Rabbi Joseph Dweck
Hannukah: The Story and its Meaning Today

Rabbi Joseph Dweck - Hannukah: The Story and its Meaning Today

- First of all, I want to say hello to everyone and it’s always an honour to be able to speak at Lockdown University, and we’re just coming up on Hanukkah. And here in London it is, sundown is already happening as we speak, and Hanukkah is coming in. And I think that for all of us, it is a festival that we are particularly looking forward to this year, given the tremendously difficult experiences that we’ve been going through and having pretty much incessantly since the 7th of October. And Hanukkah is a festival of light, as we all know, and it is light that we look forward to. It is light that has been at the heart of the Jewish people for all the ages. And what I wanted to be able to share with you all today as we come on to Hanukkah is a bit of a background on the story and what it is we can take with us, particularly for this time. And so, I offer that to you. So I’d like to begin with a bit of the background of Hanukkah because it is well known that Hanukkah is this, you know, historically, it marks this struggle that the Jewish people had with the Greeks, as in that time the Greeks were in control of the holy land and governed the people of Israel that lived in that land at the time. We’re going back, you know, 2000 years pretty much, and at the time of the second temple. So, what’s important to recognise is that although this indeed was a conflict between the nation of Israel and the nation of Greece, this was not a conflict that began with Greece. The influence of Greece was profound on the Jewish people. And I’d like to give a bit of a perspective on that, right?

An understanding of that. Because up until this point in history, the Jewish people certainly had interactions with other nations, and we even kind of, you know, dabbled in the beliefs of the other nations and the worship of the gods of the other nations. As a matter of fact, the entire Hebrew Bible is pretty much replete throughout the prophets of stories about the children of Israel, the nation of Israel, engaging in idol worship in various modes with various nations and all kinds of, you know, situations to the point that the prophets of the Bible are constantly speaking to the people, chastising the people over the fact that they are wrongly doing so, and that they are leaving God, you know, God who is a, you know, quote unquote, jealous God, right? Does not put up with his nation, his chosen people following other gods. But what’s important to recognise is that although there were, you know, certainly many instances of the people of Israel following other gods, they had never left theirs really. In other words, the people of Israel had never really left what it meant to be Israel. Yeah, and ultimately to be able to be what we now modernly call the Jewish people. The reason why I’m saying Israel specifically is because it’s important for us to remember that that is the name of our nation, and that we often mistakenly think of ourselves as a religious group. But we are not primarily a religious group. We are primarily a nation like any other nation on earth. And that is how it is, we began. And the name of our nation is Israel. And that is why we call our nation, our, you know, nation state today, Israel. It is a name that for all intents and purposes has been dormant for 2000 years. And the reason for that, which I’m not going to get into detail about, is because there was a split in the kingdom.

After the reign of King Solomon, in which the kingdom, there was a kingdom of Judah and a kingdom of Israel, in which 10 tribes essentially seceded from the union as it were, and set themselves under a king from the tribe of Ephraim rather than the tribe of Judah. The king, King David and King Solomon were from the tribe of Judah. They were the recognised royal family. And their kingdom ended up with only three tribes. The tribe of Benjamin, the tribe of Judah, which was the tribe of the royal family, and the tribe of Levi, which Kohanim come from, or said to come from today. And the nation of Israel, which was the other kingdom, or the kingdom of Israel, was taken over by the Assyrian Empire and dispersed throughout the Assyrian Empire and lost, and that’s what we call the ten lost tribes. We haven’t really seen or heard from them since, but what we call Jews are the survivors of the kingdom of Judah, which is why they’re called Jews. And therefore, I think it’s important to recognise our national identity in all of this, because when we talk about the fight that we had with the Greeks, it was not primarily a religious fight. It was primarily a national fight and a fight for our national soul and our national identity. Now, it’s important to recognise, of course, that inherent, integral to the national identity of the people of Israel is this covenant that they have with God, they believe deeply that they have with God. And I will say that no matter what it is, that one believes of the historicity of that covenant, nonetheless, has served as a foundation stone for our people for 4,000 years. So it’s quite significant, meaningful, and it’s very much integral to our identity. And therefore, the Torah and the Mitzvot, the commandments in the Torah and the laws that come from it have always been interwoven and integral with our people, always.

