The 2nd Book of Maccabees establishes the feast of Chanukkah. It is celebrated for eight days as is Sukkoth and many have believed that it was a substitute for those who could not keep Sukkoth in a particular year. My sect of Jews believes in the literal requirements of the Scripture where possible. The Scripture sets forth the requirement that the New Moon be observed by two persons and reported to a Beth Din to decide that the new month has begun. We find the National Observatory far better enabled to do that than our own eyes considering weather, smog, and other impediments. We insist upon declaring the new month on the day that the new moon appears. If it appears after sun down, it is the next day. But it is on that evening that we begin the feast. This year the Rabbinicals and the Nasoreans are one day apart. We will begin the Chanukkah celebration today at Sundown, because the new moon was one day earlier for us than them.

Now the 25th of Kislev is the date of Chanukkah every year. However, that date changes on your solar calendars, the ones used by Christians. So our holiday which never varies on the date of the month it is to be celebrated is celebrated on different days for Christians. This is not a big feast. It has become a big feast only because of Christmas. It is a time to remember the Rededication of a now extinct building, a building which the Nasoreans came to see as corrupt and profane. However, it is a time to rededicate the temple not made with hands, the community of Israel, to surviving one more year. In these days when Israel is encompassed by the Gentiles on every side and suicide bombers serving Satan, not G-d, dare to blow themselves up to kill people, it is especially necessary for us to commemorate this feast which remembers a victory of G-d over tyranny, of freedom of religion over state action, of miracle over apparent impossibility.

The Jews have not had just one Holocaust. They have had seven attempts to wipe them out. Chanukkah celebrates the Jewish ability to withstand Holocaust as much as Shoah day or Purim or the 9th of Av. The first attempt to wipe us out is mentioned in the Pesach ritual when it notes that Laban wanted to wipe us out by never allowing the children of Rachel and Leach to be born. He failed. The Pesach ritual recalls the attempt to destroy our people by eliminating all male children. It failed. G-d sent Moses and we made an Exodus to freedom. Amalek tried to destroy us in the desert and ultimately the son of Agag, the King of the Amalekites, became the Grand Vizier of the Babylonian Empire and set out to destroy us. Esther defeated him as is recorded in the Book of Esther and recounted during Purim, the feast that remembers they drew lots to decide what day the Jewish people would die. In 135 A.D., the Romans tried to wipe us out again. Millions of Jews were killed, but the greatest suffering took place among my sect, the Nasori, when we lost 980,000 in one year. Again in the period from 1300 until 1530, 400,000 Nasori now called Marranos suffered death at the hands of the Inquisition and all Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Finally, Hitler attempted to wipe out the Jewish people. Six million died.

There have always been those who would deny the seven holocausts of the Jews. A conference in Iran is merely the latest attempt for ant-Semites and the spirit of Haman to infect the world. I trust that it will happen again. I trust that many will believe it. It is amazing that people are so ignorant and intentionally believe a lie rather than truth. Perhaps as we begin to light the candles tonight, we should remember that the first candle, the Shamus, not a part of the regular eight, is the Servant Candle and for the Nasori, it is the symbol of The Man who was the Light of the World, the premier Tzaddik who became the Channel of Light from the Endless Light Himself. Remember Yeshua ha Meshiach, the Light of the World, tonight when we light the first two candles of Chanukkah and may his Light, his Truth, permeate our hearts.