentioned in the Old Testament at all. So what is it all about? What is this holiday? It's interesting because fundamentally Hanukkah is about Jewish assimilation and the resistance to assimilation. And in the case of Hanukkah, it's the resistance to forced assimilation, and it's a resistance to foreign culture. That's why it's somewhat ironic and Jeff Jacoby points this out in his column. It's somewhat ironic that Hanukkah is used today as a form of assimilation, as a form of embracing the kind of holiday spirit that is Christian. Well, not Christian, but is Christmas. But the holiday itself is rooted in the attempt not to assimilate. So we're talking about 22 centuries ago, 22 centuries ago. This is a time where Israel is occupied by one of the heirs to Alexander the Great. If you remember, Alexander dies relatively young, and his kingdom, his empire really, in the Mediterranean at least, is split up into multiple empires. I think at least two ruling. And one of them is a Syrian Greek empire, which also covers Israel. And at the time, there was a ruler called Antiochus. And again, I'm probably butchering the name, because that's what I do. I butcher names. Antiochus the fourth, who is a monarch. And he's ruling this part of the northern part, if you will. Egypt is ruled by a different to kind of the Alexander empire. And while Alexander was respectful for kind of various religion and was quite tolerant of variety of different religions, Antiochus wasn't. He was determined to impose Hellenism, to impose Greek religion with its pagan gods, its cult of, you know, human beauty. And you could argue some Aristotelian philosophy. He wanted to impose this on the people that he ruled. And the one place he met resistance was in what was called the Judea, today's Israel. So as a consequence of that, he made Judaism illegal. So this is a case of religious intolerance. And so he made things like the Sabbath observance, circumcision, the study of the Bible, were banned actually at the pain of death. And the statue of Zeus, right, was installed in the temple in Jerusalem. Pig, which Jews to the great detriment, I might add, do not eat and is not allowed in the temple under Judaism, was kind of sacrificed to Zeus in the Jewish temple at the time, right. So they did everything to basically, you know, demean Judaism and to persecute those who practice. There was no, you know, at least under this particular Greek, there was no religious tolerance. There was no religious freedom at all. So completely oppressive religious view. Anyway, some Jews assimilated and became Greeks for this purpose and abandoned their religion and embraced kind of Greek culture and the Greek gods. And those who wouldn't were punished, right. Now, here's a question. Now, granted, the Greeks did this wrong, right. They forced assimilation, they outlawed Judaism. But I suspect that if one studies Judaism of the time and Greek culture at the time and when compares the two, that Greek comes out ahead. Greek culture was probably significantly better. This is my problem with this holiday is I kind of somewhat, to some extent, I'm rooting for the Greeks. Not really because they're being authoritarian and they're cramming their religion down people's throats. But in essence, I think Greek culture was better than Judaism. It's a problem. Now, during this period, there was a one particular guy by the name of Matthias. And Matthias refused in order to sacrifice something to an idol, right. He stuck to his Judaism. And, you know, the Jew who had converted to an apostate Jew, you know, actually did the sacrificing instead of Matthias. Matthias killed this guy and tore down the altar. And then basically took his sons, his five sons, and ran into the hills and started a guerrilla war against this Syrian Greek empire. When he died, when Matthias done his second, third son, Judah Makabi, who if you know the Makabi games, Judah Makabi is one of the great heroes in Jewish mythology. He took command and with a band of fighters, he basically beat, you know, one battle after battle after battle. So this all started in 167 BCE. By 164 BC, they actually recaptured the temple and they cleaned it and they purified it and they rededicated it to the Jewish god. Hanukkah is dedication. It's to dedicate. It's a rededication. And on a 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev, this is the month now, I guess, they lit this menorah, you know, they lit a lamp and they thought they only had oil for like half a day and the lamp stayed up for eight days. And that's why you light a menorah with eight candles and you keep it on for eight days to symbolize the miracle that this little bit of oil lasted for eight days, right? So God was on their side. Now the war didn't end there. It took, you know, it really took until 142, so another two decades to actually win the war, but they did. They actually regained control. They established a monarchy in Israel that probably had no religious freedom either and probably persecuted people who are not Jewish, which is pretty typical, right? And, you know, they geopolitically, it's only 20 years later that they gained the land and they became this monarchy. So, but the holiday itself is supposed to be a holiday, kind of a spiritual holiday of commitment to your belief in God, commitment to your, you know, to the spiritual nature of Judaism and to commitment to the God of the Jews and a rejection of assimilation, a rejection of assimilation, and particularly a rejection of the kind of Greek view of the beauty of the body, of physicality, of the veneration of beauty above, if you will, holiness, the perfection, human perfection, the centrality of the individual in human life. Now, you could argue that had the Maccabees had these people failed, Judaism probably would have died and Christianity would have never been born. Now, I find those, that alternative history, very appealing, I have to say. I, you know, unfortunately the Greeks didn't win in the sense that the Romans took them over and the Romans were a sad shadow of Greece and a sad imitation of Greece and Christianity fell and without Christianity, I mean Roman, the Roman Empire fell and without Christianity, I'm not sure what would have happened to Roman Empire and how it would have fallen. So it's hard to tell what the alternative history would have been, but the perpetuation of the Jewish people is not a value to me. The, and suddenly the rise of Christianity, which I think brought a lot of evil into the world is not a great value in my book. I guess I'm not convinced that a Greek victory at the time would not have been better. So I'm always mixed during Hanukkah. I don't celebrate it. I haven't celebrated for years and years and years. We decided at some point, after resisting Christmas for many years, because of its association with Christianity, we decided to embrace the spirit of Christmas without the Christian aspects of Christmas. So embrace all the pagan aspects of Christmas. So now I celebrate Christmas, I've celebrated Christmas for since the late 90s or middle 90s, so it's been a long time. I love Christmas. Christmas is an amazing holiday and I basically ignore Hanukkah. I basically ignore Hanukkah. So to the people who still consider themselves Jews out there, I know you consider this a massive betrayal, but as I said yesterday, the day before yesterday, I only consider myself Jewish in that sense, you know, in facing anti-Semitism. Other than that, I am an objectivist. I am an American. I am an advocate for reason, self-interest, and capitalism, and that's how I define myself. I do not define myself in terms of Judaism, and I certainly don't define myself in terms of Jewish holidays, which I don't celebrate any of them. And again, Hanukkah, I'm, you know, again, I'm kind of pro-the-Greeks, so which creates a real conflict. All right, I thought that I thought