In Come the Lights
On Hanukkah and illumination.

By Eric Field, Independence Institute
December 8-9, 2001

Typically, the Hanukkah menorah is placed in a window in the front of the home, to shine its light and message out to the public. The light must not be used for ordinary purposes. It is a spiritual light, and each night it grows.

At its simplest, Hanukkah commemorates the successful war of independence waged by Israel from 167 to 165 B.C. against the Selucid Empire. The Selucids (Syrian Greeks) were one of the successor states of Alexander the Great's vast empire.

The essence of Jewish religion is ethical monotheism; this is the greatest Jewish gift to the world. It means belief in One God as the active and participating source of a lawful, moral, ethical, purposeful universe, in which every human has worth, dignity, and responsibility, and every life and event has meaning. Later, under the Roman Empire that conquered Alexander's successors, Christianity made this Jewish belief system explicitly universal in scope and accessibility.

Ancient Greece, in contrast to Israel, rejected monotheism, universalism, and moralism. The Greek gods were chaotic, capricious, hedonistic figures of fear and ridicule. Humans had no worth or dignity except in proportion to use. Greek values meant the exaltation of external qualities of power, wealth, beauty, and prowess. Women were viewed as property. Marriage did not need to be relational. Even children were often viewed as sexual objects. Physical appetites and pleasures were viewed as ends in themselves. Truth was viewed as relative (or, as in Plato's political philosophy, a servant of the power of an all-powerful government ruled by an elite). The material world was the only reality, material, and aesthetic excellence were the greatest good. Life was viewed as cyclical, not progressive.

Ancient Greeks despised Jewish Godliness, egalitarianism, purity, and self-limitation. The Jewish Sabbath, a day for spiritual rather than material concerns, and a day of freedom from work, was seen as an excuse for laziness. Jewish dietary purity (eating only kosher food) seemed irrational and an excuse for rejecting multicultural socializing. Male circumcision was viewed as despicable mutilation of the perfection of the natural human body. Sexual modesty (which prevented Jewish athletes from competing in the nude, as the Greeks did; and which of course prohibited orgies) was scorned as further rejection of the "natural."

Judaism, in contrast, views nature as amoral, animalistic, and in need of sanctification. God, the Creator, is above nature, and calls on the human, created in His image, to improve upon nature and sanctify nature, lifting sparks of the Divine up in all of creation toward their Source. Thus male circumcision, the sign of God's covenant with Abraham, improves upon and elevates nature, by establishing that even the most intimate part, the reproductive and pleasure organ, is a matter of moral interest and duty, not to mention health (in contrast to the orgy, which makes it a matter only of pleasure). Thus traditional marriage, as a holy covenant, channels male sexuality and predation into serving the duty to support and advance a family based on the partnership of husband and wife. Women's rights within Jewish marriage, including the right to sexual pleasure from the husband, elevated their status and freedom.

Above all, spiritual and ethical beauty was elevated by the Torah far above the physical beauty prized by the Greeks. And though Jews place individual freedom within the context of communal responsibility, the Torah in both its laws and its personal stories placed legal and moral obligation on individuals, without class distinctions, and morally without even national distinctions.

Alexander the Great is said to have bowed to the high priest at the temple after entering Jerusalem. His successors sent Greek pagan rituals and customs into Israel. They were assisted by Jewish collaborators, called Hellenizers (after Hellas, the Greek name for Greece). These were themselves elitists, members of Israel's richest and most cosmopolitan and intellectual classes. Soon, Hellenization became mandatory. Sabbath observance, Torah study, circumcision, and keeping Kosher were banned. Jews were killed for refusing to eat pork. Jewish worship was banned and idol worship was ordered. The Temple in Jerusalem was defiled and used for the worship of Zeus. Jewish women were taken for pagan men.

Naturally the Jews rebelled. They were led by Judah Maccabbee of the clan Maccabbee (a family of Kohens, or priests). Using guerilla tactics (which brought him the nickname "the Hammer"), with God's grace they eventually won despite the vastly greater numbers of the Syrians. On entering the Temple, they found only one jar of ritually pure oil, enough to last only for one day, though the Temple menorah was to be perpetually lit. They used it anyway and God caused it to burn for eight days, enough time for them to replenish the supply. This spiritual miracle is the basis for Hanukkah.

Modern civilization (which is Western civilization gone global) rests on the two pillars of ancient Greece and ancient Israel (as amplified and modified by ancient Rome and by Christianity). The modern world of America, Europe, and the modernizing Third World, began in Athens and Jerusalem. Athens created the modern philosophical method, science, civics, secular culture, democracy, and arts, entertainment, and (very broadly speaking) consumerism. Jerusalem originated Godliness, morality, ethics, law, democratic values, some democratic practices of its own, individuality, community, and universalism. The contest between Athens and Jerusalem is symbolized by Hanukkah. The tense but permanent synthesis between them made modern civilization possible. Even Jewish religious culture eventually accepted Greek philosophical method and science. And Greece, of course, through Christianity, eventually accepted Jewish ethical monotheism.

Today throughout the world we see this tension continually at work. Communism and Nazism both rejected God, ethics, individuality, and morals. Communism and Nazism failed. Post-modernism, now dominant in American and European academia, exalts hedonism, relativism, and materialism, and propagates weak-minded tolerance for evil. (It is no coincidence that so many American terrorist appeasers and empathizers come from post-modernism's ranks.)

The jihad barbarians, on the other hand, remake God in their own image as an idolatrous god of hate, genocide, cruelty, and misogyny.

And poor Israel, land of so many early struggles between light and materialism, once again both suffers and symbolizes a turning point of civilization. Terrorist efforts to re-conquer her have escalated. Those who attack her hate her most of all for her religion, denying the facts of Jewish history and seeking to destroy the Jews spiritually as well as physically.

Hanukkah thus illuminates both the nature of our civilization today and the internal and external challenges that threaten to destroy it. Hanukkah likewise illuminates the suffering and prospects of battered modern Israel. Jewish religious events have a way of shedding new light on humanity and history. Let us light our candles and pray.

BACK TO NRO