How Judaism Almost Destroyed Itself - Voluntarily

That is the definition of evil. They understood exactly what it was and they chose to oppose it. The spiritual victory is there was an incredibly powerful popular movement that was so embraced by the entire world at that time that Jewish people almost voluntarily spiritually destroyed themselves. Sounds pretty scary, huh? Might even sound familiar. There was a threat to eradicate Judaism by taking over the Jewish mind in a very subtle, very gentlemanly way where the Jewish people themselves would invite it and feel that they were still Jewish while it was happening. In other words, from a military strategy point of view, there was absolutely nothing advantageous, perhaps you would even call it a waste of time to ritually defile the oil. It's not like stealing the enemy's fuel or even to destroy the enemy's fuel. This is ritually defiling it, which practically doesn't really accomplish anything. The only damage is spiritual damage. And the deba says in the name of his father-in-law, yes, that was precisely the point. They were trying to inflict spiritual damage. They were fighting a spiritual war. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were not just fighting a material war. They were fighting also a spiritual war. The helanizers originally had no desire, I say originally because eventually things did come to um military conflict, but originally the helanizers had no desire to physically harm the Jews. that was not part of their agenda. They were helenizing. They were making the entire world culturally Greek, which was a pretty liberal approach. Um, meaning to say the Hellenists didn't really eradicate local cultures as long as you could sort of integrate your local culture with theirs. They weren't very particular about it. It wasn't like they demanded that you uproot any trace of your of your whatever whatever your local uh beliefs and and customs. So they were looking to do the same thing with the Jews. Their main agenda was and now we're going to take words from the Alanim prayer. The Alan prayer is a special paragraph of thanksgiving blessing that we say on Kaneka. We say it when we pray every day in Kaneka. We say it when we eat a meal. We say the grace after meals. So in the prayer, it says that the Greeks sought to what? To make the Jews forget your Torah. Your Torah. We're speaking to Hashem in the second person here. And to remove them from the laws of your will. Again, speaking to Hashem in the second person. Okay. So, to make you to make the Jews forget your Torah, meaning Hashem's Torah, and to remove them from the laws of your will. I want to just preface the word here for laws, [snorts] which is grammatically not a word that stands alone. Hook is when it's when it's combined with another word. But the the word the noun that would stand by itself is [snorts] a is a particular type of law. Generally there are three categories of mitzvah or laws in Torah. There areimus and mishbim is just plural for same word. A is a supra rational law that has no basis in human intellect. Adus are laws that they don't make sense. you wouldn't have come up with them on your own from a city council meeting, but after they exist, you're like, "Oh, I see why." Like for instance, um the holidays, you're commemorating something. Okay, I get it. That's that's what you're doing. Um you know, hook him is something like don't mix wool and linen. Like that makes no sense. Mishim are things that you would have come up with just by being an intelligent person. Like don't steal, right? Don't don't uh dig a pit in the in the public uh thorough affair and uh leave it uncovered. Okay. When the Helenists were fighting against Tyra and mitzvah, their main fight wasn't against mitzvah per se, but against the spiritual or godly aspect or quality of the tra mitzvah. In other words, if the Jews would have agreed to preserve Torah mitzvah as a culture, meaning we do this because this is what our fathers did and this is our culture, the Hellenizers would have had no problem allowing them to continue to do so as long as they combined with it Henistic culture. The problem was the Jews said, "No, when we do these mitzvah, it is specifically because of the divinity of these mitzvah. It's not just because of tradition. No, it's not just because this is what we do. This is because God told us to do it." They didn't like that. That they didn't like that's crazy talk. Intelligent people shouldn't speak that way. by the the Helenists were particularly perturbed by the Jews because the Jews are so intellectual. They thought that the Jews would be sympathetic to their approach to secularize Judaism because you're such smart people should you should embrace the idea of doing things because it makes sense. And by the way, doing it because it's tradition also is a reason that makes sense. That's you can you can be a secular conservative. You can say, "I'm doing these things that are that are rituals, and I know they're they're they're meaningless, but they're meaningful to me because my father did them." That would have been fine. But the fact that Jews said, "No, no, no. These mitz have inherent spiritual value." Yuck. The helanizers were not okay with that. I don't know so much they recognized it really as as much as they understood that that was the main factor that would pose an inherent unresolvable conflict as far as assimilating the Jewish people. I think they understood that their success had been that you can allow people to hold on to their culture. Well, you know, I think their success had been that they were dealing with people who were also okay with the idea that their their way of life wasn't necessarily absolute morality. There's a certain moral relativism here. Once you say that these laws are categorically different than all other laws, that's what bothered them. Like every society gets together and has its thinkers and legal philosophers that try to come up with good rules, but you're saying your rules are categorically