By Rabbi Hillel Goldberg

Abstraction is a bane of Jewish existence. Since this itself is an abstraction, let us illustrate.

Chanukah, it is said, commemorates a struggle for "religious freedom." This is true only if one abstracts from a specific event a general lesson. In doing this, something vital is lost.

It was not "religious freedom" that the ancient Maccabees fought for. Nor was it the right "to pray to G-d in their own way."

That is the perspective of an outsider looking in. From the Jewish perspective, the insider perspective, the Maccabees fought for the right to conduct the emotionally, physically and spiritually profound avodah, or "service to G-d," in the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem, as prescribed by the Torah.

The Maccabees fought for the right to light the seven-branch Menorah in the Temple, to offer meal offerings there, to offer sacrifices there, to conduct water ceremonies there. They fought for the right -- in terms of contemporary spiritual geography -- to go to the other side of the Western Wall. To go inside. To see the glory of G-d that intensified as the Temple's center, the Holy of Holies, was approached (within limits).

Chanukah is a yearning for the Temple, for the concentrated presence of G-d, so to speak, that is now denied to all Jews due to the exile. Chanukah is not just a yearning for "religious freedom"; it is a yearning for the kindling of the Menorah in the Temple. The smaller menorahs that we light commemorate the re-kindling of the Temple's Menorah.

In Judaism, holiness is centripetal, not centrifugal. The Land of Israel is central because it is holy. Philosophically speaking, the holiness of the land is a conundrum. How can the Infinite pierce the finite, the spiritual suffuse the material, G-d be present in land? Even if G-d, by some mechanism known only to Him, can render soil holy, how come only some soil, indeed, how come only a sliver of the earth, the Land of Israel? Resistant as these questions are, they fix the Torah's claim for the holiness of Israel, and ultimately explain the focus of Chanukah.

In Judaism, "holy land" signals the reverse of the equation of existence with expanse, the rejection of "the territorial imperative." The Torah's glorification of land is always the specific sliver of Biblically bound land; then, within this boundary (already tiny), the still smaller patches that circumscribe the holy city of Jerusalem; then, within this city, the still smaller space at its center, inside the Temple; ultimately, the one square cubit at the Temple's center.

This concept is clarified by a midrash on the precursor of the Temple, the Tabernacle of Exodus (translated by Lawrence Kaplan in Halakhic Man):

When G-d said to Moses, "and let them make Me a sanctuary" (Ex. 25:8), Moses began to wonder, and he said: "The glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the upper worlds and the lower worlds and yet He says: And let them make Me a sanctuary."

And moreover Moses gazed [into the future] and saw Solomon upon the completion of the building of the Temple . . . saying to the Holy One, blessed be He: "But will G-d truly dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You; how much less this house that I have built" (1 Kings 8:27). . . .

G-d replied: "I am not of the same opinion as you. But twenty boards in the north and twenty in the south and eight in the west [will suffice for the dimensions of the Tabernacle and My presence therein]. And more than that, I will descend and I will contract My divine presence [so that it may dwell] in one square cubit."

For Jews, the territorial imperative is not centrifugal, but centripetal. The focus is not on possession, but on contraction; not on land, but on holiness. Not on defense of a distant border but on the center, on Jerusalem, and, within Jerusalem, not on the Temple but on the one square cubit at the Temple's center, its inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies.

This, then, is the concept of the holiness of the Land of Israel. This, then, is the yearning that permeates Chanukah. G-d can pierce the material world and select but a single patch of soil for His presence, which He can then simultaneously contract and intensify, such that the closer the soil lays to the Temple, the holier it is, and the closer to the center of the Temple, the holier still.

The exiled Jews' yearning for the one square cubit of concentrated holiness at the Temple's center is, in essence, a yearning not for territory, but for G-d.

This is the nature, the content, of the religious freedom and yearning that Chanukah celebrates.

JWR contributor Rabbi Hillel Goldberg is the executive editor of the
Intermountain Jewish News and the author of several books on Jewish themes.

©1999 , Rabbi Hillel Goldberg.