What Can We Learn from Chanukah? - Part 1 - Rabbi Dr. David Gottlieb

I want to start by telling you a very bitter fictional story appeared in The Daily newspaper my Reeve about 40 years ago but like all good fiction describes an altar present reality this story describes a child coming home from school where they are learning about Hanukkah secular Israeli school he says to his father I but were the Maccabees da te religious Jews says father says no of course not the Maccabees were military heroes revolutionaries fighting for freedom and social equality they were a team the child says but I but they taught us in school that the revolt was triggered by the offering of pigs in the temple and that the revolt was started by kohanim who felt that this was a desecration of the temple and in the end they lit the menorah that's why people light candles I'm konica because of the menorah that was lifted in the temple so father thinks and he has to backtrack it is as well I guess I guess they were that team I guess they were religious the child says Allah do you think that they kept Shabbat the files as well I guess if they were that Ian must capture bad and kashrut and holidays and you go through a list of standard missiles and the father has to agree that they probably hid then the chest was Father Abba we don't keep Shabbat do we and the valid of course not that old-fashioned it superstition superstitious it boards the little ages you know it's antisocial and some of this on and we don't keep cash shoot either no cheeseburgers are wonderful and he goes through the various holidays Mary Smith salt and of course the father has to admit that they don't I was proud of it they don't keep those missile finally child says to the Father Abba if we had lived in those days which side would we have been on with we have been on the Jewish side or the Greek side what do we look more like in today's contemporary Israel do we look more like classical Judaism or more like classical Greece that's the end of the story with that question now my Reeve was and still is a secular daily so it was quite brave of them to print that piece I don't know if it could be done today it was then 40 years ago when the world was more open and less politically correct but I think it raises a serious question about how to understand contemporary Israeli society and that is one of the questions that we will discuss over this week have a chance to talk a little about Zionism I want to give one illustration also that we worthwhile thinking about every few years in this country there is an international sports competition called the maccabi games who invented international sport competition who invented it what culture invented that ancient Greece okay now the last time I checked the Maccabees were the people who fought to push Greek culture out of this country ok so now I put two and two together and try not to get six the Maccabees are fought against greek culture and now we have a contemporary expression agreed culture international sports competition so what title do we give it the Maccabee in games the model is term I can think of as irony I can think of more severe terms to describe this this belongs to a certain a certain category of activity I carry the activity is called propaganda and here's that propaganda works you take a term which has honorific associations for a population and you apply it to the exact opposite of what it's supposed to designate so as to borrow the honorific associations for the opposite of what it it's supposed to designate the maccabees fought against the greeks today you have a celebration of greek culture so you take the name which has high honor in Jewish society MacCabe and you apply it to expression expression of recapture something I won't even say it's odd because the world is full of propaganda but when you're aware of that you think it through it begins to give you a certain sense of perhaps distance that one ought to have from some of the ways in which the contemporary State of Israel and the culture of Israel presents itself this is just a headline and as the week goes on we will talk about this in detail I'm wondering a second introductory remark many people are talking about Athens versus Jerusalem and the Greeks versus the Torah I think there is a trap that i would like to dot not not to fall into and that is to paint this as an absolute confrontation and of course everything in the Torah is is right and good and true that's correct and then the conclusion would be that everything on the Greek side is wrong and bad I must be negated and that's incorrect that's incorrect it's not an attitude that the Torah has towards anything and in particular it's not an attitude that the Torah has towards Greece because when the children of Noah I having their futures described and this is prophetic the verse says the app that will keep me llevas nichkhun were all ashamed God should enable EFS was one of the Knox children and who's descended is java Greece God should give him the ability to develop he should develop grow huge combo all the shame and he should dwell in the tents of shame shame is the progenitor of the Jewish people so that the oral tradition takes as applying particularly to your phone Greece was a child of the fs and he should grow and he should develop spread his understanding and his expertise but he should dwell in the tents of shame which means that you cannot simply categorize it as evil the the tradition calls the darkness but even darkness has its role the world started with darkness and unlike light came into a world of darkness and they still both function in the world even though they had to be separated by they both function that means that that the challenge is to find something in the world of the fs of Greece which is positive together with healing out the negative and discarding it criticizing and discarding it one has to identify what's positive and show a way in which that can play a role in the tents of the Torah the Gemara says a moment of reh talk about going of timing if you are told that the non-jews of the world have wisdom believe it it's true it's true Hoffman Huck was a very strong term in our tournament and in our tradition they have Kozma a moment a yes turban going out timing if they tells you that they have Torah don't believe it the rough difference