CLAL Holy Days Archive
Welcome to CLAL Holy Days, the place where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on upcoming Jewish holidays.
HANUKAH I
In 167 B.C.E., for the first time in history, observance of Judaism was made a capital offense. A short time later, a Jew named Mattathias, along with his five sons, initiated a revolt against the Syrian monarch, Antiochus, who had promulgated the anti-Jewish campaign. Within three years, the rebels, known as Maccabees, ousted Antiochus's troops from Palestine.
The Maccabeean revolt affected world history no less than Jewish, for had Antiochus succeeded in wiping out Judaism, Christianity and Islam, both of which are rooted in Judaism, would never have come into existence. Along with Judaism, the Jewish ideal of ethical monotheism, the belief that there is one God, whose essential demand of human beings is ethical behavior, would have been extinguished as well. Six hundred years before the Maccabean revolt, the prophet Micah summarized God's demands of human beings in ethical terms: "To do justice and to love goodness, and to walk modestly with your God' (6:8).
A century and a half after the Maccabees, one of the great figures of rabbinic Judaism, Hillel, was asked by a would-be convert to summarize Judaism's essence. "What is hateful unto you don't do unto your neighbor,' he replied. 'The rest is commentary.' On the basis of the non-Jew's acceptance of this principle, Hillel converted him to Judaism (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a).
Had Mattathias, the first Maccabee, not raised his battle cry, 'Whoever is for God, follow me', Judaism and its notion of ethical monotheism, ideas that have transformed history, would have been erased from human consciousness.
(Joseph Telushkin)
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