#chanukah

The Jewish festival of Chanukah, pronounced Hanukkah by those who can’t handle guttural phonemes, starts on the 25th of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar, which corresponds this year to the evening of December 6th. Chanukah is an event that should resonate with car enthusiasts — after all, it celebrates a miracle involving oil (well, that and a victory in a military/cultural/civil war with the Seleucid Greeks and Hellenistic Jews).

After defeating the Seleucids and reclaiming Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the Hasmonean Jews (aka Maccabees) found that there was only sufficient consecrated oil to light the Temple’s seven branched menorah, which was supposed to burn continuously, for just one day. It took about a week to prepare and purify new consecrated oil and, as the story goes, that one small jar of oil miraculously burned for eight days, till there was sufficient new oil.