Happy Hanukkah! You are not crazy if you are wondering if the spelling for this holiday is correct. This holiday's title seems to have an endless supply of new ways to spell it, and almost all of them are correct. Odds are, by next Hanukkah, this year's misspellings will be valid as well. The Maccabees were a family of leaders that chose to follow God's ways instead of submitting to the desecration of God's temple. The Cheese is a snack next to the table while my family plays board games as part of our celebration. Sometimes the dreidel is spun, or gifts opened as lights flicker in the background from lighting Hanukkah candles.
Hanukkah means dedication. After the Maccabee, Jewish, revolt that started when pigs were sacrificed in God's temple, the temple had to be cleansed and rededicated.
This particular eight-day holiday is not one of God's feast days commanded in the Bible. I have met people that are adamant that it is a tradition of men and should not be followed.
Mark 7:6-8 tells of Yeshua (Jesus) quoting Isaiah "And he said to them, "Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, "'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.' You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men." We want to follow the commandments of God and not be hypocrites, so what is this all about? Context is key. It also helps to look at Isaiah's words when they were first said since he is quoted. There must be more to this; when Yeshua was at the temple during the Feast of Dedication, there was no mention that this tradition was bad.
A tradition during Hanukkah is spinning the dreidel. The dreidel is a gambling game that hides that the Jews were discussing Torah. It means "A great miracle happened there (Israel)," and they were celebrating a Maccabee revolt in that there was Salvation for the Jews and God was glorified. Dreidels were whipped out when Roman soldiers broke in on the Torah meetings to arrest those practicing their religion. They were forbidden to practice their faith openly. After all, if you are playing a gambling game, you wouldn't be practicing your religion.
As with any holiday, this holiday is something one should pray about and look to scripture to see if it is something that pleases God. If your purpose of celebrating it is to replace Christmas because of the pagan traditions associated with Christmas, you are probably celebrating for the wrong reasons. The feast of dedication is when Christ announced himself being one with the Father when asked to speak plainly if he was the Christ in John 10:28 "I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand." This happened during the feast of dedication or festival of lights (Hanukkah), but this is not one of the Feast Days God has instructed us to keep. It is a lot like the fourth of July in that it is a tradition of man. Paganism is not associated with Hanukah, and it does not hint at leaving the commandments of God. Another example of a tradition that does not have paganism roots, the Bible discusses making Purim an annual holiday for the Jews to celebrate their Salvation from extinction by the king's edict in the book of Esther.
If the holidays you choose to celebrate draw you closer to God, I think that is great. If you observe your holidays the same way every year, though, that isn't growing closer to God; that is stagnation. As our relationships with God deepen, so should our understandings of why we are celebrating. Scripture should always be a part of our celebrations as we learn more about our King.
I hope this has blessed you.
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