For a considerable time now, I have found the celebration of Chanukah philosophically challenging. I ascribe to a tradition within Orthodox Judaism which views secular wisdom as complementary to Torah learning. Call it Torah uMadda, call it Torah im Derech Eretz, call it whatever you will, the attitude that our community by and large holds dear is one that embraces the challenge of bridging the gap between the sacred and the mundane, of allowing what we know about the world to meaningfully contribute towards our authentic Jewish religious experience.

At first glance Chanukah seems to fly in the face of this tradition. Chanukah is a holiday that celebrates the Jewish victory over the Greeks. These same Greeks are usually regarded as the founding fathers of the modern rationalist tradition within Western civilization. The Rambam, among other Torah giants, heavily involved himself in the study of Greek philosophy and science. Contrast this with Chanukah. The holiday, as traditionally interpreted, seems to celebrate the victorious rejection of all things Greek. How are those of us who follow in the tradition of the Rambam supposed to understand this celebration? Moreover, one could pose this same challenge to the Greeks themselves. Why did they find the Torah to be such an anathema to their culture that they openly persecuted those who studied or observed it?

The Mahara”l, in his essay Ner Mitzvah on the story of Chanukah, (Section 1 ד"ה ודע כי החומר) explains that the Greeks, hand in hand with their scientific and philosophical superiority over the rest of the ancient world, possessed the trait of brazenness. He points out that brazenness is both the driving force behind and the natural potential byproduct of the pursuit of knowledge. To acquire knowledge, one must brazenly leave no stone unturned, fearing neither the tremendous effort nor the necessary controversy required for intellectual growth. At the same time, the more one knows, and the more certainty with which one knows it, the more confidence and even pride one takes in their own understandings. The Greeks prided themselves on their cultural and intellectual advancement, and that pride led to a definite national brazenness in their interaction with foreign nations. 

It was thus that nothing insulted Greek national pride more than encountering a Jewish people that not only stubbornly refused to “admit” to Greek cultural superiority, but claimed to possess a body of Divine wisdom, the Torah, that stood beyond any human challenge. The Jewish sages could reply to Greek missionaries that “What you have is nice, and we’re fine with it, but at the end of the day it’s only human wisdom. We have something more, something that no matter how hard you try you will never eclipse.” Not only did the Torah challenge Greek superiority, it stood in opposition to their entire concept of man’s place in the world. For while the Greeks brazenly celebrated human intellectual achievement, the Torah demanded a perspective of humility, of surrendering oneself before the infinite, ultimately unknowable Divine. The conflict between Jew and Greek was far more than simple culture clash; it was a conflict between two diametrically opposed perspectives on man’s place in the world.

This now resolves our initial question. The victory we celebrate on Chanukah was not over Greek wisdom, but over Greek attitudes. In repelling the Greek onslaught, the Jewish people declared once and for all not the invalidity but rather the subservience of human knowledge to God’s Torah. The Jewish approach to understanding the world, one that humbly seeks to find God and to serve Him through every new insight into His wondrous creation, proved victorious 2200 years ago, and that same approach continues to guide us to this day.