And so the fight for nationhood and identity, of course, included our spiritual identity, our religious identity, our covenantal identity. But what was happening here during this Hellenistic time was unique because as I said, we had always dabbled in other nations and their beliefs, but we had never wholesale given ourselves to becoming or assimilating to another nation, another nation’s culture, another nation’s identity, and relinquishing our own. And that is very much what happened during this period of time. It was slow, but it developed. And what ended up occurring was that the nation of Israel, the Jews, had deeply identified with Greece. Now, the question is, is why, but before we answer, you know why, I want to look at something with you, and I don’t know if I’m able to share screen. I’m going to try and see if we can. Here we go, yes, I can. And I’m going to show you an entry in the, if I can do this, here we are, share, in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. And it talks about the word Hellenist. And it says, a Hellenist is a person living in Hellenistic times, who was Greek in language, outlook, and way of life, but was not Greek in ancestry. So it means they became Greek, even though they were not ancestrally Greek. And it adds, especially, a Hellenized Jew. So it’s a unique situation that’s occurring with the Jews at this time, together with Greece. And I thought that it was significant to look at Paul Johnson, this line from Paul Johnson in his “History of the Jews,” in which he says, “Any possibility of Greeks and Jews living together in reasonable comfort, and there was possibility for that, was destroyed.” “It was destroyed by the rise of a Jewish reform party who wanted to force the pace of Hellenization,” which means, and this is, you know, very much the nature of the history, that the whole problem of Hanukkah was really established by the Jews, not by the Greeks.

There was a strong constituency, amongst the Jewish people at the time, to become Greek. And that meant wholesale becoming Greek, to leave our traditions, our law, our covenant, our essential identity, and to engage as Greeks in the world. And I said, you know, it’s important to recognise why. And I believe that one of the major reasons this was the case is because we had never met a nation like Greece. The reality is that the world had never really, and still hasn’t met a nation like Greece. Greece and the nature of approach they had to the world was absolutely revolutionary. They were the first nation on earth besides the Jews that decided that things like an examined life, things like examining the world itself and trying to find a systematic approach to understanding the world was absolutely new and revolutionary. And that had not happened by any nation before, before them. So to us, it was the first time that we experienced a nation that rivalled our own, that actually had an opposing, or an alternative, perhaps is better term to use, systematic understanding, deep, broad, and refined understanding, or at least an approach, an attempt to, of the world. And this became an ideal increase, right? This became meaningful, valuable increase as to how it was that they were going to live their lives as human beings. So for the first time we thought to ourselves as a people, do we really need this Torah that we have? Do we really need all this law that we have, when we have over here a very interesting people, the people who not only live and exalt wisdom and recognise their wise men and their philosophers as the highest ideal of life, but also exalt beauty, and for that matter, sports and beauty pageants?

I mean, you know, it’s a hard act to kind of pass up because it’s not just that they have this deep and broad understanding and wisdom, it’s also that they have a tremendous amount of fun doing it. It’s quite competitive and exciting. I always find it, you know, very ironic that the Israeli, you know, sports teams are called Maccabees because you know, the Greeks gave us sports in the first place, and Maccabees, of course, are the ones that originally fought the Greek ideals. But nonetheless, the reality is, is that this is what was going on. And it meant that if it was the Jewish constituency that wanted to become Greek was posing the biggest problem, right? If that were the case, well, then this is less a war and conflict between Israel and Greece and more a war and conflict between Israel and Israel, between Jew and Jew, between the internal struggles of who we are as a people and what it is that we should hold as an ideal. And that is still marked till this day in the festival of Hanukkah. And so I’d like to unpack that a bit to be able to kind of look at that and then have an understanding perhaps on contemporary issues that are occurring with us. So if I say that this is kind of, you know, this internal struggle, I believe that when you have a 4,000 year history like we do, if we start from Abraham, it is important to have an awareness at least in broad strokes of the movements of that history because it has everything to do with who it is that we are today. And if we look at that, you know, I mean it’s one of the values of our religious life is that we have, you know, these annual readings of the Bible, of the Torah, publicly. So each and every single week in a synagogue you will hear the portion of the week or the parashah as we call, the sedra as often called, read.

