Tag: Seleucids

Perpetual Chanukah: A Sermon in the Preposition

David Porush
For my son, Avraham Benjamin, who was born the first night of Chanukah.
“When the hoof of the swine touches Jerusalem’s walls, the entire foundation of Israel itself shakes.” – Talmud: Sotah

Perpetual Chanukah

Chanukah is both alarming and comforting. Jews are struggling with the growing sense that it’s happening again. Less than eight decades after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the West. I don’t need to recount the litany of current events and the fear they’re causing. I’m alarmed that we’re still fighting the culture war it commemorates.

The lights and prayers give psychic comfort and hope. They are also the actual weapons to resist the dark tide of history.

Here’s what I mean. On the first night of Chanukah 1st night chanukahwe say a third prayer, the Shehecheyanu, thanking God for bringing us “to this time” (lazman hazeh). This prayer always gets me whenever I say it. Its message is for anyone: be grateful for all the things good and bad that occurred to you, because they brought you to this lovely intersection of fate. Every moment is a miracle.

The second prayer, recited every night over the candles, rhymes with this third. We say bazman hazeh – “in this time” – implying ‘this season on the calendar when we remember what God did for us on Chanukah 22 centuries ago’: letting one night’s worth of oil keep the lamps lit for eight nights after the Maccabees regained the Temple from the Greeks.

There’s a profound lesson in the prepositions, from bazman – in this season repeated every year – to lazman, to this very moment – this particular personal intersection of fate. We’re being told this isn’t just a nice commemoration of history. It’s still happening. We still are in history, or history is brought to our doorstep, at this very moment. That’s why we’re supposed to display the menorah, even putting it out in front of our homes for everyone to see.

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Perpetual Chanukah in the West – or – Why the Pythagorean Theorem is More Than Just Math

David Porush3 Comments
’כהיומ הזה’ – “…even like today” – Chanukah prayer
This is dedicated to my son, Avraham Benyamin (Ben) Porush, whose birthday is the first day of Chanukah and bris the last.

Why does the Talmud warn against teaching Greek to Jewish children?

Pythagoras traveled through the Middle East for twelve years, imbibing Egyptian & Jewish philosophy.

The last pages of the Talmud volume Sotah portrays the decline of Jewish spirit after the destruction of the Temple. It marches through a long, dispiriting list of the horrible things that happen as Jews have to abandon customs that could only be kept alive when there was a spiritual center in Jerusalem and they lived as a nation inside their own borders.

In the middle of this lamentation (called Yeridas HaDoros – “decline of the generations”), the Talmud warns somewhat mysteriously that fathers shouldn’t teach Greek to their sons.What did the Sages have in mind? They can’t have meant Greek language, because the Rabbis were conversant with Greek and spoke it in the streets of Jerusalem. By the first century CE, and almost certainly earlier, it had displaced Hebrew as the lingua franca. And in various places in the Talmud, Greek is praised as the only language into which the Torah can be elegantly translated. Indeed, Sotah itself recounts a lament of Shimon ben Gamliel, the great Sage (50 CE) that shows how much the rabbis thought of Greek:

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Perpetual Chanukah in the West:

David Porush

<Why does the Talmud forbid teaching Greek? -or- Philosophical Violence in the Judaeo-Christian Hyphen

The last page of Sotah brings to a climax the apocalyptic portrait of the decline of Jewish generations, spirit, learning and virtue after the Chorban (the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE). The section, and others like it in Talmud and Jewish literature is called Yeridas HaDoros, “Descent or Decline of the Generations.” In the middle of this lamentation, The Talmud discusses many virtues of Jewish spirit that were lost, and many customs which had to be abandoned, such as the bridal veil and litter and the ritual to cleanse an unsolved murder of a body found between two cities – the eglah arufah.
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