The Midrash records that Reish Lakish (Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish) homiletically explained the first few moments of Creation to be a microcosm of all subsequent history:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth; and the earth was chaos and void, with darkness over the abyss. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters, and God said: Let there be light! – And there was light” (Genesis 1:1-3).
Reish Lakish expounds: “‘The earth was chaos’ alludes to the Babylonian exile…; ‘and void’ alludes to the Median [Persian] exile…; ‘darkness’ alludes to the exile of Greece, which darkened the Jews’ eyes with their decrees, when they said to them: Write on the horns of the ox that you have no share in the God of Israel; ‘over the abyss’ alludes to the exile of the evil kingdom [Rome], whose extent cannot be fathomed, just like the abyss; ‘and the Spirit of God was hovering’ alludes to the spirit of King Mashiach” (Bereishit Rabbah 2:4).
Though Greece was – and still is! – considered the epitome of enlightenment in the ancient world; and though Greek philosophy and science provided the basis for philosophy and science even until today; and though Greece was far-and-away the most cultured and educated nation in the world at the time; and though ancient Greece produced some of the most beautiful statues and architecture and works of art in history –
– nevertheless, from the Jewish perspective, it represented darkness. Greek Hellenistic philosophy rejected God and spirituality, therefore all of its (admittedly impressive and physically beautiful) achievements were dead.
Maybe the epitome of Hellenism was the philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.) – the philosopher who taught complete sensuality. This life is all that there is, there is no afterlife, no reward or punishment – therefore the sole purpose of life is sensual enjoyment. Pleasure and pain, he taught, define good and evil: this is to say that anything which brings pleasure is good, anything which brings pain is evil.
As a philosophy for life, it inevitably militates against spiritualism, against any concept of good and evil as defined by God.
And it is no idle happenstance that the Hebrew adaptation of his name, epikorus, means heretic. The Hebrew ????????????? combines the name Epicurus with the Hebrew root ???, denoting “free of restraint”, as in the word ??????? (ownerless). And since the root-letters in Hebrew can sometimes change order without changing the meaning of the word, the word ????????????? can also be seen as a cognate of the root ???, denoting “cast off” (as in casting off a yoke).
For all its physical beauty, Hellenism is the epitome of rejecting the constraints which God has ordained.
Greece’s earliest history begins immediately after the Flood, with the origin of mankind’s 70 nations:
“The sons of Yefet (Japheth): Yavan (Javan)… and the sons of Yavan: Elisha and Tarshish, Kittim and Dodanim” (Genesis 10:2-4).
Yavan, ?????, is the Hebrew name for Greece. And his first son, ????????? (Elisha), is a clear reference to Ellas or Hellas, part of ancient Greece (Hellas of course being the origin of the name Hellenism). And it is intriguing that the Targum Yonatan renders ????????? into Aramaic with two names: ????????? ?????, Elisha Allas, strengthening the connexion between Greece and Hellas.
And the Targum Yonatan renders ???????? (Dodanim) into Aramaic as ????????????? (Dordaniya) – maybe suggesting the Dardanelles, in Greek called Dardanellia, known in antiquity as the Hellespont, from the Greek Hellespontos, “Sea of Helle”.
And the Hebrew name for Greece, ?????, is clearly a cognate of Ionia, part of ancient Greece.
Yavan’s father was Yefet, ?????, whose name denotes beauty. And among Noah’s first recorded utterances was his blessing: “Blessed be Hashem, the God of Shem… May God beautify Yefet, and may he dwell in Shem’s tents” (Genesis 9:26-27).
Yefet’s beauty – Yavan’s beauty – would, in an ideal world, be housed in the tents of Shem, meaning in Synagogues and Batei Midrash (Study Halls). In an ideal world, Yavan’s undisputed physical beauty would be harnessed to Israel’s spirituality and would be dedicated to the service of God.
When Yavan is left to go his own way, his beauty inevitably degenerates into Epicurean sensuousness – epikorsut, heresy.
And so we note the inference of the name ???: three letters which follow the same general form, each one plunging lower than the previous one, leading to ever-deeper depths.
And we also note that ????? is ??????? (Zion) without the ? (tzaddik). ???????, denoting “distinguished by beauty”, but devoid of the ?, denoting righteousness. When ??????? is devoid of its ?, its righteousness, then what remains is ?????, Yavan (Greece).
The original Divine plan was for Shem and Yavan – the Jews and the Greeks – to collaborate in building a world of spiritual and physical beauty.
And indeed, when the original Greek Empire under Alexander the Great conquered Israel in 333 B.C.E., the relationship between the Jews and the Greeks was beautiful and harmonious.
The Talmud (Yoma 69a) records that when Alexander the Great conquered Israel and was approaching Jerusalem, the Kohen Gadol (High Priest) Shimon ha-Tzaddik, wearing his garments of Kehunah (Priesthood), led a delegation of Elders to meet him. Alexander, upon seeing Shimon ha-Tzaddik resplendent in his Priestly garb, dismounted from his chariot and knelt before him. Alexander’s astounded entourage exclaimed: “What’s a great king like you doing bowing to this Jew?!” Alexander the Great explained that every time he had ever gone into battle, he had seen an apparition of this elderly Kohen Gadol, and ascribed his victories to him.
