Miracle? Feh.

To continue this week's recurring theme, offensive posts about different ethnicities, today we look at what can only be termed the lamest holiday in the multitude of lame Jewish Holidays, Chanukah or Hanukkah or
Chanuka.

It's so lame we couldn't even decide on a correct spelling.

Hanukah, as you may or may not know, commemorates the Maccabees, who successfully rebelled against the armies of Antiochus. They liberated and purified the great Temple of Jerusalem (the same temple that was there about 700 years before Islam was even born) in the year 165 B.C.E. According to the story, there was only enough oil to keep the lamps lit for one day, but the Lord, in his infinite generosity, made the oil last for 8 miraculous days and nights. Holy crap, too bad someone didn't have a Sony Camcorder to get it all on tape.

What a cheap parlor trick.

Why didn't the Lord, the King of Kings, the Host of Hosts, smite the armies of Antiochus with a tower of fire or swallow them up with a raging tsunami? Something a little more majestic, for God's sake. I once saw a magician in Las Vegas pull the 7 of clubs from the ass of a cow.

We get the Bronze Age equivalent of flashlights and we're supposed to fall on bended knee?

I'm sorry rabbi, I'm just not buying it. Oh, I'll light the candles. And I'll eat the latkes. And of course I'll shower my daughters with 8 days of of increasingly more valuable gifts, but only because if I didn't I'd never hear the end of it.

But don't try to convince me this was some kind of miracle from the Lord who was looking after his Chosen People. If that were the case he would called off the Inquisition. Or cancelled the pogroms. Or even intervened in 1939 and saved the lives of million of Jews, one of whom probably would have found a cure for cancer. Or invented a toaster-oven that lasts longer than 6 months.

Now that would be a miracle.