Hanukkah and Christmas

Take time out during this festive season to think about what is being celebrated. Hanukkah commemorates the revolt of a band of bigots against a formerly tolerant, but increasingly intolerant empire. Christmas celebrates the triumph of superstition, fear of death and afterlife, guilt and sense of sin, over a rational classical philosophical world view. The Persian Empire, and the Alexandrian Greek Empire tolerated the different practices of their various constituent people. This tolerance, however, degenerated over generations into intolerance. The Seleucid successors of Alexander imposed Greek values on people under their rule, including the Jews. The Greek world view might have appealed to an assimilated ruling class, but alienated the simple peasants, the people of the land. They had no appreciation of the rich Greek culture. They wanted simple answers to life's problems, as people did in more recent times, under Nazi rule, under the rule of the Ayatollahs in Iran, as benighted followers of ISIS do now. Similarly, adherents of Christianity wanted answers simpler than the closely argued complex answers of Judaism. This is what you do, this is what you believe in, because the priest says so, the Church says so, the Pope says so. This search for simple answers lead to the destruction of classical civilization. I have just finished reading Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, [Norton, 2011], an amazingly readable, vivid account of how Poggio Braciolini, a papal secretary, temporarily unemployed, went in search of ancient manuscripts and came across, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, in 1417, a long epic poem celebrating Epicurean philosophy. For a thousand years this work was lost, known only from extracts and references to it by other writers. The rediscovery of this ancient work had an great influence of the intellectual history of the world. It taught that the world was made up of atoms, that the Gods care not one bit about the lives of humans, that there is no afterlife, no soul, the body just disintegrates into its constituent atoms. The purpose of life is its enjoyment, pleasure. Epicurean philosophy, transmitted through the poem of Lucretius undermined and ultimately destroyed the medieval cultural landscape. The Maccabean revolt also had a huge impact on Jewish culture. Not only were traditional practices and rituals restored, it gave strength to a popular Pharisaic and democratic approach to questions about how to live; Pharisaic as distinct from Sadducean, which was sacerdotal ritualistic. And although the revolt was against Greek domination, the Greek influence was absorbed by the Pharisaic tradition. You arrive at answers about how to live, as Greek philosophers did,  though discussion, in which no opinion is ruled out, every opinion is given weight. Chaim Raphael describes in his introduction to the Passover Haggadah, The Feast of History, Seder as an epicurean discussion with people reclining and exploring the variety of issues raised, and, of course, eating a lavish feast. The impact of Epicurean philosophy and Greek philosophy on Jewish religion is vastly greater than narrow-minded religious bigots would acknowledge. And what started as a peasant revolt, a revolt against the priestly elite, turned into a reappraisal of Jewish religious beliefs.