And we run through it every single year and complete it. And what we are reading in now, the stories, and I think that, you know, it’s beautiful because ultimately it means whether you go to synagogue or not, the nation itself, no matter where there are Jewish communities are on, literally, on the same page. So the stories that are being read, the issues that are being read, are central to the minds of the Jewish people at that time of year. And always, always at the time of Hanukkah, we are reading the story of Joseph and his brothers. And it’s important to recognise as well that the story of Joseph is the longest biographical narrative in the Torah, by far. There’s no other life that is told to us in terms of a biographical account as long as Joseph’s, right? Some people say Moses, Moses is not presented as a biographical story. Moses is just a character in another story that’s being told to us about God’s relationship with us. But as biographical narrative, Joseph’s story is longest, by far. And that means that it’s central and significant to us as a nation. And of course, that story is a story of not just sibling rivalry, but deep rifts amongst siblings, deep ideological differences amongst siblings. And these are siblings that end up fathering the 12 tribes of Israel, ultimately end up fathering the nation of Israel. And we as a people ultimately find our roots and ourselves in these siblings. And that’s what we call the children of Israel. Israel is simply another name for Jacob, our forefather. So we are genuinely children of Jacob or children of Israel. And we are quite diverse because besides being, you know, 12 of us originally, we also came from four different women, right? Four different women mothered the people. So as I said, the only tribes that are left today are the tribe of Judah and Benjamin and Levi. And they come from different mothers. Well, you, Judah and Levi come from the same mother, Leah, but Benjamin of course comes from Rachel. And there are rivalries between the mothers, there are rivalries between the children. It is not a homogenous easy family. It is a heterogeneous, very differentiated and difficult to reconcile family. And that’s always been the case, hasn’t it?

I mean, you know, it’s the old joke of you have, you know, one Jew, two synagogues because there’s one that he goes to and one that he refuses to step foot into. But you know, the problem is that we can’t always start another synagogue. Sometimes we have to figure out how to be able to live together. And the issues between Joseph and his brothers were very significant serious issues. One of the major issues was how do we live in the world? How should the people of Israel, the Jewish people in covenant with God live in this world? Should we recognise ourselves as absolutely different and separate, sacrosanct and section ourselves off from the rest of the world in any significant way, you know, without engaging in any significant way and interact with the world as necessary for ourselves, use the world as we need, but otherwise mind our business, do our thing. Or should we integrate with the world? Should we embrace the world? Should we look to being a nation that is able to not only be an example and a role model to the world, but also to learn and grow and understand things from other nations in the world? This, I posit, was a central rivalry. This question was a central rivalry between Joseph and his brothers. It was also essentially a rivalry between Jacob and his sons because Jacob very much believed that it was appropriate to interact and engage, integrate with the world because he saw the world as an expression of God and that the people of Israel should be engaged with the God’s world and the other nations that he created for all intents and purposes. So his vision is to interact. And because of that, because of that, a high ideal of Jacob is beauty. To explain, beauty is very important, right? If we look at it from an evolutionary perspective, beauty has a function in this world. It opens itself to engagement.

In other words, what we tend to find beautiful on an evolutionary level is due to our survival. We tend to find what is beautiful in terms of how it is that we understand our world and understand the viable nature of our lives in the world. So what we find to be beautiful is something that we believe we should engage with, connect to, things that we don’t find to be so beautiful are things that we don’t so much engage with. Now, sometimes beauty can not be terribly deeper than its surface. And it can confuse us, it can fool us, it can entice us. Beauty always needs to be backed up by substance. And that’s why people will say beauty is only skin deep. So when we recognise that the function of beauty is very much an interface, a facilitator, right? It opens the possibilities, it signals the possibilities for interface. So, you know, flowers develop in ways that bees are attracted to them so that they can pollinate. Humans have these attractions to beautiful fruits, beautiful foods, smells, feelings, people of course, and so on. And much of this is because they signal to us that they are worth interacting with. Now, of course, like I said, one must be judicious and selective in what it is that a person follows but beauty nonetheless has a function of allowing for and opening interface. And because of that, Jacob believed that beauty was very important, especially for the people of Israel. It was a high ideal. And it is interesting indeed that, you know, Rachel, for example, Rahel is presented to us first in the Torah and we are told about her that she’s… that she’s extremely beautiful, of form and expression and Jacob falls in love with her. And fascinatingly, her son Joseph is also presented to us in very same terms. And Joseph was very beautiful and he’s known for his beauty.

