It is axiomatic to Judaism that every nation has its mission in this world which G-d created, and Greece’s mission is first alluded to immediately after Noah’s Flood, when Noah gave his blessing to his son Yefet (Japheth):
יַפְתְּ אֱלֹקִים לְיֶפֶת, וְיִשְׁכֹּן בְּאָהֳלֵי שֵׁם:
“Blessed be Hashem, G-d of Shem…May G-d bestow beauty upon Yefet, for him to dwell in the tents of Shem” (Genesis 9:26-27).
The first word of this blessing, יַפְתְּ (yaf’t) is a cognate of the name יֶפֶת, Yefet (Japheth), which is in turn a cognate of יֹפִי, yoffi (beauty) and יָפֶה, yaffeh (beautiful).
Yefet was the father of Yavan (Genesis 10:2), Yavan being Greece: the name יָוָן easily morphs into Ionia, a region of Greece. And among Yavan’s sons were Elisha, a cognate of Ellas or Hellas, the ancient name of Greece; and Tarshish, which name morphed into Tarsus, which in ancient times was a Greek province (today in Turkey); and Dodanim, which name morphed into Dardanelles, in ancient times called the Hellespont.
Shem, of course, is the ancestor and progenitor of the Jewish nation.
Yefet’s beauty – Yavan’s beauty, the beauty with which Greece is blessed – 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 G-d.
We note here that יָוָן (Yavan, Greece) is צִיּוֹן (Zion) without the צ, the tzaddik. צִיּוֹן, denoting “distinguished by beauty”, but devoid of the צ, denoting righteousness. When צִיּוֹן is devoid of its צ, its righteousness, then what remains is יָוָן, 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. G-d charged us, the Jews, with responsibility for the spiritual perfection of the world, and He charged the Greeks with responsibility for the physical perfection of the world.
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, with a few minor differences (Antiquities of the Jews XI: 321-347).
Alexander the Great accorded great respect to the Jews, allowing them complete freedom of worship, 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 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.
Hanukkah certainly celebrates our victory over Greece – but the very fact that we had a victory is a testament to a world which was disorientated, turbulent and agitated: in an ideal world we would have been collaborating to build a world of spiritual and physical beauty: the spiritual beauty was our mission, the physical beauty was Greece’s.
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 הַ-. And the general rule is that the letter following the הַ- prefix has a dagesh (a dot in the letter which doubles and emphasises the letter): הַסֵּפֶר (the book), הַלַּיְלָה (the night), הַיָּרֵחַ (the moon), and so forth.
But there is an exception to this rule:
When the letter following the הַ- is a yud vowelized with a sh’va (יְ), then there is no dagesh in the yud: הַיְלָדִים (the children), הַיְאֹר (the river, specifically the Nile), הַיְשִׁימוֹן (the desert), הַיְרֻשָּׁה (the inheritance), הַיְבוּסִים (the Jebusites), הַיְרוּשַׁלְמִים (the Jerusalemites), and so forth.
And there are two exceptions to this exception: הַיְּהוּדִים, the Jews (see, for example, 2 Kings 16:6, Jeremiah 38:19, and dozens of times in the Book of Esther), and הַיְּוָנִים, the Greeks (see Joel 4:6). Hebrew grammar gives an unwarranted dagesh to the יְּ of both nations, the Jews and the Greeks. The יְּ (yud) which is the first letter of G-d’s holy Name; the יְּ which represents Hashem Himself.
This tiny, minuscule point of Hebrew grammar, so esoteric that few people ever notice it or are even aware of it, nevertheless teaches us a central lesson. Both הַיְּהוּדִים (the Jews) and הַיְּוָנִים (the Greeks) add the dagesh in the י, the yud, the first letter of their names, against the rules of normative grammar. Both הַיְּהוּדִים (the Jews) and הַיְּוָנִים (the Greeks) are supposed to emphasise G-d in this world.
In an ideal world, both would.
In an ideal world, both one day will.
This is the ultimate promise of Hanukkah.