is wisdom is a means understanding of how the world works is only a means it doesn't tell you what you should do it only tells you how to do what you set yourself to do really we should do Tori tells you what you should do which is a wisdom unto itself but the non-jewish world has wisdom as well as long as that wisdom is used in the tents of the Torah then it has a positive role now I don't know if you've how much you've looked at the archaeology in this country if you go to the north and you see synagogues from 2,000 years ago 1800 years ago very often they the roof is supported by pillars which are in the Greek architectural style and I like certain naive archaeologists and historians who think that this was a compromise this shows Greek influence on the Jewish religion on the contrary this attitude goes back to Noah 4,000 years ago that the Greek has a place yes greek-style pillars can hold up the roof they can do that didn't tell you what you should do there what's your take a place there but they can be used for the architecture of the building that's contributing a means but not taking over the ends um there was a fellow and if he's still alive maybe still alive Jacob Posner who at last count wrote to infinity of books he was writing one a year for many years and he claimed the position of having understanding of Jewish history and Jewish philosophy Jewish religion and he wrote about the Greek influence on judy's on the grounds that in some of those setting augs that were uncovered there were mosaics and some of the mosaics were mosaics of the zodiac with the zodiacal pictures which come from Greek culture so said here you see obviously that Greek culture and Greek religion had inroads into Judaism as over the so on one very careful archaeologists noticed that these pictures of the zodiac had labels some of the labels were wrong there's a wrong constellation for the label she said you know if you were compromised with Greek religion if you're trying to show that you had some desire to express week religion you wouldn't get the labels off this was an artistic style and they put it up as an artistic decoration and the labels to get it right get it wrong didn't matter so one has to be very careful not to be overwhelmed by these borrowings of trappings of Greek culture as long as they are just artistic collaborations or their architectural styles and not infiltrating into the goals which is up with your story and alito so I don't want to be caught in the trap of thinking that everything Greek has to be bad because Greece opposed what we stand for no we have to be careful to be selective and identified the parts of Greece that can be used elevated incorporated identify the parts the can't and those that can we have to see how that can be done ok that's the introduction to the whole series now I want to start with a key piece of Greek philosophy this comes to fruition in our sole ruler and Plato and Socrates but it comes to parishioner Aristotle and it is a very radical idea and here there will be a great a great opposition and that is the status of nature in Aristotle's philosophy nature is everything nature's everything everything that exists is natural there are laws of nature the laws of nature govern everything nothing escapes nature even though the laws aren't aren't universally deterministic but nature is everything that transcends nature you may read if you if you read some excerpts of Greek philosophy I'm not recommending this but if you happen to you'll see that they mentioned God careful translators write it with a little G God in that not corpus does not mean creator there's no creator the world has no beginning Paris title the world has no beginning goes back forever and will continue forward forever and it runs on certain principles of those principles have always been running the world I will always be running the world there'd ever be any any overall change in the structure of the world now different areas of the world are under the control of different types of nature's if it aspects of nature the heavens which are very regular repetitive and for the Greek unchanging the Greek picture the heavens is that they never change their constant Universal always have been and always will be the same as anybody here heard the word quintessence they may have a clue with quintessence means Quint means five essence means essence surprise the Greek picture of the world was in our part of the world there are four basic elements earth air fire and water everything that's in the world is a combination of those four elements anything that's combined of different elements eventually comes apart the combination of different elements is inherently unstable and the stability can be purchased only at the cost of a certain amount of energy and the energy runs out the stability is lost and the thing comes apart everything falls apart sooner or later because it's a combination of or different elements uneasily cooperating but the heavens aren't like that the heavens aren't combinations of different elements they are a single fifth essence quintessence means fifth essence and heavens are each thing in the heavens the Sun Moon Stars all of them are made out of only one essence not four elements but one a thing that's made out of one has no reason to fall apart there's no tension there's no incompatibility and therefore the heavens are forever exactly as you see them so they always have been and so they always will be only in things of the earth all fall apart eventually because they are combinations of these four elves and of course they are being recombined by the same forces to put them put them together same forces are continuing to put the other cycle of building up and dissolution that has been going on from forever and continues to go on and we'll go on and say wait forever so whatever you want to believe whatever you want to make to incorporate your whatever your picture it's got to fit into the idea of nature so then why do they use the word God at all what's g-o-d doing for them well there's ten picture is that if you want to explain why things happen there are four different elements of explanation for different things you take into account when you explain why things happen three of them are familiar to us as I will describe to you and the fourth is not familiar because modern science