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Chanukah and the Battle for Higher Meaning

BY RABBI MOSHE TARAGIN

The heroic Maccabee warriors defended our country, restored our national pride, and renovated our vandalized mikdash. Additionally, they defended us against a subversive Hellenist culture which contested core Jewish values and opposed the religious rituals which embodied those values.

The battle lines with Hellenism were drawn around three seminal mitzvot: shabbat, rosh chodesh and milah, rituals which shape our perspective of time, history, creation, and Jewish selection. Shabbat memorializes divine creation and, as the Greeks did not acknowledge a purposeful and organized creation of our world, Shabbat was illegalized.

Milah, a physical mark on our bodies, signifies our selection as G-d’s chosen, a notion which Athens had great distaste for. Athens sought to relandscape a world without borders, in which all local identities merged into one pan-Greek global culture. National identities were an outdated vestige of an ancient tribal past in which ignorant humans formed clans solely for protection and survival. The new civil society centered in Athens would unify man in pursuit of a higher and more elegant style of living. The only people who could be considered “chosen” were the citizens of Greece whose culture would educate the barbarians and redeem them from a life of darkness and violence. For the Greeks, milah mutilated the perfect form of the human body and was therefore banned. The mitzvah of shabbat which recalls creation and the mitzvah of milah which embodies Jewish selection were each offensive to the Hellenists.

Rosh chodesh emphasizes that Jews don’t just inhabit static “time” but participate in a dynamic process called “history”. The process of history has a beginning called “creation” and an endpoint called “redemption”, and we drive humanity to that historical terminus. A “fluid” lunar calendar centered around a constantly regenerating moon reflects the Jewish dynamic view of history.

By contrast, Plato and his fellow Greek philosophers searched for universal truths which superseded time and place. They weren’t engaged in a larger historical process but attempted to uncover truths and principles of life which were valid in every time and place. Possessing a completely different view of time, the Greeks prohibited Rosh chodesh celebrations. Hellenist opposition to these particular mitzvot wasn’t arbitrary.

THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Beyond defending specific religious beliefs and particular miztvot which symbolize them, we also clashed with ancient Greece about the human spirit and its search for higher meaning. Conceivably, the Chashmona’im warriors may not have been aware of this larger struggle, yet, it was still part of the Chanukah battle.

The Maharal, a 16th century philosopher and mystic, claimed that the four notorious empires which visited our planet weren’t just mighty kingdoms which persecuted the Jews and banned our religious freedom. Each empire posed a religious threat to humanity and each of these four dominant cultures introduced hazardous religious ideas, which, if left unchecked, would have infiltrated the human imagination and corrupted moral and religious experience. As the religious guardians of humanity, we battled these four empires and defended humanity from moral and religious collapse. Greece was the third of the four empires and much was at stake for humanity in this epic battle between Athens and Yerushalayim.

HIGHER MEANING

Like the Jews, the Greeks searched for higher meaning. There was more to life than violence and survival, if Man could escape the futility of his dreary and vulnerable existence and reach a “higher plane”. Greece was the first non-Jewish culture to ascend to that higher plane.

Religiously, Greece re-imagined ancient religious theories, breaking with archaic notions of paganism. No longer were gods physical statues, stars, or human-crafted images. The Greeks abstracted their gods into larger-than-life beings who inhabited a distant mountain and possessed superior powers. They failed to imagine a one G-d responsible for the variety and dichotomy of this booming and buzzing world, but they did make great strides in revolutionizing religion by extinguishing the dark world of classic paganism.

CLARITY, INTELLIGENCE AND BEAUTY

More dramatic than their religious revolution was their scientific and cultural revolution. Ancient Greece advanced dramatic developments in science, math, art philosophy, culture, and politics. There is hardly a sphere of modern experience which Greece, the first civilization, didn’t deeply impact.

The Greek term for the universe is “cosmos” which means order. By employing the tools of science and mathematics to organize and order our world, the Greeks eliminated much of the uncertainty and anxiety which had plagued ancient Man who faced a random and unpredictable universe.

If Greek logic could organize our world, Greek art could duplicate it and reflect it. The Greeks developed the cognitive tools to organize their world and the aesthetic imagination to reproduce their world in works of art. Ancient Greece, literally held the universe in their two hands. One hand of logic and one hand of art.

For the first time in history the muddy veil of our world was lifted, and clarity replaced confusion. This orderly and predictable world was more pleasant and more beautiful than a haphazard and unsystematic world. Freed from the struggle for survival, Man could ponder the larger questions about life and meaning. In his landmark essay about the differences between Greek and Hebrew culture, Matthew Arnold, a 19th century author, described the Greeks as transforming a dark and ugly ancient world into a radiant and sweet world of beauty. They were the first to rid civilization of the ignorance and confusion which had handicapped the human condition for three and a half thousand years. Intelligence, knowledge, clarity, beauty and civility, Athens had it all.

AWE OF G-D

What they didn’t possess was awe or fear. The gods of Greece were not fundamentally different from humans but merely stronger, wiser or wealthier. They were powerful beings which humans aspired to become like rather than fearing or submitting to. To many Greek philosophers, gods didn’t actually exist but were merely ideas or abstractions of noble and moral values which humans could model their lives upon. Greek culture, with its pleasantly organized world, eliminated fear and awe and did irreparable harm to the concept of holiness.

PIETY NOT INTELLIGENCE

Our own search for meaning and higher purpose is centered upon our submission to a Higher being. We don’t just look at Hashem as the source of wisdom or morality but as a different Being whose wisdom we cannot fully decipher but whose will we obey.

Admittedly, as Hashem created us intelligent and with artistic appreciation, we explore our world for deeper knowledge and enrich our imagination with beauty. However, we cultivate these faculties to more deeply appreciate divine majesty and to more completely obey His Will. For Greece, intelligence and beauty were the goals, for us they are “means” to an end, or enhancers of piety.

NO COMMANDMENTS

Because the gods of Greece weren’t higher authorities, merely stronger beings, the concept of commandments or mitzvot is completely absent from Greek philosophy. Once obedience was eliminated from religious experience it was easy to fall into moral decadence. Hashem created us noble and elegant, but we also possess dark desires and human weaknesses which must be regulated. Based upon Hashem’s instructions we learn to regulate these powerful forces and to avoid sinful and self-destructive behavior. For all its moral thought and higher meaning, Greece had no fear of sin and no divinely delivered regulatory system to fortify human intelligence against human desires. Ultimately, a system without divine restraints quickly degenerates into moral delinquency. Greek culture was adopted by the Roman empire which conquered Greece in the second century BCE. A few centuries later Rome quickly descended into moral degeneracy and collapsed under its own weight. Higher intelligence and appreciation of beauty unanchored by piety and fear of sin is not a religious system built to last.

During the Chanukah wars a historic battle was waged between two cultures asserting two different models of spirituality and the search for higher meaning. Our victory assured that piety, and not intelligence would shape the future of religious experience.

The writer is a rabbi at Yeshivat Har Etzion/Gush, a hesder yeshiva. He has smicha and a BA in computer science from Yeshiva University as well as a masters degree in English literature from the City University of New York.