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Chanukah in Hindsight

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ל“צז

istory itself has a history. Our per- that Jews of the time called the Abomina- is told instead is a very different one, with
spectives shift over time, and some tion of Desolation. a powerful message.
moments may only seem meaningful An elderly Priest called Mattityahu, and The Talmud tells us that in the first
Hin retrospect. We don’t always under- his sons and their supporters known to century, in the last days of the Second
stand the real significance of an event history as the Maccabees, rose in revolt. Temple, a Rabbi called Yehoshua Ben
until many decades later or sometimes
even centuries. A classic example of this Over the next three years they scored a Gamla established a network of schools
throughout Israel. The result of this was
momentous victory over the Seleucids,
is the history of Chanukah.
reconquering Jerusalem and bringing that from the age of six, every child in
At one level, the Chanukah story is very it back under Jewish sovereignty. They the country received a publicly-funded
simple. From the days of Alexander the cleansed the Temple and rededicated it, universal education. This was the first
Great of Macedon, Israel was under the lighting the great Menorah, the cande- education system of its kind anywhere in
dominion of the Alexandrian Empire of labrum that stood in the Temple, for a the world, and also a clear indication of
the Greeks. This meant that in the third celebration lasting eight days. the now familiarly Jewish commitment
century BCE, it was under the control of That is the story of Chanukah as cap- to education and to ensuring our children
the Ptolemies who were based in Egypt tured in history in the first and second are literate in their heritage. According to
and Alexandria. Then, during the second books of Maccabees. But that is not how the Talmud, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Gamla’s
century BCE, Israel came under the memory is blessed, because without his
domain of the Seleucids who were based the story was ultimately told within the intervention the Torah would have been
Jewish tradition, as it was ruled that the
in Syria. forgotten in Israel. Without him, there
two books of Maccabees, and others under
The Seleucid leader, Antiochus IV, who the same title, should be called Sefarim would have been no survival of Judaism
modestly called himself Epiphanes, mean- Chitzoni’im, apocryphal works, and kept and ultimately no Jews.
ing “G-d made manifest”, decided to force out of the Bible. The Chanukah story that What Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Gamla and the
the pace of Hellenisation on the Jews of other Sages understood, and what was
the Land of Israel. Among other things, not understood at the time of Chanukah
he forbade the public practice of Judaism, itself, was that the real battle against the
erected a statue of Zeus in the Temple, and Greeks was not a military one, but a cul-
offered swine before it as a sacrifice, in tural one. At the time, the Greeks were
a desecration of Jewish values the world’s greatest in many fields. They

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