Now, I mean, you would imagine that if Jacob, you know, saw Joseph and recognised, you know, Joseph, and by the way, Joseph is not just beautiful, presented to us that way in the Torah, he’s also quite youthful. He is presented to us at 17 years old in the Torah, in the Bible. That’s his age, as you know in the beginning of the story. And you wonder, I mean, you know, in the book of Genesis, everybody’s 932 years old and all of a sudden you’ve got a 17-year-old over here. You know, it’s extremely stark and significant, to the point that the rabbis say, right, our sages say that Joseph accentuated his beauty. He spent time curling his hair, he spent time paying a great deal of attention on the clothes that he wore. And one might think, well, that’s, you know, quite vain. And perhaps at 17 years old, it may very well have been coupled with some vanity. But when you think about how his father dealt with it, you’d think that his father would play it down a bit and say, you know, “Joe, relax a bit.” You know, “Don’t spend so much time in the bathroom every morning. Come off it a bit.” But that’s not what Jacob does. Instead, what Jacob does is he promotes this and he gives him this brand new suit or a coat as it were, of many colours. He encourages Joseph’s wardrobe and presents to him things of beauty. And that means that this is, as I said, a high ideal. Of course, the brothers do not align with this at all. Not only because they are jealous, I mean, and they are terribly jealous of Joseph because his father has tremendous favour with Joseph. And they know that there’s something that’s missing in their father’s feelings and eyes with regards to them.

And that doesn’t help the rivalry at all. But there is this rivalry. They believe that we are not meant to be engaging with the world so enthusiastically. Rather we should engage with the world only as necessary, but otherwise keep our guards up. And I believe that this is one of the reasons why, for those who know the story, Joseph accuses his brothers later on when they come down to Egypt as being spies. It’s not just a random thing. He accuses them of being spies because he believes that that’s exactly how they live their lives. A spy is somebody who pretends to be involved with a particular people and area when all the while only using what it is that they get from that people and area for themselves. And so he accuses them of living their lives that way. And all he wants to know is, do they love their brother? Will they defend him? Benjamin, of course, right? Joseph’s brother of the same mother, their half brother, will they defend Benjamin? Will they stand for him? Will they fight for him? Can they find love in all of their jealousy and hatred? That’s his test. Now, I believe why all of this, right? Just around Hanukkah, because what the Greeks did was they raised this spectre of Joseph to us again. We had never really dealt with it. The brothers and Joseph never really came to reconciliation. I mean, if you read the story, you will see that they never really come to reconciliation, to real mutual understanding. It’s always, well, just don’t hurt us, because Joseph had a power dynamic going on. So it’s never resolved. And it’s never resolved and it ends up manifesting nationally ‘cause as I said, there was a split in the kingdom. And guess who was the king of the seceding group? A certain Jeroboam Ben-Nabat who came from the tribe of Ephraim, who’s the son of Joseph. He’s the Joseph in this story but this time the brothers went with him instead of Judah. So there’s a rift, a fundamental, foundational rift amongst the Jewish people. And it is rooted in this ultimate question of integration versus isolation.

And it manifests in our people throughout history. And there are always different sides of the coin and different sides of the argument. And I don’t mean for it to be absolutely binary, of course, there’s a spectrum, but these are the ends. So what Greece does is it raises the spectre of Joseph again to the nation. It says, we believe in beauty, we believe in the world on the world’s terms. We believe in exalting the world and embracing it, celebrating it, competing even, what say you? And at that time, there was a huge amount of Jews who believed that Greece was correct and that we had to leave our nation in order to be able to connect to it. And that was a huge issue internally. So really, as I suggest, it was an internal issue. And that’s what Hanukah comes to deal with. So, we end up waging a war. Now the interesting thing is, who ended up waging this war? Well, it was the family of the Kohen Gadol, the family of the high priest, the family of Hashmonai Johanan, the high priest specifically. And there’s something about the nature of the office of the high priest and the person who holds it that is meant to be unique to it. And that goes all the way back to the first holder of that office and that was the brother of Moses, Aaron, right? So, in the Hanukkah story, it’s the militia that is gathered by the high priest and his family, that waged this, they launched this rebellious attack or rebellion against the Greeks, and they astonishingly win, right? Which in and of itself is a miracle. And they regain Jewish control over the land for the next 200 years, which is remarkable.

