Why is Chanukah so popular?
It’s fun. It’s colourful. It involves body as well as soul. It resonates.
The story symbolises so much of what being Jewish is about – a people who wish only to be able to follow their beliefs and practices and to see others too able to be themselves.
Jews never gave up hope that this Chanukah ideal would one day prevail.
Judah L. Landau, a former chief rabbi of Johannesburg, wrote: “Ages may still pass, centuries may roll by in the deep of time, generations will come and go to make room for others, but the nation as such will stand unshaken and unbroken, ever proclaiming the words, ‘These lights we shall continue to kindle until the great day will dawn when the ideals of Judaism – love and justice – shall dominate human life throughout the inhabited world’.”
Fired by such a belief, how could Chanukah not be popular?
