Hanukkah and Mikkeitz: Enlightenment
Hanukkah and Mikkeitz: Enlightenment

 

In more than ninety percent of years, Parashat Mikkeitz coincides with Chanukah; the last time it did not was in 5761 (2000), and the next time will be in 5681 (2020). Is this merely coincidence, or is there a common theme which links Parashat Mikkeitz with Chanukah?

Parashat Mikkeitz begins with Joseph languishing in Egypt’s royal prison, convicted of a crime which he never committed. Even Potiphar, who had had him thrown into the dungeon, knew – or at least suspected – that Joseph was innocent (Genesis Rabbah 87:9, Targum Yonatan to Genesis 39:20; see Ramban, S’forno, Malbim, and Ibn Ezra on 39:19). After all, he knew exactly what sort of a person his wife was, and had he really believed that this foreign slave had attempted to rape his wife, he would certainly have had him executed.

By the end of the Parashah, nine years later, Joseph was the viceroy of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh himself.

Pharaoh had demonstrated that Egypt would accept a Hebrew, even a Hebrew who was an ex-convict and ex-slave, as their ruler, based on his merit alone.

In the rest of the Book of Genesis history continues on its familiar path: the Egyptians invited the Hebrew family down to Egypt to live there in comfort, luxury, and honour. The Egyptians were full of gratitude to Joseph, and by extension to his whole family, for having saved them from regional famine. Not only did Egypt survive – it became a regional superpower thanks to Joseph.

Egyptian exile began so auspiciously, that first generation must have wondered why their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, had so dreaded it. It took another generation before Egypt turned against us: only after the last of the twelve sons of Israel died did a later pharaoh initiate his programme of forced labour, slavery, torture, and extermination.

Parashat Mikkeitz is the story of the comfortable and genial beginning of the Egyptian exile. (And in the very few years that Mikkeitz does not coincide with Chanukah, Parashat Yayeishev does instead; this, too, depicts Joseph’s descent to Egypt, which is the introduction to Egyptian exile.)

Jump ahead almost a millennium and a half.

The year was 333 B.C.E., and Israel had been a semi-autonomous province for generations, ever since Koresh (Cyrus), king of Persia, had granted the Jews permission to return home from anywhere in the Persian Empire they may be, there to rebuild the Holy Temple (Ezra 1:1-4, 2 Chronicles 36:22-23).

In 333 B.C.E., Alexander the Great invaded Israel, driving out the Persian forces. The Greek invasion was bloodless, and the Greek Empire treated the Jews not merely with tolerance, but with genuine respect. The Greeks regarded themselves (maybe justifiably) as the pinnacle of civilisation: almost alone in the ancient world, they maintained written historical chronicles, they valued education, they had well-constructed philosophies, they had an advanced functioning government and legal system. All other nations whom they encountered were illiterate barbarians.

When they conquered Israel they found, for the first time, another nation which was also highly educated, with its own system of education, historical chronicles, philosophies, legal system, and neatly-ordered society.

The leaders of the two nations – Alexander the Great and Shimon ha-Tzaddik the Kohen Gadol (High Priest) – had mutual respect for each other: the Talmud (Yoma 69a) records that as Alexander the Great was approaching Jerusalem, Shimon ha-Tzaddik, wearing the garments of the 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.)

Greek dominion of Israel began very auspiciously – as auspiciously as the Egyptian exile had begum all those centuries earlier. 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.

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 Hellenisation of Israel and forbade the Jews from practicing Judaism: one of his first acts, in 174 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. Confused fighting raged through Jerusalem for over a year, until in 168 B.C.E. Hellenist forces under the command of Apollonius finally subdued the entire city, massacred the Jewish population therein, and began offering pagan sacrifices in the Holy Temple. This was converted to a pagan shrine to the Olympian god Zeus, and a pig was sacrificed to him. This sparked off a bloody and vicious civil war, between the Syrian-Greek forces and their Jewish collaborators on one side, and the Jews who remained loyal to Judaism on the other side.

In 167  B.C.E., Antiochus Epiphanes began a concerted campaign against Judaism throughout Judea. A unit commanded by Apelles set up a pagan altar in the village of Modi’in, in the foot-hills of Judea, 27 km (17 miles) north-west of Jerusalem. Apelles ordered Matityahu (Mattathias), the priest of the village, to sacrifice a pig upon it. When Matityahu refused, another Jew (whose name has been forever lost to history) stepped forward to sacrifice the pig on the pagan altar.

