You Are the Maccabees! (December 20, 2025)

You Are the Maccabees!

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

December 20, 2025

 

I want to tell you a Hanukkah story.

I came to Israel for the first time in 1968 for my third out of five years of undergraduate study. I lived in a Seminary building connected to our studies with Dr. Shamma Friedman. The person who ran the building and our program was Yaakov Panini, may his memory be for a blessing. He was a multigenerational Jerusalemite who fought in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the Sinai Campaign of 1956—which most people forget—and the Six-Day War in 1967. And I arrived in Israel one year and three months after that war. I know that for many young people this may feel like ancient history, but it is history that must be remembered.

On the first night of Hanukkah, Yaakov organized a caravan of several cars. I did not know at the time that there were guns in the cars. We traveled straight north out of Jerusalem on unlit roads to an army base north of Jerusalem. It was a dark, cold, drizzly night.

We, the seminary students, arrived with Yaakov at the military base called Beit El. We went to the dining room and had a light repast—I have no recollection of what we ate. Then we came out to the main square, where the entire base was assembled.

I was looking at members of the IDF my age. I was 20 years old, looking at young men my age who had fought just 15 months earlier in the Six-Day War to save Israel—perhaps alongside their fathers and grandfathers. They were standing at attention on this cold, dark night.

In front of them was a giant menorah—not with lightbulbs, not with candles, not with oil, but with torches, large torches. The army choir was there, and they chanted all three blessings for the first night of Hanukkah. Then the choir sang songs—not the Hanukkah tunes that you and I grew up with, but songs of a different register and power.

Then the Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, stepped forward. He was about my height, with a salt-and-pepper bushy beard. By that point, my oral understanding of Hebrew had improved enough that I could fully understand him.

He spoke not to us - we were off to the side - but directly to the troops. He said to them, “Atem HaMakabim! You are the Maccabees!” These young soldiers understood exactly what he meant.

Without needing to say it explicitly, he invoked a bloodline that ran directly from Mattathias and Judah, Yohanan, Yonatan, and Shimon - those who fought to preserve the existence of the Jewish people so that we would not be swallowed up and disappear from the pages of history.

They were few, but they stood their ground.

And now, standing there 15 months after the Six-Day War, at another moment when the Jewish people had been threatened with extinction, these soldiers did not flinch. Ramrod straight, they understood. They understood that they were part of that unbroken line, people who stood as Maccabees in their own time and place.

That line continued through those who fought the Romans, twice; through the creation of Jewish life in the Diaspora; through survival after the expulsion from Spain and the destruction of a glorious civilization; through the Warsaw Ghetto and other uprisings; through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, when a tiny Jewish community struggled to survive; through 1948, against all odds.

They understood that this line had now stretched to them.

And standing there with them, we felt it too.

That line of being Maccabees, fighting for the existence of Israel, has never stopped: from 1973, through all the episodes that followed, through last Sunday on Bondi Beach in Sydney as well.

For us, this places both an opportunity and an obligation before us: to be Maccabees in our own ways, whenever we can. To make sure that the Hanukkah menorah we light is in the window, so that our neighbors know that when they pass our corner, there is a menorah in that window.

When I walk into a room wearing the whitest, most noticeable yarmulke I can find, people know who we are. It is not just me who is there. We are there. Not me, we. This too is a way of being Maccabees.

Each of us can be Maccabees in our own way, but we are indelibly stitched into those who came before us so that we could be here today. We must never take that for granted, and we must never let our hands slack from the reins of our destiny.

When you look at the menorah, I want you to hear Rabbi Shlomo Goren’s voice from Beit El—just a stone’s throw from Modi’in, where all of this began—and hear him say to the troops:

“Atem HaMakabim! You are the Maccabees!”

And we are too.