Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, in the days of the Mishnah, had a different thought. He said it would all depend on what you were doing at that moment. In his view, if a message came to say the Messiah was here and you were engaged in planting a tree, you had to go on with your planting and only then go out and welcome him.

The background to this statement is essential to an understanding of what Rabban Yochanan was saying. The Temple had been destroyed, the Holy Land was in ruins, the people’s morale was low. Only the long-awaited Redemption would brighten the future. In what sense? The coming of a Divinely-appointed leader would regenerate the nation, but that was up to God. The regeneration of the land depended on rehabilitating the trees, forests and vegetation, and that was up to the people’s own will and effort.

Maybe that’s what the Torah is telling us in the words, “Why do you cry to Me? Tell the Children of Israel to go forward!” (Ex. 14:15).

There is a lesson to be learned from this episode – gratitude. One should not repay good with evil: “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

It’s a good rule, but what happens if the person you show gratitude to didn’t really mean to do you a favour?

Take the case of the Egyptians. The Torah commands us, “Do not hate an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land” (Deut. 23:8). “A stranger in his land”? When the Egyptians were treating us so harshly and we were downtrodden slaves in their midst? What were we – their pampered guests? Are we meant to say, “Thank you, Egyptians, for making our lives hell?”

Nachmanides, on the verse in D’varim we have quoted, says that the Torah meant what it said. There were things about the Egyptians which we can never forgive and forget… but there were also (admittedly) minor things which in the end brought us at least a modicum of benefit. According to Nachmanides, in time of severe famine – which must have destroyed many other peoples – the Israelites survived because they were in Egypt where they did not go hungry, even though it was poor-men’s bread that they ate.

Renoir's painting, Roses in a vase

We are not talking about people called Rose – or Rosenberg or Rosenblum or anything similar. The reference is to the Chanukah song, Ma’oz Tzur. It has a verse which says, “They breached the walls of my towers (i.e. the towers of Jerusalem and the Temple) and defiled all the oils – but from the remnant of the flasks a miracle was wrought for the Roses”.

The word shoshanim – roses (though another translation is “lilies”) – was probably introduced by the poet because he needed a word that rhymed with kankanim, flasks. Nonetheless, there are other places where the Jewish people are likened to roses. Think of the Purim song Shoshanat Yaakov, “The Rose (or Lily) of Jacob”. This might also have had a prosaic origin in that the story is about the Jews of Shushan and the word Shushan yields the play on words with which the song begins.

Midrashic sources – especially the Midrash on Shir HaShirim – say that the righteous are compared to shoshanim, and if the word is understood as roses the idea could be that the righteous are handsome in their deeds but prickly if anyone tries to exploit them.

No wonder Chanukah is still so popular, because – at least in some circles – it enables Jews to show that they have a colourful festivity to rival Christmas and some families go in for the Chanukah Man and the Maccabee Tree. At the same time there are serious gentile attempts to adopt Jewish practices as diverse as the Chanukah candles and the Passover Seder. An elderly rabbi I knew used to shake his head in confusion. “The Yidden want to be goyim, and the goyim want to be Yidden!” he muttered, amazed at the paradox.

Some of the Jews in the days of Antiochus even thought that it was doing the community harm by maintaining its separateness. The First Book of the Maccabees (1:14) reports that some of the people “went out from the midst of Israel and stirred up the masses, saying, ‘Let us covenant with the nations around us, for since we have turned aside from their ways many grave troubles have occurred”. It was not just in superficial things that they wanted to be like everyone else, but in art, literature, theology and philosophy.

Jewish history has encountered many cultures and pondered whether and how far Judaism could live with them. Some went to extremes: in both directions, total acceptance of the environment and complete retreat from it. Both extremes had their negative effects on Jewish identity, but both added to the debate about how far Judaism can adapt to the world and how far, to use Samson Raphael Hirsch’s famous words, it is possible to adapt the standards of the world to the criteria of Judaism.

The sages surely thought hard and long before fixing on the name “Chanukah”. They must have discarded a number of alternatives, finally choosing the name used from the dawn of Jewish history to denote a feast of dedication.

The Midrash says there are seven Chanukahs:
1. The Chanukah of the creation of the world, when God completed His work and launched man on the arena of history.

2. The Chanukah of the Tabernacle in the time of Moses, when the princes of the tribes brought offerings to the Sanctuary.

3. The Chanukah of the First Temple, erected and dedicated by Solomon.

4. The Chanukah of the Second Temple, erected by exiles who had returned from Babylon.

5. The Chanukah of the wall of Jerusalem, completed in the days of Nehemiah.

6. The Chanukah celebrated by the Maccabees.

7. And the Chanukah of the time to come, when the world will be illumined more brightly than on all the Chanukahs of ages past.

