Chanukah In Conversation with AI

The week before the first night of Chanukah, my aunt, who works in the hospitality industry, sent me an overview of the holiday that she likes to share with her non-Jewish colleagues. Here it is in its entirety:

In my world of non jews...love sharing this

🌟 The True Meaning & Purpose of Hanukkah

1. Historical Roots: Rededication & Courage

Hanukkah (also spelled Chanukah) commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem around 165 BCE after it was defiled by the Seleucid Greek Empire.

At its core, Hanukkah celebrates:

Religious freedom

The victory of the Maccabees, a small Jewish rebel group, over a much stronger occupying power

The restoration of Jewish worship practices that had been outlawed

It is, fundamentally, a holiday about identity, resilience, and reclaiming sacred space.

2. The Miracle of the Oil

During the Temple’s rededication, the Maccabees found only one small sealed jar of pure oil — enough to light the Temple menorah for one day.

But the oil lasted eight days, long enough to prepare more.

This is the spiritual heart of the holiday:

Light emerging from scarcity

Hope extending longer than expected

A reminder that small acts can ignite lasting impact

The 8 nights of candle-lighting celebrate this miracle.

3. Spiritual Purpose: Bringing Light Into Darkness

Hanukkah is often called the Festival of Lights, but its purpose is deeper:

✨ To bring light into the darkest time of the year.

It is celebrated near the winter solstice — the longest nights — symbolizing that even in the darkest periods, faith, hope, and identity endure.

✨ To make miracles visible.

By placing the menorah where others can see it, the tradition teaches:

Don’t hide your light. Share it. Publicize goodness.

✨ To honor perseverance.

Hanukkah reminds us that even when resources, energy, or hope are low, something greater can sustain us when we take courageous steps forward.

4. Modern Meaning: Heritage, Joy & Community

Today, Hanukkah carries additional layers of meaning:

Celebrating Jewish identity in a world where it has repeatedly faced suppression

Family connection through candle-lighting, songs, food, gifts

Joyful traditions like dreidel games 

and fried foods (symbolizing the oil)

Teaching children the values of courage and resilience

It is a holiday of gratitude, light, memory, and community.

5. In One Sentence

Hanukkah is the celebration of the resilience of a people, the miracle of light that outlasts its limits, and the enduring belief that even a small flame can push back great darkness.

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When I saw this document, I knew immediately that it had been generated with AI. My aunt explained that she pays for a customized subscription to Chat-GPT. With the enormous corpus of human-generated content about Chanukah at its disposal, Chat-GPT beautifully tailored this document to my aunt’s audience of kind and curious non-Jewish colleagues.

Thirteen years ago, I tried to do something similar myself. Matt and I hosted a Chanukah party for the other students in his Michigan State PhD program. After frying latkes and lighting the menorah in front of what felt like a large crowd of curious strangers, I got bogged down in the details. After all, Chanukah is a strange holiday. A winter solstice “festival of lights,” yes, it is also a commemoration of the military victory of a controversial group of religious zealots over the forces of Hellenic assimilation. The Maccabees had strong opinions about what ״real Judaism” looked like and little tolerance for Jews who did not conform to their ideals. I doubt the Maccabees would have looked kindly on Reconstructionism.

And yet, Chanukah has endured as a celebration across the diaspora (and in post-Temple Israel too) precisely because Judaism has been allowed to evolve for centuries. The Jews, famous for their “three opinions for every two people,” decide what it means to be Jewish. And that includes what it means to celebrate Chanukah.

Chat-GPT, with its mastery of the Internet, grasps this concept with the fluid LLM equivalent of intuition. It can distill the essence of a set of rituals and attitudes into one sentence that can be grasped by just about anyone. 

Hosting a Chanukah party at my house on Sunday, I thought about my aunt’s custom AI overview. Knowing that my guests were already a bit more experienced with Chanukah, I opted to print out translations and transliterations of prayers and songs instead. 

I realized that my favorite Hebrew Chanukah hymn, Maoz Tsur, has a rather martial tone overall, but I’ve always loved the final line: “And your word broke their sword when our own strength failed us.”

I like to believe that the essence of Judaism’s endurance is the faith that what is right and true will outlast any attempts to impose a rigid (brittle) structure on humanity. In the immortal words of Debbie Friedman, in her own English language liberal interpretation of Zachariah IV:6:

Not by might and not by power

But by spirit alone shall we all live in peace.