In some ways, the more you understand Western culture, the more difficult it is to understand Chanukah. As children, we were taught a helpful dichotomy: the Greeks and Hellenized Jews stood for materialism and immorality, while the devout Jews championed spirituality and virtue. The version we receive as adults is only slightly more nuanced: Granted that Greek civilization supplied the foundation for Western thought, it nevertheless erected this foundation at great cost, elevating beauty over goodness and power over truth. “Western thought,” we are reminded, is an unstable edifice, offering some protection from the barbarism of the ancient world but ultimately prone to falling into depravity itself. Alongside so many other lessons, Chanukah seems to be a reflection on the capriciousness of Hellenistic values.
Someone once asked me if Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish philosopher who drank heavily of Greek philosophy, was in fact a “Hellenized Jew.” I replied that Philo was certainly Hellenized, but much less so than we are today. I'll explain this with an analogy. The modern American, if he retains a patriotic spirit and a basic education in American history, understands very well why we light fireworks on a particular day in July and eat turkey on a particular day in November. These customs embody specific values for him, and he perceives them as quintessentially American. But it is completely conceivable that someday our biological or cultural descendents will reenact these rituals with no real connection to the historical values they embodied, much like how the modern Olympian feels no real connection to the sacred honor of Zeus.
Philo and his community understood very well the values that Greek customs and institutions were meant to embody, and this allowed them to live as informed consumers of Greek culture. Two thousand years later, we no longer enjoy this special discernment. Greek culture is the water in which we swim, and we rarely pause to appreciate how deeply we are submersed. Acceptable forms of entertainment, attractive styles of art, effective modes of government, compelling manners of speech—our positions on these subjects are drawn from these ancient Greek waters with as much self-reflection as a fish pumping water through its gills.
Even in matters that we consider uniquely Jewish, we are often only repackaging Greek modes of thought. In a recent article for the journal Tradition, I showed that many of the concerns of major Jewish thinkers, from Maimonides to the early kabbalists, are utterly foreign to the worldview of our Talmudic sages. These concerns entered Judaism through its engagement with gentile philosophy and can ultimately be traced back to Alexandrian Jewry's revolutionary synthesis of reason and revelation. Without Greek wisdom, the classics of Jewish philosophy would not be, and our understanding of ourselves as Jews might be radically different.
None of this is to deny the basic dichotomy with which we began; Greek culture was indeed prone to materialistic excess, and the Torah provided a singular beacon of light in the darkness. But the result of this clash was not an unambiguous triumph of good over evil. If anything, it was the beginning of a long and bumpy road. Jewish life between the Maccabean victory and the destruction of the Second Temple broiled with political upheavals, internal conflicts, cultural cross-pollination, and ultimately a radically new understanding of Torah study. On Chanukah, Jews regained a degree of autonomy and rededicated the Temple, but this brought neither lasting physical peace nor intellectual independence. So what then was the great victory, and what is its enduring message for our time?
In his recent book, Jewish Tradition, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed writes that the role of the Jewish nation is “to perfect itself by absorbing the faith, truth, and good found in Torah and mitzvot, and combine that with what is positive in other cultures, integrating them into one harmonious whole.” Chanukah taught the Jewish people the steep penalty for stepping out of this harmonious balance. To fail to recognize its role as a civilizational model, to allow Greek values to dictate Jewish norms, was an utter failure of the entire nation's raison d'être. But to miss what was valuable in Greek thought, to fail to integrate it into a thriving spiritual ecology, was equally problematic. Hellenism was never meant to be conquered. It was meant to be nurtured by the only nation capable of refining it.
The recognition of this dynamic relationship was our greatest victory on Chanukah, and it is a victory that continues to make demands of us. In every generation, there is a temptation to either relinquish ourselves to the spirit of the times or to utterly sever ourselves from the corrupting forces of the world. The difficult alternative to these extremes—the restless pursuit of harmony—is Chanukah's gift to us and our gift to the world.