Religious and Secular, We are the Maccabees - By Naomi Ragen

Every single Jew living in the land of Israel is a modern day Maccabee.
Every Jew who has dared to wrench this re-born homeland from a callous world
that would deny us  Jews our birthright, while championing  the birthrights
of every other native people in the world --Tibetans, and Palestinians, and
South African Blacks-- is a Maccabee.  Every Jew sitting in Israel,
surrounded by the overwhelming power  and numbers  and evil designs of the
hostile Moslem world,  is a Maccabee.  With every candle we light - whether
we are religious or secular - we celebrate those things that hold us
together as a nation: our history and our culture and our faith.  We
celebrate that these things have not been erased from the world, and are not
now relics behind the glass cases of museum  exhibits  like those  of  the
Canaanites, Hittites, and Sumerians.

With every light in our window shining out against  the dark night we
proclaim: We are still here and  our very existence is a stunning victory of
the weak against the strong, the few against the many, the just, who love
and protect life,  against the lawless,  who have no respect for life.

With every candle we light, we reaffirm all those things that hold us
together as a nation and a people: our stubborn disregard for the forces
aligned against us, our rejection of the lies told about us, and our
unwavering assertion of our history and our right to take our place as a
nation among the nations.  We assert that we are in our homeland, the land
that was given to us and which we have inhabited - in lesser or greater
numbers-from the time we crossed the Jordan with Joshua.   That we,
descendants of  Abraham and that  tribe of desert children born from  freed
Egyptian slaves,  remember who we are despite all efforts to make us forget,
to convince us otherwise,  to rewrite and defile and deny our history and
our rights as a native people living in their native homeland.

We remember not only what we are, but who we are: the torch-bearers of the
precious value of human life.  Our agony as a nation over the life of one of
its precious sons, our willingness to release those who have murdered us
without pity so that that son might return to his family and live, that
agony unites us as a nation because it goes to the deepest part of our
heritage. No other nation in the world would even consider such a trade.
But we do, because that is who we are, demonstrating that we have not been
infected and defiled by the values of other nations.  We stand unique in all
the world, every single one of us.  Because we are alive at this time and in
this place, and we have chosen to spend  that life in our homeland despite
all the dangers and hardships and sacrifices.  Because we are Jews and
Israelis and together we light a candle, secular and religious, against the
vast darkness of a hostile world.  Because with that candle we proclaim: we
are a unique people, and we are here to stay.

Happy Chanukah.