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Editor's note: Joel Baden is professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University. The opinions in this column belong to him.
(CNN) -- On Tuesday night, Texas Gov. Rick Perry -- long a public fan of Judaism -- marked the beginning of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah by comparing it to the Boston Tea Party, which was celebrating its 241st anniversary the same day.
There is a parallel to be drawn here -- but Perry chose the wrong tea party and the wrong lessons.
Let's back up.
The Hanukkah story, to which Perry's statement made reference, is a fairly straightforward one: In the second century B.C., a small band of faithful Jews, led by Judah Maccabee, rose up against the oppressive Seleucid Empire, which had taken control of the Temple in Jerusalem, and won a surprising victory.
The Maccabees recaptured the Temple and rededicated it to the God of Israel. They found, however, that they had only one day's worth of oil for the holy lamps, the menorah -- but miracle of miracles, that oil lasted for eight days. Hence the Hanukkah we know and love: eight days of candles.
It is this story that Perry had in mind when he said, "The same spirit of freedom that inspired the Maccabees to rise up against a foreign empire motivated our Founding Fathers to rebel against the Crown on that fateful night. They knew, as the Jewish people know, that the few can overcome the many, that right can defeat might, that faith can transcend persecution."
Now, if we're talking about the traditional Hanukkah story described above, there are some problems with Perry's analogy. The most prominent might be the definition of "freedom."
For the Maccabees, what was at stake was the very existence of Judaism: The Temple, the very seat of God's dwelling on earth, was in the hands of pagans who prohibited Jewish worship there.
See the rest here:
Perry is really wrong about Hanukkah