The Maccabees Were on the Wrong Side of History — So Why Do We Still Celebrate Hanukkah?
... I feel more in tune with the bad guys of Hanukkah, the Hellenizers, than with the story’s traditional heroes, the Maccabees.
But if I’m on the wrong side, it’s a crowded one. “I think 90% of American Jewry would be with you,” said Rabbi Max Weiss, my rabbi at Oak Park Temple, outside Chicago, who acknowledges his own Hanukkah issues...
I think theologically, Yeshua would have felt more at home with the Maccabees than the Hellenists. Tradition was not merely about pork and circumcision, those are the mere surface things. Yet all the apologists for the Hellenists always lift up the surface things and ignore all the rest of the faith the Greeks and Hellenists sought to extinguish.