I have never had a problem finding a topic for the weekly newsletter.
We seem to generate more news, bad and good, than nations many times our size.
Well this week I decided to disregard the Wikileaks; ignore our promising gas and oil drillings and steer clear of the sordid sex-scandal involving high ranking police officers, including the leading candidate for the position of Chief of Police. Instead I’ve chosen to write about Hanukkah. Tonight is the second night of the festival loved by children and adults alike.
You don’t have to be Jewish to like Hanukkah. Sometimes it coincides with Christmas; however this year we will light our Hanukkah candles three weeks before our Christian friends decorate their Christmas trees.
Like all our festivals Hanukkah commemorates an event that occurred in our part of the world, the Middle East. A later festival, not included in the Hebrew canon it is, nevertheless one of the most widely celebrated festivals in our calendar.
Hanukkah commemorates the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid Empire that occurred in
165 BC.
The root causes of the revolt are still disputed by historians. Suffice to say that a power vacuum created in the context of the rising Parthian Empire and the Seleucid Empire’s conflict with Ptolemaic Egypt, opened a window of opportunity for the Jews. Some people see the success of the revolt as an act of Divine intervention. The result was a brief 103 years of Jewish Independence. This was but one of the Hanukkah miracles. The miracle of the flask of oil that lasted for eight days instead of one is perhaps referred to more than the military actions and battles.
Let’s fast-forward to the Middle Ages and the appearance of the Dreidel the Yiddish name for the unique a four-sided spinning top, played with during Hanukkah. In Israel the top is more often called by its modern Hebrew name sevivon.
As we know, each side of the dreidel bears a letter of the Hebrew alphabet which together form the acronym for “a great miracle happened there.” In Israel one letter is changed to transpose “here” for “there.” The letters also form a mnemonic for the rules of a game played with a dreidel.
At that time, and certainly earlier the miracle of the flask of oil was in fact the great miracle. However, the authors of the Books of Maccabees omitted to mention the flask of oil and its miraculous attribute. The Jewish historian Josephus Flavius mentions a “festival of lights” but overlooks the flask of oil.
Hundreds of years later we find the first reference to the flask of oil in the Talmud. It appears that the miracle of the flask of oil was imbedded in the Hanukkah narrative at a later date..
Just the same, in my humble opinion we should accept the flask of oil as a welcome latecomer. The oil of course was none other than olive oil.
There’s no better description of the olive than Lawrence Durrell’s wonderful account -
"The entire Mediterranean seems to rise out of the sour, pungent taste of black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat or wine, a taste as old as cold water. Only the sea itself seems as ancient a part of the region as the olive and its oil, that like no other products of nature, have shaped civilizations from remotest antiquity to the present"
When Herod the Great lay dying his physicians tried immersing him in a bath of hot olive oil. The hoped for cure only aggravated his malady and he died a few days later. Notwithstanding this failed treatment, today olive oil is highly regarded by dieticians. It seems the olive tree is reclaiming lost ground in more than one way.
A few years ago I mentioned archaeological surveys conducted in western Galilee and the Golan Heights that uncovered the sites of scores of thriving Jewish settlements dating from the Roman-Byzantine period. The large number of olive presses found in both these regions supplemented by additional evidence has reinforced the claim that Jewish communities continued to exist here and even prospered long after the destruction of the Second Temple.
By using a rule of thumb method archaeologists estimate that these communities on the Golan Heights and in western Galilee managed to export considerable quantities of olive oil.
Extensive use of larger improved pressing mills made the oil extraction process more efficient and required less manpower. This export trade itself was facilitated by the network of Roman roads which enabled the growers on the Golan Heights to send their product to the provinces in the east. Sea routes across the Mediterranean brought the large amphorae of olive oil from western Galilee to markets throughout the Roman Empire.
The decline of the Roman-Byzantine Empire, more markedly in the fifth and sixth centuries, dealt a death blow to the communities reliant on exporting their surplus olive oil production. The collapse of the empire's eastern defence line made the Golan prone to incursions by nomadic tribes who at first were content to pillage and later encroached on the farm land grazing their camels and flocks of sheep and goats. One by one the Golan settlements were deserted. The same happened in western Galilee after the Muslim invasion when the sea routes across the Mediterranean were disrupted.
Anyone touring Israel and the West Bank today will no doubt notice the ever increasing number of olive groves. In some places olive groves have become part of the violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Most markedly the friction points are Palestinian villages that border with Jewish settlements. Not everywhere, but in far too many places there have been despicable incidents involving wilful damage caused to Palestinian crops, in particular olive groves. Trees have been damaged, torched and cut down. In some places Jewish settlers picked their neighbour’s olives before the owners could gain access to their groves.
A few weeks ago I mentioned a village called Jelabun and promised to write about its connection to Hanukkah
Six years ago journalist Akiva Eldar published an article in Haaretz under a double heading
“ A One-time Hanukkah Miracle.”
“The Story of a Very Large Cache of Oil, an Orthodox Kibbutz and a Palestinian Village.”
The story is best told in his own words.
“In better days, other days, before the second year of the intifada and before a high barbed-wire fence separated Kibbutz Merav from the northern West Bank, Hanukkah was a holiday for the residents of the nearby village of Jelabun; Merav's candle factory was the source of livelihood for a number of Jelabun families. It was a win-win situation.
But two fatal attacks in the area put an end to neighbourly relations between the 70 young kibbutz families and the people of Jelabun. A high fence now slices across a 200-metre wide swath between Merav and Jelabun, leaving major parts of the village's olive grove in the wadi on the Merav side, shut up tight as a drum. Shuri Sholev, a member of Merav's secretariat, notes that during the last olive harvest, none of the villagers were seen in the grove. They may have been afraid to come across at the chinks in the fence the border police open from time to time.
A few weeks ago, a group of high school students came down from the kibbutz to the olive grove. They harvested the fruit, took it to a local olive press, and returned with their loot - a big barrel of fresh oil. When their parents found out, a members meeting was speedily called. According to Sholev, somebody mentioned the halakhic (Jewish law) ruling by a number of West Bank and Gaza rabbis that settlers may harvest the Palestinian olives. According to those rabbis, the land of Israel belongs only to Israel, and therefore so does its fruit.
Most of the members, however, supported the kibbutz rabbi, Eitan Tzuker, who ruled that the act constituted theft and it was prohibited to enjoy its fruit. The olive press reported the appearance of Jelabun's olives on its premises to the border police, and the surprised lawmen were asked to return the unusual cargo to its rightful owners.
Rabbi Tzuker prefers to keep the incident within the kibbutz, and is not interested in transforming his ruling into a halakhic dispute. Sholev cannot hide his longing for the days, not so long ago, when no one in this Orthodox-Zionist kibbutz would have dreamed that his son would steal the fruit of his neighbour. "Ninety-five percent of the people of Jelabun are good people who are only trying to earn an honest living," says Sholev. "It's a shame that a small group of their young people went to the mosques in Jenin and came back riled up and hostile. It was probably one of them who led the terrorists who killed a young girl here three years ago. Later, two people from Jelabun took part in the murderous attack in Beit She'an on the morning of the Likud primaries."
The kibbutz members take comfort in the fact that at least one positive thing came out of the incident - a morality tale with a happy end. Who knows - it may even spark debate among Orthodox-Zionists on the question of the attitude to the Palestinians, and encourage rabbis to follow Rabbi Tzuker's lead. From the point of view of the residents of Jelabun, the story of the very large cruse of oil is a one-time Hanukkah miracle.”
Chag Hanukkah Sameach
Beni 2nd of |December, 2010.
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