Matityahu snatched a sword from a Greek soldier and killed the Jewish traitor. He then turned his sword on Apelles, killing him too. He and his sons then attacked the entire Greek garrison, killing all the soldiers, and before other units of the Seleucid army could take reprisals fled into the surrounding Judean hills.

Thus began the revolt of the Maccabees against Greek oppression.

Matityahu would die less than a year after the revolt began, but his five sons inspired the masses of Jews in Israel to take up the fight for independence. In 164 B.C.E. Maccabean forces liberated the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, drove out the Syrian-Geek idolatry and the accoutrements with which they had defiled the Holy Temple, and re-dedicated the Holy Temple to the worship of the One true G-d on the twenty-fifth of Kislev. The fighting would continue for decades, but for the first time in almost three centuries, there was full Jewish independence in Israel (albeit only in a small area to start with).

Greek rule, which had begun with such enlightenment, had rapidly degenerated into something evil and ugly – just as, all those centuries earlier, Egypt had done.

Egypt had been a regional superpower, with physical achievements that were the envy of the ancient world. Egyptian architects had designed and constructed pyramids, irrigation canals, granaries, cities and palaces which were more impressive than anything else that existed. Egyptian civilisation had built a stable monarchy and government which survived over a millennium and a half, through more than twenty dynasties.

But it was based on idolatry – the denial of G-d, the denial that man is created in G-d’s image. It was inevitable that with idolatry as its foundation, the entire edifice of Egypt would one day become evil, would one day treat people as property to be disposed of with as little worth as bricks or straw.

Likewise, Greece was a global superpower. For better or worse, Greek philosophy, Greek architecture, Greek science, the Greek language, Greek art, the Greek legal system – these dominated the world, and have dominated, or at least influenced, all human civilisation ever since.

But Greece, too, was based on idolatry – and it was inevitable that Greece, however convivial they may have been when they first conquered Israel, would one day descend into the same murderous evil as all systems which deny the sanctity of man created in the image of G-d, and of the world created by G-d for His purposes.

Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Hertz (1872-1846), former Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, notes: “[In] Greece, a slave was deemed ‘an animated tool’, and he could claim no more rights in his relationship to his master than a beast of burden. Agricultural labourers were chained. If at ay time it was thought that there were too many slaves, they were exterminated, as wild beasts would be. Athens was an important slave market, and the State profited from it by a tax on the sales. So much for ‘the glory that was Greece’” (commentary to Leviticus 25:46).

Greek society and Hellenist philosophy are commonly thought of as enlightened and tolerant. Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Hertz demolishes this myth, too: “As for tolerance, even enlightened Greek polytheism permitted three of the greatest thinkers of the age – Socrates, Protagoras, and Anaxagoras – to be put to death on religious grounds. The Jews came into contact with Greek polytheism in its later stages. But neither Antiochus Epiphanes, who attempted to drown Judaism in the blood of its faithful children, nor Apion, the frenzied spokesman of the anti-Semites in Alexandria, displayed particular tolerance… Greek society was broad-based on un-righteousness, i.e. on human slavery… It is not generally remembered that we find traces of human sacrifice throughout the Hellenic world, in the cult of almost every god, and in all periods of the independent Greek states”.

In Egypt, the tyrant who began the descent into murderous oppression was the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who radically reformed Egyptian polytheism, replacing it with worship of only one god – the sun. (He did not deny the power of the other gods; he merely illegalised their worship.) Accordingly, he changed his own name to Ekhanaton, “glory of the sun”, awarding himself divine authority. In Greece, the murderous oppression began with Antiochus IV, who awarded himself the title theos epiphanes (“manifest god”), awarding himself divine authority too.

The immutable law of history, which both Parashat Mikkeitz and Chanukah teach, is that even a nation which has the most beautiful art, the most impressive architecture, the most intellectually brilliant philosophers, the most enlightened legal system, can nevertheless degenerate into hideous cruelty. Even societies which have been wonderfully welcoming to Jews have usually turned against them sooner or later. Egypt was the paradigm; Greece followed the same pattern; so did Moslem Spain, Catholic Poland and Protestant Germany and a hundred other countries after them.

Parashat Mikkeitz and Chanukah: two paradigms of oppressors, one in exile and one in Israel. Both began as a beautiful friendship with Israel; both were pagan; and both degenerated into murderous horrors.

Purely human enlightenment can never be trusted to last. True enlightenment comes from G-d Who gave us the Torah, which alone gives us pure and eternal enlightenment; “for the candle is the mitzvah, and the Torah is light” (Proverbs 6:23).