Martin Buber
What is Chanukah for us
At the start of the last quarter of the last century (the 19th century), that same part of Judaism, when man remained as an essential and creative force, to observe and insist on his nationalism, one of his thoughts was to rouse this festival with a national character, to renew the expression of the national memory and the national hope. That same movement, which engraves on its flag the name of the temple mount, the name of Zion, and thereby made a motto for the war of the nation and its labour, created from the festival of Chanukah the Festival of the Maccabees. In this festival the memory of an unknown heroic period with belief in the future to come, historic pictures merge with pictures of dreams, and words that came to praise the heroism of the past call for a new heroism. This mainly relates to this celebration of the memory of the people who fought and took Zion and Jerusalem from the internal and external enemy, a connection that will not be severed in expressing our will, to overcome all the external and internal obstacles and to re-acquire for us the land, in which the roots of our power are buried.
The design of this new image into a festival was not coincidental, but rather the fruit of expression of the new process in our faith.