A Chanukah Puzzle
Next week Chanuka begins. This holiday commemorates a time when the Greeks attempted to stop the Jews from keeping mitzvot and as a result the Jews went to war. This seems to be an odd response as one would assume that if the Jews were threatened spiritually (as they were being prevented from doing mitzvot) they would respond in a spiritual manner, such as prayer and not in a physical manner by going to war. To make things more puzzling, when we look at Purim we see there that the Jews were threatened with the loss of their lives, yet their initial impulse was not to pick up a sword and fight, rather they turned to prayer and fasting to battle for their lives.
This leaves us with two seemingly contrary situations and leads us to ask, why did the Jews fight for their spiritual lives with physical might and fight for their physical lives with spiritual ammunition?
The answer is that when the Greeks outlawed Torah and mitzvoth the Jews realized that G-d would never forbade them from fulfilling his will to observe the Torah. Therefore, the Jews were confident that Hashem would support them in a war against the Greeks. However, during the time of Purim the Jews were threatened with physical extinction and the Jews recognized that G-d was using a physical threat as a punishment for their spiritual lacking. In turn, this led the Jews of Purim to turn to the spiritual means of prayer and fasting for their salvation.
Looking to these lessons of the past we can be assured that in our modern day efforts to introduce unaffiliated Jews to the beauty of Judaism, Hashem will certainly back us in every way!
I think this explanation is a great one but my question is: while it makes sense that on purim, the threat of extinction brought jews to prayer, why is the spiritual threat of chanukah different? why wouldnt the macabees rely and pray for some divine intervention on chanukah as jews did on purim? the symetry works well but actually, the macabee’s power was in their faith in Hashem, not their weapons, after all chanukah is often interpreted to mean “rest on the 25th” but actually, literally, means “inauguration.” since the macabees actually had a spiritual quest in mind all along, why was their battle different than the macabees in requiring physical force?
Posted by Jon Eskreis-Winkler on 01/04 at 01:10 AM
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