Hanukah calls to us to combat assimilation and to fight for our heritage. Besides those who actively supported assimilation there were many who passively acquiesced. What is the use in opposing the force of history, they reasoned. We can't halt assimilation any more than we can stop the tides or the passage of the seasons. Today, too, there is paralysis before the apparently inevitable progress of assimilation.
Jewish particularism is a past value swept away on the tides of liberalism.
With the barriers of anti-Semitism down and the land of opportunity beckoning, the day of cohesive Jewish community seems gone. It's with resignation that we accept the spiraling intermarriage rate which spells our destruction as a people. Not so the approach of the Maccabees. Finally triumphant, Jews captured Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple. They found just one flask of oil but the flame which should have lasted one day burned for eight as if to testify that our determination was enhanced by some ineffable power suffusing our efforts with transcendent glow and power.