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Chanukah begins at sundown on December 11.  It's a child's holiday, with candles, songs, and, in the affluent west these days, presents.  For adults, at least for me, it's a bit more problematic–it's a holiday that celebrates confusing things, the triumph of religion over reason, the cleansing of the Temple, the start of a theocracy not unlike current-day Iran's.

Religion and politics in the Middle East in 167 BCE were just as complicated and deadly a combination as they've remained today...