different. like they're not subject to popular opinion. That really I think the Syrian Greeks were actually pretty correct in assessing that as an existential uh threat to their their agenda at least, you know, in in in the Holy Land. That's why it says that they sought to make the Jews forget your Torah, meaning the Torah that belongs to you, to to Hashem. Meaning, they didn't mind if it was a Torah, but divorced from Hashem. You can learn the laws. Go ahead. You can have a college course in Talmud and study the Jewish lore and uh just don't attribute any sanctity to it. The helanizers did not care so much that the Jews learned Tyra. They could learn Tyra. They just wanted it should be a purely intellectual pursuit. Learn it because it's clever. The Talmud is so clever. The intricacies of its dialectic will sharpen your mind. or like the verse says that the Torah there's a verse in Deuteronomy chapter 4 verse 6 which is the Torah will be considered among among the world as the wisdom Hashem's wisdom among the Jews so yeah great be wise and the the Helenists you know they they they enjoyed having different types of cultures under their banner and they knew Jews are famous for being smart so like hey yeah you smart Jews be smart under our henistic banner. The entire thrust of their attack was to make us forget your Torah. Meaning, Hashem's Torah, to make the Jews forget that Torah is Hashem's Torah. Like, continue to learn it, teach it, become experts in it. Just don't think of it as God's law. Similarly with the mitzvah, with the actual laws. The Torah means the concepts, the ideas. Mitzvah means the code that's the behavioral code. The war that the Hellenists were fighting against the mitzvah was against the divinity of the mitzvah. They didn't mind if they were preserved as cultural practices or relics. They didn't want us to attribute divinity to it. The idea that the mitzvah are God's will. That they didn't like. That's precisely the wording here is that word suprational laws of your will, God's will that it's ultimately it is moral because God likes it, not that God likes it because it's moral. It is right because that is the will of God. They didn't like that kind of stuff. There are two levels of meaning to this. that the other two categories of mitzvah other than hookim what I called before the mishbotim and the adus that they were okay with because that had some basis in rationality and negative mitzvah to hookim and really the only war that the yvanim were fighting was against the super rational laws so they just wanted to make us not observe things like don't mix wool and linen and crazy stuff like that because those mitzvah it's pretty clear the only reason you're doing it is because God said so. So, one explanation is that's all the Greeks were trying to uproot. Just get rid of those mitzvah, those mitzvah that don't have any intellectual explanation. But then there's a second explanation. It's a deeper theb says it's a deeper explanation. When it says they were trying to remove us from it doesn't just mean theim laws, the super rational laws. It really means they wanted to remove us from all of the mitzvah. But not even to remove us from the mitzvah, to let us continue to practice the mitzvah, but to remove from us the feeling of divinity that's even in those other laws. In other words, ultimately the fact that in Jewish law it says that if if you damage somebody's property, you have to pay for it. The reason that a Jew does that is not because that's convention. That's what moral people seem to all agree is normal, but rather because that is what God Almighty has deemed to be the truth in his infinite unknowable wisdom. Well, what's so infinitely unknowable about the fact that if you damage somebody's property, you should pay for it. There is such a concept that ultimately even behind the most rational laws of the Torah, there is a divine core that is incomprehensible to mortal intellect. Which is where does this surface? Where do you see this become relevant? When a law that is normally considered ubiquitous or ubiquitously moral becomes inconvenient and then we begin to rationalize. Because if after all we conform to the mitzvah because of its rationale well when it starts to offend our sensibilities whether for you know selfish reasons or even for for more lofty reasons. It offends us on a philosophical uh basis. So then we start to figure out loopholes to get around it because you know God wouldn't want that. Surely he wouldn't want that. You know this causes too much trouble. This is too uh or this is too intellectually untenable. So we just dismiss it and move on. But if you follow the mitzvah, even the mitzvah that make sense, if you follow even the mitzvah that make sense because God said so, well then you have to do it no matter what because God said so even when it's inconvenient for you. So one explanation is that's what the Greeks were targeting. They wanted us to which is really deep if you think about it like they didn't even have the internet. How are they going to do this? What they wanted to do is this is a crazy agenda to somehow accomplish that there would be a Torah observant Jewish community under their under their governance which would continue to observe Torah, study Torah and do mitzvah but have no feeling of divinity in regards to any of it. And the crazy thing is they were almost successful in accomplishing that. And the fact that they didn't required drawing down a light that is what we call eight beyond the natural order in order to repair that that that damage. And that's what we're representing symbolically when we light the eight branched manura in the dark at the at the time of darkness after the sunset. And the question that often we ask or I've asked is did these bad guys know all of this? Were they conscious of this? Because if so, that makes them pretty spiritually tuned in, >> right? Why didn't they just join? >> And that is the definition of evil. They understood exactly what it was and they chose to oppose