Each of the first six Chanukahs has a symbolic meaning, particularly relevant for an age when principles are discarded and values devalued.

The Chanukah of creation tells man that, God-like, he should devote his energies to constructive ends.

The Chanukah of the Tabernacle suggests that, like the princes of the tribes, man should bring his best to every worthwhile cause.

The Chanukah of the First Temple declares, “Set aside time and place for worship, joining heaven to earth as your prayer ascends upwards.”

The Chanukah of the Second Temple, built by returned exiles, tells man to work for the day when all men will be free and none shall be subject to harassment or hatred.

The Chanukah of the wall of Jerusalem, which gave security to the City of God, shows man how to find anchorage in time of fear and uncertainty: “Find protection,” it says, “in the encompassing Providence of God!”

The Chanukah of the Maccabees, possible because the few stood up against the many, assures man that he need not be afraid to stand up and go it alone against the negative tendencies of the age.

The culminating Chanukah, when the messianic end of days will dawn, is one which we can begin to build now, without delay. The first step in building it is to learn to live at peace with yourself. The second is to learn to live at peace with your fellow.

The Messianic Chanukah will arrive when we succeed in making of the earth a temple of peace. This is what we pray for in Ma’oz Tzur – the day “when You will cause all slaughter to cease,” and man “shall complete with song and psalm the dedication of the altar”.

The sages were not unaware of the military victory but did not mention it. Their idea was that events only have significance if they can be seen as part of God’s design for history. In celebrating such events there had to be a spiritual focus.

Their principle ought to guide us when we consider how to assess and celebrate the State of Israel. If it is judged and marked in terms of airplanes and weaponry its message is obscured. Only if it is seen as the finger of God in human history does it assume a real cosmic significance.

You could predict Pesach; slaves eventually become free, and sooner or later there would have been an Exodus. One could have predicted Shavu’ot; a people that gains its freedom cannot manage for long without a constitution and charter.

But one might have thought that Chanukah would never have been needed. After all, King Antiochus was a pagan, and paganism is by nature tolerant; it deems one person’s god as good as another’s.

Why then did Antiochus try so hard to eradicate Judaism, and in the process make Chanukah necessary? Because an “anything goes” laissez-faire policy is not really as democratic as it seems. No, says Judaism, it is democracy gone mad. If one god is as good as another then all are nothing, and Judaism cannot cope with this. The Jewish view is that there can be only one valid God, and He must be unique.

Judaism also cannot cope with an ethic in which right and wrong are matters of opinion and you can basically invent any standards you like; it insists that civilisation cannot survive without eternal, immutable moral principles.

It cannot cope with a lifestyle in which holiness or hedonism are equally legitimate; the only valid way, in the Jewish point of view, is that of holiness and decency.

It cannot cope with the thought that all ideas are as good as one another, or all days are the same as each other, or all foods are equally acceptable.

That is why Mattathias had no choice but to raise the Hasmonean banner of revolt against Antiochus, and to proclaim, “Whoever is on the Lord’s side, come to me!”

Not that an act of moral courage like this will always make you popular. But Rav Soloveitchik says that there are two types of heroism – a strong person who does mighty deeds, and a person who even without much physical strength or stamina is prepared to do what others regard as absurd and inexpedient: to stand up for principle.

But this, in turn, must be done judiciously and carefully, without ever humiliating or ridiculing the other person’s point of view. You may be right that you are right, but the way to handle disagreement is with respect for the human dignity of the other person and the ability to try to persuade logically and never squash or, God forbid, physically threaten anyone else. People who differ should be capable of creative engagement with derech eretz and dignity.

This dramatic meeting between the representative of the Greek spirit and the high priest of Jewry had an important impact. From that time, Jewish life followed less and less the pattern of freedom from external influence urged by Ezra and Nehemiah. Now, for at least three centuries, there was continuous contact, with varying degrees of cordiality, between Jewish and Greek cultures, two distinct approaches to the purpose of living.

Greek culture penetrated Judea on two levels:

1. On the intellectual level, it introduced the Jews to a brilliant system of science, philosophy and art.

2. On the level of social life, it influenced language, dress, name of places and people, civic organisation, fashions in entertainment and the like. This was not an attempt to impose one nation’s way of living, in the narrow sense, or another nation, but rather a campaign to establish a universal world culture. It was a campaign that attracted many Jews, especially among the higher social classes, encouraged by the tolerant way in which Alexander, and then the Ptolemies and Seleucids, treated their Jewish subjects.