has tried to eliminate it Oh some are urging that she'd come back in like Thomas Nagel you want to know why logs burn well they burned because wood the stuff they're made out of wood has certain qualities which enable it to combust to oxidize and that's what burning is the kind of stuff that wood is when you aren't explain why something happened sometimes you explained on the basis of the material you're dealing with he lit a match and there was an explosion why is that because there was fuel vapor in the air which he was unaware of and it ignited because that's what fuel vapor does when you give it a spark it explodes that's an explanation the basis of the side on the nature of the materials now if you've had this experience if you travel a lot you may have this experience was up ahead a number of times check out a coin put it in the slot the machine comes tumbling out anything gee I wonder what happened the answer is that you're standing in front of Israeli machine and you're using a leftover American coin in your pocket which looks roughly the same it looks about the same size and you just took it but the machine doesn't get fooled it knows it's not exactly the right shape exactly the right size so it's been two back there the explanations are the basis of the shape of the item not what is made of it could be made of copper or nickel or or tin machine won't care about that the cajun just care but that should be the site right size and shape so that's the second type of explanation a third type of explanation that we're all familiar with is where an event a cause another event someone comes home and he sees his big plate glass window in shards and pieces on the floor and there's a big heavy stone on his floor anything wonder what happens and somebody says you know are you living within the vicinity of an Arlen don't talk about that that's just politics I'm somehow somehow he has to Kurt political authorities maybe there was a gust of wind that lifted up the stone and wife did it through your window you know couldn't be a person through it with person I was certainly no we won't tell you but obviously the stone what broke the window so the stones motion hitting the window cause the window to break those are three types of explanations which we all recognize and Aristotle enshrined all three but then he had a fourth type we take an acorn now you take a see-through winged seed from maple tree you plant it and guess what the a crowd grows into an oak and the sea from the maple tree grows into a maple tree why did he do that because the Acorn wants to be an open it has oh goodness drawing it in the future a goal of oak this draws it to develop in a particular way whereas the wing it seed from maple wants to be maple tree and it's drawn by the end of maple pneus to develop into a maple tree and not into an oak things have goals built into them and that future goal is one of the explanations for why things do what they do now if that sounds fun for the Earth's because as I said modern science banish that maybe not correctly but that's what they did they were they opted in favor of past events causing future events but in human in the case of human action we do this all the time why did he do that because he wanted to get cute that's why he did beginning of Kyo is what motivated him to do it now it's the future cue that draws him to act in that direction this is what's called officially teleological explanation at a loss is an end a goal some future state and that's a fourth way in which things happen things happen because future states call them to develop in that direction now as I said human action that's that's why we talk about human action all the time indeed in Lahad ID which we sing Friday night there's a phrase soph maya sieber macabre tila that which is last in action is first in thought last in action is first in thought what kind of item is that think of the items that there are in the world what kind of item could you call last in action at first and thought the answer is a purpose a purpose is last in action at first and thought he asked a kid in high school what are you what kind of profession you want to have when you grow up now you don't say that because he thinks he's already growing up but and he says I'll be a doctor oh really so what are you doing about it i'll listen to be a doctor means I've got to go to medical school go to medical school means I gotta go to a good undergraduate pre medical program so I've looked into the universities to have good undergraduate pre-med programs like Johns Hopkins where I used to teach and I've discovered what kinds of criteria they use for admissions and I'm taking science courses in high school and I'm doing science projects that I'm trying to form a relationship with the science teachers and show them how gifted I am how responsible I am and so on and so on so that I can get into johns hopkins and you had a good undergraduate pre-med education get into a good medical school and then become a doctor now look at his his when we come out of my shovel look at his mental is mental flow the goal is be a doctor how do I get there well medical school how do we get there good undergraduate program and how do I get there a good high school record and that's what he's working on now and in two years he'll go to johns hopkins and four years later he'll go to johns hopkins medical school and eight years later become a doctor so becoming a doctor was first in thought but last in action that's what a purposes that's a typical way to explain human action now aristotle saw that functioning in the world as well i told you about the a corner and the maple animals want to survive and the survival and reproduction is what draws them to act in the way that they do and not only that not only the individual things have purposes built in but the world as a whole has a general purpose built in and that general purpose is that the functioning of each thing and its relationships to everything else should be idealized that's a goal built in of the world some of the things that happen in the world are the result of that idealized go pulling things forward that's g-o-d with a little G that's part of nature that beyond nature doesn't dictate to nature it's part of nature I don't know if you follow the evolution wars and the intelligent design Wars but one