(The renegade Jewish historian, Josephus Flavius, records the same incident, though with a few minor differences, in Antiquities of the Jews, XI: 321-347.)
Alexander the Great accorded great respect to the Jews, and made what seemed to him a very modest and reasonable request: That they erect a statue of him in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
This was, of course, so blasphemous as to be out of the question. However, Shimon ha-Tzaddik offered Alexander an acceptable alternative: that every Jewish baby boy born that year would be named Alexander in his honour.
And since Jews traditionally name children after ancestors or after other great Jews, the name Alexander remains a popular name among Jewish men until today. (Including the Yiddish diminutive “Sender”.)
But after just ten years, Alexander the Great died, and the Greek Empire immediately fragmented into three successor-empires – the Seleucid Empire, based in Syria; the Ptolemaic Empire, based in Egypt; and the Macedonian Empire, based in Greece proper. Israel was included in the Ptolemaic Empire, under Ptolemy I. Ruled from Alexandria, a great cosmopolitan city, the Ptolemaic Empire at first retained Alexander the Great’s tolerance and liberalism, and Jewish life flourished in Israel for a century and a quarter. The Jews were free to worship and live their lives as they wanted, which was unique in the Greek Empire, in which every other conquered nation was Hellenised and assimilated into Greek Hellenistic culture.
Yavan and Shem – Greece and Israel – were indeed building a culture of beauty and holiness together.
But in 198 B.C.E., the Seleucid (Syrian-Greek) Empire, ruled by King Antiochus III, invaded Israel from the north, driving out the Ptolemaic Empire, and the Seleucid reign was harsh and oppressive. In 175 B.C.E. Antiochus III died, his son Mithridates became king, changing his name to Antiochus IV, and installed an ever-more intrusive government.
Antiochus IV, identifiably a megalomaniac, awarded himself the Greek title theos epiphanes (“manifest god”); the Jews contemptuously referred to him as Epimanes (“the lunatic”). Almost as soon as he ascended the throne, Antiochus Epiphanes began enforced Hellenization of Israel and forbade the Jews from practicing Judaism: one of his first acts, in 174 B.C.E., was to install his hand-picked acolyte, Menelaus, an enthusiastic Hellenist, as High Priest. He thus had effective control over the Holy Temple in Jerusalem – that is, de facto control over the Jewish religious, political, and cultural centre.
In 169 B.C.E., Antiochus Epiphanes marched on Jerusalem. Hellenist forces – Syrian-Greek with Jewish collaborators – captured the city after brief skirmishes, and Antiochus Epiphanes plundered the Holy Temple.
Yavan and Shem were no longer cooperating to build a world of beauty and holiness. Instead Greece began using their naked physical power to destroy holiness…and the rest is history.
The Jewish revolt against this perversion of Yavan’s blessing was inevitable. When Yavan was no longer beautifying Shem’s holiness, he had to be driven out of Israel.
Now I suggest that there is an exquisitely subtle hint to our – Israel’s and Greece’s – intended joint mission in the world in an exquisitely subtle and abstruse point of Hebrew grammar – actually an exception to an exception to a seemingly insignificant point of grammar.
Hebrew has no word for the definite article “the”. Instead, “the” is the prefix ??-. And the general rule is that the letter immediately following the ??- prefix has a dagesh (a dot in the letter which doubles and emphasises the letter): ???????? (the book), ?????????? (the night), ????????? (the moon), and so forth.
But every rule has its exceptions, and this rule has two exceptions:
(1) The five guttural letters ? and ? and ? and ? and ? can never have a dagesh;
(2) When the letter following the ??- is a ? vowelized with a sh’va (??), then the ?? does not have a dagesh: ?????????? (the children), ??????? (the river, specifically the Nile), ???????????? (the desert), ??????????? (the inheritance), and so forth.
And there are two exceptions to this second exception: ????????????, the Jews (see, for example, 2 Kings 16:6, Jeremiah 38:19, and dozens of times in the Book of Esther), and ???????????, the Greeks (see Joel 4:6). Hebrew grammar gives an unwarranted dagesh to the ??? of both nations, the Jews and the Greeks. The ??? which is the first letter of God’s holy Name; the ??? which represents God Himself.
This tiny, minuscule point of Hebrew grammar, so esoteric that few people ever notice it or are even aware of it, nevertheless reaches us a central lesson. Both ???????????? (the Jews) and ??????????? (the Greeks) add the dagesh in the ?, the yud, the first letter of their names, against the rules of normative grammar. Both ???????????? (the Jews) and ??????????? (the Greeks) are supposed to emphasise God in this world.
In an ideal world, both would.
In an ideal world, both one day will.
This is the ultimate promise of Chanukah.
I will add the Hebrew font soon.