But I do want to say something about the kohen gadol, the high priest, and what he represents amongst the people. The kohen gadol, I wonder if you’ve, you know, you can kind of bring up in your mind’s eye. I imagine you’ve seen it one time or another, you know, depictions of the high priest, his robes and his turban hat, you know, and upon his chest, he wears a breastplate that holds gems, 12 of them and each one with another name of the tribes of Israel. So it is upon his chest that he wears the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. He represents, for all intents and purposes the entire nation, all of its tribes in its full diversity, upon him, his chest before God. And what is known is that he only entered into the sanctum sanctorum, what we call the Qodes HaQodasim, on one day of the year and that was on Yom Kippur. And Yom Kippur, of course, is the day that we stand before God and we ask for his mercy. We ask for him to see the good in us. We ask for him to cut us some slack. We ask for him to give us rahamim. Rahamim, literally in English is translated as mercy but the word in Hebrew, rahamim, comes from the root, rahem. The root rehem means womb. The reason why mercy is related to the womb is because the womb is a place that expands within a mother to allow for the development of life. And it holds that life even though it is not yet ready or complete or fully developed to stand out on its own. So mercy is the allowance for development, even though something or someone is not entirely whole. When we ask for mercy, we essentially ask for that room and that space, that understanding. And so the high priest, the kohen gadol would enter into the sanctum sanctorum, the Qodes HaQodasim, every Yom Kippur and ask God to see the best in his people. Now, it’s important to imagine, ideally, who should do such a thing?

What kind of person should stand before God and ask God to see the good in all the people of his nation? We would hope that it would be someone who genuinely themselves sees the good in us, who encourages us to be able to recognise in ourselves the good, a person who’s not jealous, who doesn’t want to be someone else, who doesn’t feel guilty or upset or angry about anyone else. A person who is quite secure in themselves, quite aware of who they are and the value of their own being, so that when they see other people, all they see is potential and the goodness that really resides within them without jealousies. And that was very much Aaron, the brother of Moses, which I’ll explain in a moment. And it was meant to be the identity of the high priest. And what we needed on Hanukkah was a leader that was able to see the best in all of us, even though we were terribly divided, we were terribly broken as a people. We had lost for all intents and purposes the direction of our whole and robust identity, even though we were latching onto elements of our identity. And we had to fight for who we were, in its wholeness. We needed to fight to accommodate the embracing of beauty and integration with a whole world. And we needed to fight to be able to hold and keep the spiritual and ritualistic and covenantal origins and foundations of our people as well, and not see the two as being at odds with each other. The kohen gadol was the one who was able to do that, indeed, the man that held all the names of Israel upon his chest but I think there’s an important point there. The pasuk that tells us that the Kohen Gadol needs to wear that breastplate says that it shouldn’t be worn. It says it should be worn, not on his chest. It doesn’t use the word chest.

It says it should be worn on his heart. It says that you are to place the breastplate on the heart of Haroon. And of course, the question is why. And so there’s a bit of a story, a very short story that goes with this. You see, Moses was the younger brother of Aaron. He was four years younger, and Moses grew up pretty much removed from the Hebrews or the people, the children of Israel for the majority of his life. He was a prince of Egypt. He fought in Pharaoh’s army. Aaron on the other hand was always with the people, nurturing them, encouraging them, giving them hope for the future, with them in their slavery and suffering. And God calls on whom to lead the people out? His kid brother, Moses? A touch of jealousy perhaps we might expect, wouldn’t even fault him for if he had. But instead this is what happens. God himself speaking to Moses, God who we believe knows the hearts of human beings speaking to Moses during his hiring process at the burning bush says, “Now Moses, I’m really not happy that you’re not going to do the speaking to Pharaoh yourself. But nonetheless, I have decided to send your brother Aaron with you because I know that he knows how to speak. And now I want you to know Moses, that your brother, Aaron, your older brother, is coming towards you.” And the pasuk says in Hebrew and translated to, “And when he sees you, Moses, he will rejoice in his heart in seeing you and knowing that I have given you this task and I’ve called you to this mission.” And that is important because it means that not only will Aaron accept Moses, but will genuinely applaud and celebrate Moses for what Moses achieved, without an iota of jealousy. And the reason why Aaron is able to do that is because Aaron is very, very strong and secure in who he is and what his role is.