of the great thinkers of our time Thomas Nagel who happens to be Jewish and for these purposes happens to be beneficial that he's if you think because he's a great critic of standard evolution and if you're religious that they were dismissed him as a crank they can't dismiss him because he's a top-notch philosopher and he wants to revive this our Sicilian idea it's not enough to talk about X pushes why but why falls on z and z cracks and breaks and then that trips the alarms and so on and so on it's not enough to talk about that you have to talk about the world developing towards certain ends naturally as part of nature and he says I know that someone with a religious point of view could use my argumentation to get a different result I know that but I'm not religious I don't want to follow that with that line so I want to try to mimic it within the world and use this idea of an end drawing things forward and yes it's a resurrection of our stuff quite right so the world's books not closed on Aristotle even though the vast majority are screaming in pain and trying to discredit him but they're not spreading it with arguments there just discrediting which is the standard of debate today now this is very important for us because little g-o-d sometimes to be confused for capital g OD and we will have a very careful to distinguish between them keep them clearly separate in our minds now one more point on I make today and it will fill in these things in the coming days we have a tradition that at a certain point in the oppression the Greeks opposed three Jewish mitzvahs shabbos Mila bris milah circumcision and rosh chodesh beginning of the month I don't think that's obvious at all okay shabba celebrates the creation creation of the universe I understand very well why Greeks are not going to put up with that because creation could only be the result of something that stands outside of the created world outside of nature superior nature they're not gonna stand for that bris milah circumcision that's to mutilate the body that nature produces that's crying as a matter of fact it was a rule in the Greek sport competitions that it was circumcised you couldn't compete because you had performed a mutilation a violation of nature and of course she's not going to take that lying down there were Jews who invented a surgical procedure to erase the sign of circumcision because you really want to compete you really wanna compete and by the way Israeli army I think this is still true when they do a medical exam and theoretically you could get 100 if you are in perfect medical shape if you're circumcised the top you can get is 97 you can't get 100 but you also could be questioned I think could be questioned ok but then Rose coldish cleaning of the month who cares about that why would that be the third choice of something that the Greeks want to wipe out the Greek attitude here is this you have a religion you have holidays that's fine we have a religion also any holiday any Mitzvah that you have that can be naturalized that can be reinterpreted as an expression of nature we're prepared to tolerate you had a revelation your God told you what he wants you to do we have God's also and they tell us what they want us to do that doesn't mean it can't be part of nature idea that the God communicates to his people and tells of what he wants to do it's not it's not necessarily beyond nature you have a pacer which is a liberation day terrific you were slaves now you're liberate is celebrating your freedom there's no reason why they can't be natural you have laws of Kostas every ancient civilization had food temples every last one of them so welcome to the club fact that you have food taboos doesn't mean that you are doing something to transcend nature only the ones that are impossible to reinterpret as natural did they oppose so shabbos as we said it's obvious because shabbos is the celebration of the creation can't be creation from a natural point of view bris milah because it violates the body as its created by nature as its delivered by nature what about the first of the month the beginning of the new month the new month was was started when witnesses saw the new moon that's perfectly natural then no moon the monthly cycle of the waxing and waning of the moon but there happens to be a law and the Jewish books that the court is not bound by the sighting of the witnesses it's not bound by the sighting of the witnesses the witnesses can come and they can say this other moon they can be cross-examined and their testimony passes all the tests and the court says yes you saw it your testimonies perfect we don't want it we're pushing it off till tomorrow or the court can say no witness has appeared there's no testimony at all we're starting in any way the court is not bound by the witnesses therefore the court is not bound by the moon it's not bound by the moon it can override them all now let's imagine we are starting the month of Nissan in the month of the semi celebrate pesach Purcell is the 15th of nisa pensive is the anniversary of the exodus from Egypt now the wit to succumb or they don't come and court over rides what would have been a testimony it says we're starting it today no witnesses no testimony no moon we're starting it today Tuesday so two weeks later on Tuesday will be pesach is that the anniversary of the exes from Egypt the moon says no because the moon wasn't there on Tuesday and the court says yes that means according to Jewish law the court has control of time the court can create dates time is under the control of the court not under the control of the moon but under the control of the court the Greeks were stupid they saw that they understood that and they said we can't have that we can't have that if you would make your dates out according to the moon that would be fine but you're not making your days according to the moon you're overriding them on then this is something which is anti natural its built-in to be anti natural this we cannot tolerate the rest of it we can tolerate but this we cannot and therefore they opposed all three of them this sets up a conflict concerning the what could be called the nature of nature what status does nature have for the Greeks nature is everything what we need to do is analyze what nature is for us as Jews and then see how the two ideas relate to one another you