Chanukah is a festival of freedom. It is written in the Hayom Yom for the seventh night of Chanukah that,
The campaign of the Greeks was aimed to “make them forget Your Torah and violate the decrees of Your will” (Sidur p. 59); as the Midrash (Bereishit Raba 16) puts it, (the Greeks demanded) “Write…that you have no share in the G-d of Israel.” It was a war against G-d. “Let them study Torah,” the Greeks implied. “Let them practice the justice-mitzvot and the ‘testimonial’ observances. But they must not mention that the Torah is G-d’s Torah and the mitzvot are the decrees of His will. Torah and mitzvot must be severed from G-dliness.”
Torah and mitzvot, of course, have no meaning without G-dliness; they cannot exist independently. In this passage, the Lubavitcher Rebbe points out the intimate deception in the Greek argument. They weren’t interested in simply regulating behaviors but rather in acquiring power and controlling individual freedoms. We celebrate Chanukah to remember the Macabeean revolt that defended the individual’s right to believe and defeated the intimate deceptions of the Greeks. There are at least three ways I feel this war going on today:
1 – Science & Creationism. Any argument here ultimately presents a false dichotomy; it is as oxymoronic for a scientist to embrace faith in their work as it is for a religious individual to rely on the scientific method to justify their faith. So when politicians and activists engage in heated debates on this topic, then the real goal is to conquer, to exert power over how the other person chooses to live their life.
2 – Climate Change. There’s really no question that recycling is a good thing to do. The same may be true for lots of other individual choices ranging from shower duration to mode of transportation. However, there is no direct (simple) connection between these “sustainable” practices and global temperature. So any efforts to claim that changing global temperature is the motivation behind current national and global legislation efforts are clearly intimate deceptions. What’s really at stake is power and who gets to decide what decisions an individual is allowed to make.
3 – Evolution by Natural Selection vs. Symbiogenesis. A recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included a series of articles that argued for and against a controversial hypothesis, that the larval form of lepidopterans evolved by symbiogenesis of ancient lepidopterans with onychophorans. When these articles came out, there was a great uproar among my colleagues against the hypothesis, with arguments mainly focusing on the unorthodoxy of the idea. We celebrate Darwin so much in biology that it’s unfortunately easy to forget that natural selection is not the only way that evolution may proceed (as Lynn Margulis so well demonstrated throughout her career). But when we attack ideas simply because they are foreign, we sacrifice intellectual freedom and trade the pursuit of knowledge for the pursuit of power and stability.
Festival of Light 5770
I have to wonder if the emergence of Reform Judaism isn’t itself a power struggle analogous to the attempts of the Seleucid Greeks to transform or even destroy Judaism. If so, wouldn’t it be somewhat ironic for a reform Jew to observe Chanukah in the first place? And isn’t it particularly painful that the “Reform” movement is so-far the more successful one? Where is the Maccabean revolt today?
I fail to understand your coupling of natural selection and ‘endosymbiosis’ . Natural selection follows mutation and other genetic change of which endosymbiosis is just another form, picking the most fit to survive. Symbiogenesis is then actually simply another form /force of genetic variation upon which the mill of selection grinds, a introduction to the genome which has been found ‘desirable’ and lasting.
To Jessie: Funny you should ask where the Maccabees of today – they probably are somewhere close to wherever the Seleucid kings are . The last time I looked, Israel was still a jewish state and successfully taking on all comers, LOL.