Rating 4 out of 5 (Highly platitudinous)

Barack Obama has just received his Nobel peace prize for making the world so peaceful. Nobel instituted the prizes after reading his own mistaken obituary and realising that he would only be remembered as an explosives magnate. He decided he wanted to be remembered for peace.

By complete coincidence, there's a big Jewish festival just starting. This is a celebration of peace when the Maccabees peacefully revolted against the evil Greeks. The Greeks had erected a statue of Zeus in the Temple - can you believe such wickedness? Zeus is not a real god, like our god is, so there was only one possible outcome: war (done in a very peaceful way of course). When we'd expelled the evil statue from our holy Temple, we lit a special peace candle to celebrate the return of peace after we'd won the war.

Today we have to light two holy candles, one for our peaceful expulsion of Zeus pretending to be a proper god, and one for the Sabbath, because the Sabbath means peace. But what if you only have one candle? Is it a Hanukkah candle or a Sabbath candle? These are the kind of profound moral dilemmas that we people of faith must confront and make a decision about. There can be no fudging on such a serious issue as this. When religious protocols of this magnitude come into conflict, the law must provide a clear and unambiguous choice and the choice is this, it is a Sabbath candle. For no matter how peaceful and well intentioned our expulsion of the evil Zeus-worshippers was, the Sabbath, which means peace, is even more important.

It's about time you non-Jews started thinking about being peaceful like us.

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