Chanukah celebrates the victory of the Chashmonaim over the Greeks. While the Jews won that battle, the war between these two cultures and worldviews continues to this very day. Much has been written about the clash of ideology separating Jerusalem from Athens. Nineteenth-century German poet-philosopher Heinrich Heine suggested that for the Greeks beauty was truth whereas for the Hebrews truth was beauty, and late-20th-century philosopher William Barrett maintained that while the Greeks idealized philosophic speculation and theoretical meditation, the Hebrews emphasized moral and ethical conduct in daily human behavior as being the highest good.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin suggested another significant distinction between the Greek and Hebrew cultures, one which reverberates to this very day. The answer to the Greek Riddle of the Sphinx “Who walks on four in the morning, on two in the afternoon and on three in the evening?” is Man, who crawls about as a baby, stands upright as an adult and has need of a cane in old age. C.M. Bowra, the great interpreter of the wisdom of Hellas, suggests that indeed Man is the answer, not only to the Riddle of the Sphinx but to every question worth asking. Pythagoras taught that “Man is the measure of all things”; for the famed sculptor Praxiteles, the human form was the most perfect of all forms (and therefore for the ancient Greeks circumcision was a heinous crime because it maimed the perfect human body); and the chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone iterates and reiterates, “Many are the awesome-awful (Hebrew nora, nora’ot) phenomena, but none more awesome-awful than man.”
Hence the gods on Mount Olympus were formed in the image of man, endowed with human and mostly physical characteristics: Zeus was the most powerful, unpitying and terrible; Aphrodite was the goddess of love, beauty and pleasure; Hermes was the god of speed. The gods were created in the image of humans, warring and jealous human-like beings, idealizing their most physical and even animalistic traits.
Judaism, explains Rabbi Riskin, is the very antithesis of this. Human beings are created in the image of God, duty bound to walk in God’s ways and to emulate His Divine characteristics of love, compassion, patience, loving-kindness and truth. “Just as the Holy One Blessed be He is called compassionate, so must you be compassionate, just as He grants His grace freely, so must you grant grace freely....”
This distinction between Athens and Jerusalem is important for all Jews to remember as we navigate a society still enamored by many of the ideas that originated in Greek philosophy. But understanding this distinction is especially important for students on secular college campuses. College is an exciting time to learn and explore new ideas. Many of these ideas are directly from, or derivatives of, Greek ideas. And as the Talmud teaches us “Yesh Chochma BaGoyim”, we should not be so quick to dismiss ideas that are attributable to the Greeks. At the same time we must study and expand our minds from a Jewish perspective. We are first and foremost proud, educated, sophisticated Jews. The current climate on college campuses is one that is concerning to anyone who rejects the idea that all of life must be viewed through the prism of postmodernism, subjective morality, and Marxist class struggle. We celebrate Chanukah and appreciate why the Maccabee victory over the Greeks was so important then- and why we must continue to fight that fight today in ways that continue to shape our Jewish identity and serve as a light and enlightenment for the world.
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