And he simply applauds and rejoices and celebrates Moses. And God testifies to the innermost chambers of the heart of Aaron and says that his heart will rejoice for you. And it’s that heart that is able to see the good, the potential, the value in everyone around him, that is able to hold all the names of the tribes of Israel and represent them before God. And so it says that they are not to be placed on his chest, but on his heart, the heart of Aaron is to bear the names of the tribes of Israel. And say, our sages, the heart that rejoiced in the greatness of his brother should be the heart that wears the names of the tribes of Israel and represent them before God. And that is significant because the one who waged war against the Greeks, essentially a war of unity amongst the people of Israel was the high priest, the kohen gadol who was representing Aaron in his office, and ultimately the one who held all the names of the tribes of Israel upon his heart. And if it doesn’t already reminisce to you what we are going through right now, I will say it outright and explicitly. These harrowing days for us began, and it might be quite awkward and uncomfortable for us to recall and say, began with the only news coming from Israel being conflict and a nation torn asunder, a nation that could not get along, that couldn’t see past its differences, that actually emerged into, dare I say, hatred of one another on levels that we had really not seen up until that point. Interestingly, with very much of the same issues that Joseph and his brothers had problems with.

And now a war, a war where astonishingly, there is a deep unity that is emerging, a closing of ranks of sorts. But what’s important to recognise that Hanukkah didn’t solve the problem, it was just a respite. It was an island of beauty in the midst of terrible difficulty. And we deteriorated into the destruction of the second temple and a loss of our land after Hanukkah. And although it feels very strong for all of us, I believe, to be able to see the unity, solidarity, and strength of the people, of the Jewish people, those rifts and differences do not just disappear. They lie now at the deeper levels within us. And the question of course, is for all of us, what will we do when the dust settles? And please God, it will, and we will succeed in this war and we will reemerge as a stronger and different, more educated and understanding nation. But what will we do? We cannot go back to how we were dealing with it before. We need to remember that at the end of the day, we are a familial nation. We are brothers and sisters. Every single one of us knows someone that is either in combat, has died, is taken, is connected to a hostage or their families, by, I would venture to say, no more than three degrees of separation at the most. We are a familial nation. Every single one of us feels this in our hearts deeply. And how will we come out of this? Will we forget, go back to our routine or will we remember this central lesson? And I believe that as we light the lights of Hanukkah tonight and the subsequent days that we must look at those candles, we must look at those lights and remember the light that our people has brought to this world and it is a significant one.

And the light that is within all of us that has chosen to survive through 4,000 years of trial and tribulation, it is not just a miracle from top down on God’s part that we’ve survived. We as a people, yes, there are many that have, and there have been profound casualties, too horrific to even speak of. But with all of it, here we are, a nation, thriving, strong, alert, aware, still contributing to an entire world in ways that are far out of proportion to our numbers. What will we do? How will we be? We’ve chosen, we’ve chosen to carry on through all of this history and there is future yet for our people. And the lights of Hanukkah remind us the lights of the light that is in us in terms of our own souls as a people, the light of our people collectively and what we bring to a world and the light ultimately of our future. And it is, I believe that the story of Hanukkah is as relevant and as contemporary as it was close to 2000 years ago. With that, I close and I thank you for your time. Again, I apologise for coming on a bit late. And I suppose if there are any questions I could answer a bit. Shall I look at the questions? I suppose I had some in, let me time.

• [Facilitator] Yes, if you’re able to do that, otherwise I can read them out too.

• I can see them, I can see them, thank you.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, it is true, yet Aaron failed to stop the people from building the golden calf, that is true. Not only did he not stop them, he aided them in building the golden calf. Sometimes the desire that one has for supporting the people goes a little bit too far, which is what Aaron wanted to do. And he learned from that and was able to rectify that. Yes, it was definitely a mistake. Moses was killed as a Jew. Why was Aaron not killed four years earlier? It was before the decree.