If a peaceful cross-fertilisation of the two cultures could have developed, there is no telling how brilliant a civilisation might have resulted. The hellenistic approach would have benefited from the faith and ethics of Judaism, while the latter could have employed the best features of hellenistic artistic and intellectual genius in spreading the Torah.

But history does not work so symmetrically and peacefully. Human beings rarely enjoy the luxury of formulating an outlook calmly and deliberately, remote from the stresses and strains of reality. Events did not allow a gradual exchange of ideas between Judaism and hellenism.

What was confronting Judaism was not classical hellenism at its best – that of Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristotle and Plato – but a debased form which expressed itself in paganism, immorality, sensuality and barbarism.

Secondly, important ingredients of hellenism offended against Jewish law, sentiment and susceptibilities. The universalism of hellenism was a threat to Jewish national identity. Jewish tradition was wary of the Greeks’ allegorical interpretation of the Bible. The ideals of the two cultures clashed. Dubnow said:

“It was a duel between ‘The Eternal’ on the one side, and Zeus on the other – between the Creator of the universe, the invisible spiritual Being who had, in a miraculous way, revealed religious and ethical ideals to mankind, and the deity who resided upon Olympus, who personified the highest force of nature, consumed vast quantities of nectar and ambrosia, and led a pretty wild life upon Olympus and elsewhere.

“The Hellenic theory identified the moral with the beautiful and agreeable, and made life consist of an uninterrupted series of physical and mental pleasures. The Judean theory is permeated by the strictly ethical notions of purity, of ‘holiness’; it denounces licentiousness, and sets up as its ideal the controlling of the passions and the infinite improvement of the soul, not of the intellect alone, but of the feelings as well.”

Political factors aggravated the situation and made a showdown inevitable. Relations between the Jews and their overlords were deteriorating. Intrigues divided the high priestly family and one party embarked upon a determined campaign of thorough hellenisation, symbolised by the introduction of Greek games into Jerusalem and the participation in them of some of the priests. This the pious among the Jews would not countenance. Greek sport was associated with pagan worship and moral levity; and being taken naked, it involved some Jews in attempts to deface their circumcision in order to cover up their origin.

Now, when Antiochus IV, seeing Jewish religious observance as a barrier to the progress of the supra-national culture, instituted aggressive measures to exterminate Jewish worship and study, the banner of outright revolt was raised, and Matityahu (Mattathias) and his sons turned passive resistance into open warfare.

Many of the classical commentators explain that it was not God Himself, but Abraham, who needed to find out the extent of his obedience when asked to do something so difficult that other people would have refused. Maimonides (Guide to the Perplexed 3:24) says that the important thing is not just Abraham’s obedience but his motivation. In other circumstances a person – even Abraham – might obey out of fear of punishment; but here there was no other possibility than sheer love of God.

Maimonides also speaks about God’s motivation. Implicit in the words of the Divine angel, “Now I know…” (Gen.22:12) is the idea that until the Akedah God did not really know how Abraham would respond. It sounds quite inconceivable that God should lack knowledge of anything. Says Maimonides, it all depends on what you mean by “knowledge”. “To know” has more than one meaning, and God’s knowledge is not the same as ours. We and our knowledge are distinct: here am I, here is my knowledge. God and His knowledge, indeed God and all His attributes, are one and the same. The words “Now I know” do not imply that hitherto God did not know but “now My knowledge is confirmed”. Rashi suggests that God is saying, “Now I can give a reason for My love for Abraham”.

A. We all know that in the end no killing took place, and a ram was offered up instead of Isaac, but Abraham and Isaac were not to know that in advance. The commentaries are all exercised about the events and God’s part in them. How, they ask, could God even talk about child murder when it clearly contravened His own moral law? We cannot say that God is above His own law, since He accepts Abraham’s rebuke, “Does the Judge of all the earth not act justly?” (Gen. 18:25).

It is possible that God deliberately organised the events so that anyone who thought that child sacrifice was pleasing to the Creator would find the Almighty decisively intervening to prevent it happening and showing that what He really wants is for His children to live and grow and bring blessing to the world.

Another possibility is that the story is a paradigm of Jewish readiness to be martyrs for God: we do not invite or relish the fearful possibility that we and/or our children will have to make the ultimate sacrifice, but if there is no way out we are prepared even to lose life for the sake of our faith and people. From this point of view the Akedah is a test of readiness, but in this case no martyrdom was called for and nothing more was required of Abraham and Isaac than to be willing.