Chanukah is a celebration of the miracle of Jewish spiritual survival. After millennia of attempts to assimilate us, whether through force or persuasion, we are still here. But, it is not mere physical survival that we celebrate. After all, the genes of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks have also physically survived. The miracle of Jewish survival is that we have survived with our spiritual heritage intact. When we ...
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The idea that any one people could be “chosen” or have a Divine revelation was completely contrary to Greek belief. Their campaign against Judaism and the Jews did not focus on physical extermination, but rather attempted to eradicate the Jews as a special people. One example of this effort was the Emperor Ptolemy’s translation of the Torah into Greek. The Talmud relates that Ptolemy gathered 72 Sages, placed them in 72 ...
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Chanukah starts in about a week and a half, and without doubt it is one of the most popular of our festivals amongst Jews in general, even if not observant. A lot of people identify with Chanuka, and there is a lot of misunderstanding of its significance. Chanuka marks a clash of cultures - Judaism and the Torah versus the Hellenistic Greeks. I have nothing against the current Greeks. We’re ...
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Setting the Scene Israel: Approximately 200 years before the events of Chanukah, hundreds of thousands of Jews returned from the Babylonian exile to the Land of Israel. In time, they rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem and established an independent Jewish monarchy. Greece: After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, the Greek-Macedonian Empire split into several smaller kingdoms: the Greek empire based in Greece; the Seleucid empire, based in Syria, ...
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