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from the 1987 issue of the New York Times Magazine http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/15/magazine/reflections-on-hanukkah.html?scp=12&sq=ozick%20israel&st=cse&pagewanted=1

…Hanukkah marks the earliest battle for religious freedom in the history of our planet. But more than that: Hanukkah marks the beginning of the very concept of religious freedom. If the life of a little people had been extinguished, if a small nation had not been victorious over a savagely reductive oppressor, if Judaism had been uprooted - if the light of Torah had been snuffed - what would our allegiances look like today? There would be no legacy of monotheism. The Ten Commandments would be absent from the treasure house of world culture. There would be no Christianity. There would be no Islam. There would be no Bill of Rights. That little bit of oil has lasted and lasted - like the burning bush it reflects, it stands for the glory of God.

Or, if that phrase tends to embarrass us skeptical moderns (in whichever millennium our modernity happens to fall), let us choose words more accessible, more comprehensible - but also more arduously demanding, because they are ineluctably bound to the immediacy of human responsibility. Say, then, that the little cruse stands for mercy, conscience, freedom, dedication, thanksgiving. Call it civilization.

THE EGALITARIAN MENORAH is lighted by women and men and children. The rule is to set it in a window - liberty's annunciation - for passersby to see. (The rule does not apply when there is danger of persecution, as in ancient Babylon, when the surrounding fire worshipers prohibited the lighting of the menorah, or in Inquisitional Spain, or in certain cities of Germany and Poland in the 1930's, when a glimmering candelabrum might bring a rock through the glass.) No work may be done by the light of the menorah - its light is for celebration, not for commonplace household use - so while the candles burn, play is decreed. Hence the dreydl, that four-sided medieval teetotum carrying the initials of the words A Great Miracle Happened There - there in Jerusalem, long ago. Dreydl spinning is a kind of gambling game, with nuts for stakes; in a more puritan era it represented a dispensation for other frivolities - riddles, acrostics, even card playing. Under the menorah's light, lightness reigns.

Well, then: Hanukkah as cheerful lively domestic bustle and cozy Jewish family festival? Unquestionably. And surely here and now, in an American December. But when the latkes in their frying pan, bubbling and spurting and crackling, suddenly sparkle with little bursts of oil, know that those sparks are for the redemption and rededication of the world.