Q: Someone asked, Moses was set afloat because he would not, he would’ve been killed as a Jew. Why was Aaron not killed four years earlier?

A: It was before the decree. Okay, yeah. Yes, yes.

Q: How would you characterise the rape of Dinah with the issue of integration?

A: It’s a very good question. It was collateral damage, unfortunately. Because what Jacob, this is not an easy question, right? What Jacob wanted to do with the city of Shechem was to engage with the city of Shechem, right? He wanted to interact with them. And he recognised that, you know, this was a terrible calamity that occurred to his daughter and he had to deal with it but his way of dealing with it was to call it all off and run for the hills. But his boys not only decided to call it all off and run for the hills, they used the mode of covenant that we have to destroy these people. And that for Jacob, right? I’m not qualifying whether what they did was right or wrong, but there’s no question that Jacob believed what they did was wrong and he never forgot it. And he waited till the day of his death until he brought it up again in very sharp terms with them.

Q: How do we integrate into society if you’re not welcome?

A: That’s a very good question but there’s an assumption that we are always not welcome. And I don’t think that that’s always the case. I think that it’s very much emerging from a portion of society today and it’s harrowing, it’s extremely destabilising to hear. But there are friends out there, there are friends out there. And one of the things I think that we learn about integrating in society is that in order for us to do it well, we need to be strong and secure in ourselves. And that’s the first order of business.

Q: What can we do today as part of diaspora?

A: There’s so much that we can do today as part of the diaspora. I think that there is a question of what it is that we do locally in terms of our own communities, to strengthen our own communities. There’s a question of what it is that we do in order to support Israel itself, whether it’s our own presence there or the support financially there and so on. But ultimately, if you want to ask me, which I see you are, the first port of call, the first thing that we do is to motivate ourselves to unity. I genuinely believe, that’s not, you know, that’s not just some, you know, pie in the sky or high flying idea that is a pipe dream. I mean that we must do, we must make concerted efforts to recognise that our viability on this earth has everything to do with our unity. Now, I don’t mean to say that we should smear over the differences that we have. There are differences that are serious and don’t go away. And we need to have those differences, engage in dialogue, and do the best that we can to be able to come to some level of connection and understanding with it. But if we don’t recognise fundamentally that we are a family and that, you know, you may not always like members of your family, that’s understandable. You may not even like to talk to members of your family.

But oftentimes, unless in extreme situations that same member of the family that you don’t really like or like to talk to, if they were in trouble, if they were, you know, in danger, you would either be on the first plane to help them, the first train to help them or be there to be able to do what it is that you need in order to be able to be there. And in the worst case scenario, if they were dying, you probably would go to pay your respects, on the worst case scenario. We are a familial nation. Bring up the Jew that you can’t stand or that you can’t imagine talking to. And for the majority of that, you know, who would fall into that category for us, for the most that would fall, I’m not saying every Jew, but for the most that would fall into that category for us, we have to remember that they are our brother or sister. And we may not like what they say or what they do, but ultimately it’s us in the world. And if you were in a foreign place where everyone was foreign, speaking foreign language, and that was the only other person there, the likelihood is that’s the person that you would go to speak to first. It’s not if you can’t speak in praise of that person, that Jew that you bring up in your mind, try at the very least not to speak negatively about them. Those are practical points which are worth trying, in my opinion.

Q: I don’t think, Dave, again, this is a question from David Sand. Would you comment that the miracle of the oil lasting eight nights was invented by the rabbis to diminish the contribution of the Maccabees because they invited the Romans to support the Hasmoneans?

A: I think that it’s more complex than that. I think that it’s more complex than that. And I think that if you look, you know, you talk about invented by the rabbis, even the rabbis themselves downplayed the nerot. When you look at our prayers and we talk about Hanukkah, it’s not even mentioned in the prayers and the prayer. So it has its place and it’s significant in terms of what it is that it is but I think that the war is not diminished. It’s just became very, very central to people because it’s what is that we do? It’s an action that we do on the festival. And so people tend to focus on that a great deal.

All righty, I thank everyone for your time and for your attention, which to me is the most precious thing that anyone can give to another person. And I wish everyone a very, very happy and blessed Hanukkah. And may we see peace and strength always within our people in the world. Goodnight.