As you light the third candle on the menorah tonight (as every good Commonweal reader would--no?) I'd direct your attention to this David Brooks column on the Hanukkah of history, which provides a more comprehensive take on the story of the Maccabees than we normally get:

Tonight Jewish kids will light the menorah, spin their dreidels and get their presents, but Hanukkah is the most adult of holidays. It commemorates an event in which the good guys did horrible things, the bad guys did good things and in which everybody is flummoxed by insoluble conflicts that remain with us today. Its a holiday that accurately reflects how politics is, how history is, how life is.[snip]The Jewish civil war raised questions: Who is a Jew? Who gets to define the right level of observance? It also created a spiritual crisis. This was not a battle between tribes. It was a battle between theologies and threw up all sorts of issues about why bad things happen to faithful believers and what happens in the afterlife issues that would reverberate in the region for centuries, to epic effect.The Maccabees are best understood as moderate fanatics. They were not in total revolt against Greek culture. They used Greek constitutional language to explain themselves. They created a festival to commemorate their triumph (which is part of Greek, not Jewish, culture). Before long, they were electing their priests.On the other hand, they were fighting heroically for their traditions and the survival of their faith. If they found uncircumcised Jews, they performed forced circumcisions. They had no interest in religious liberty within the Jewish community and believed religion was a collective regimen, not an individual choice.They were not the last bunch of angry, bearded religious guys to win an insurgency campaign against a great power in the Middle East, but they may have been among the first. They retook Jerusalem in 164 B.C. and rededicated the temple. Their regime quickly became corrupt, brutal and reactionary. The concept of reform had been discredited by the Hellenizing extremists. Practice stagnated. Scholarship withered. The Maccabees became religious oppressors themselves, fatefully inviting the Romans into Jerusalem.

A very Niebuhrian take, which is characteristic of Brooks--and Obama in Oslo, and elsewhere, I'd argue. And yes, perhaps a lesson on the perils of assimilation, or accommodation, and retrenchment. Oh, and a great story. Whatever happened to Mel Gibson's movie project on the Maccabees? A "Jewish western," I believe he called it. Maybe the story line got a tad complex.Good yontif!