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A guard
walks past statues of wounded Amazones, made between 400 and 350 BCE, at the
National Archeological Museum in Athens. (photo credit:REUTERS).
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Athens vs Jerusalem. By Shlomo Riskin. Jerusalem Post, December 3, 2015.
Riskin:
A significant distinction between the Greek and Hebrew cultures reverberates to this day.
Contemporary
Western culture is fundamentally the product of two great ancient
civilizations: Greco-Roman and Hebrew (or Judeo-Christian, as it is generally
described).
More
than two millennia ago (in 165 BCE), the Hasmonean-Judeans won a military
victory against the Syrian Hellenists, granting Judea the opportunity to
reclaim and cleanse our Second Holy Temple and develop the Second Commonwealth
largely independent of the heirs of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic
conquest of the “fertile crescent.”
Much
has been written about the clash of ideology separating Jerusalem from Athens.
Nineteenth-century German poet-philosopher Heinrich Heine suggested that for
the Greeks beauty was truth whereas for the Hebrews truth was beauty, and
late-20th-century philosopher William Barrett maintained that while the Greeks
idealized philosophic speculation and theoretical meditation, the Hebrews
emphasized moral and ethical conduct in daily human behavior as being the
highest good.
Allow
me to suggest a more significant distinction between the Greek and Hebrew
cultures, one which reverberates to this very day. The answer to the Greek
Riddle of the Sphinx “Who walks on four in the morning, on two in the afternoon
and on three in the evening?” is Man, who crawls about as a baby, stands
upright as an adult and has need of a cane in old age. C.M. Bowra, the great
interpreter of the wisdom of Hellas, suggests that indeed Man is the answer,
not only to the Riddle of the Sphinx but to every question worth asking.
Pythagoras taught that “Man is the measure of all things”; for the famed
sculptor Praxiteles, the human form was the most perfect of all forms (and
therefore for the ancient Greeks circumcision was a heinous crime because it
maimed the perfect human body); and the chorus of Sophocles’s Antigone iterates
and reiterates, “Many are the awesome-awful (Hebrew nora, nora’ot) phenomena,
but none more awesome-awful than man.”
Hence
the gods on Mount Olympus were formed in the image of man, endowed with human
and mostly physical characteristics: Zeus was the most powerful, unpitying and
terrible; Aphrodite was the goddess of love, beauty and pleasure; Hermes was
the god of speed. The gods were created in the image of humans, warring and
jealous human-like beings, idealizing their most physical and even animalistic
traits.
JUDAISM
IS the very antithesis of this. Human beings are created in the image of God,
duty bound to walk in God’s ways and to emulate His Divine characteristics of
love, compassion, patience, loving-kindness and truth. “Just as the Holy One
Blessed be He is called compassionate, so must you be compassionate, just as He
grants His grace freely, so must you grant grace freely....”
(Maimonides,
Book of Commandments, Positive Command 8). These characteristics are not
physical but rather spiritual; characteristics of the soul.
I would
submit that from the pre-Sophists of the Hellenistic era until the
post-Modernists of today, there are only two fundamental ideologies of the
human being: Is he a complex animal, the most fit species to survive because he
was the most powerful (sometimes as a result of superior intelligence leading
to knockout weaponry) and to the victor belong the spoils, or is he rather a
child of the Divine created in the Divine Image, inalienably free, inviolate
and inviolable and Right will eventually triumph over Might, in a perfect world
under the Kingship of the Divine? Greek-Sparta-Rome taught the former, touting
war as the ideal because war tests the mettle of the man, separates the strong
from the weak, the brave from the cowardly; “arma virumque cano,” “of arms and
virility do I sing,” calls out the Aeneid. And this view spawned Babylon,
Persia, Rome, Aryan-Nazism, Stalinist (and Putinist) Communism and extremist
Islam – father of ISIS.
Abraham
taught the latter, “commanding his children and his household after him to
observe the way of the Lord, to do compassionate righteousness and moral
justice, chosen by God to become a great nation to bring blessing to all the
families of the earth” (Genesis 12:2, 3, 18:18-19).
Abraham’s
seed, and all of those who accept the teaching of the God whom Abraham, the
father of a multitude of nations, discovered, are to be God’s witnesses,
priest-teachers to all of humanity, promulgating a world of peace and human
redemption, a world in which the strong will not take it as their right to
destroy and inherit the weak but will rather take responsibility for the weak
and teach them how to become strong.
HENCE,
FROM time immemorial great wars have been fought between those who believe in
power and those who believe in morality. Nietzsche even taught that those who
believe in morality place limits upon, and severely threaten, those who believe
in power, which may well explain the anti-Semitism suffered by Jews throughout
human history.
It is
not correct to link together the three major world religions – Judaism,
Christianity and Islam – as being monotheistic, and thus against the rule of
Power.
That is
true of Judaism, which believes that God created humankind in His Image, and
God created everyone equally free to believe in whatever he may wish to believe
as long as it does not imply bringing undue suffering to any innocent human
being. That is true of contemporary Christianity, post-Nostra Aetate, but it is
not true of jihadist Islam, preaching a holy war of domination and subjugation
and even extinction of any people who do not believe in Islam’s right to
dominate.
Abraham
did not merely discover monotheism; he discovered ethical monotheism, a God
demanding compassionate righteousness and moral justice.
Anyone
who believes in one deity, who urges terrorist jihad, is a mono-satanist, not a
mono-theist, having transformed our loving God into a hating Satan.
Textbooks,
propaganda machinery and armaments in the hands of these mono-satanists must be
extirpated if the free world is to survive.
And so
the truest distinction between Judaism and Hellenism lies in the question as to
who is really the measure of all things, the ultimate decisor of human
conflict: powerful man or ethical God? From this perspective we may also gain
deeper understanding of the ideological argument between Joseph and his
brothers, an enmity born not only from jealousy and sibling rivalry.
You
will remember the grand dream of our forefather Jacob, truly the national
vision of Israel, a ladder uniting heaven and earth, spirituality and
materialism, with God above the ladder charging Israel’s eternal seed to fill
the earth with the blessing of compassionate righteousness and moral justice
(Gen. 28:13-15).
HOW
DIFFERENT are the dreams of Joseph, newly appointed heir-apparent to the
birthright, just having received the tunic of many colors from his father: the
sheaves of grain of the brothers all bowing down to the sheaf of Joseph; the
sun, moon and 11 stars all bowing down to Joseph! Joseph, not God, is at the
center of his dream. No wonder the brothers are ready to banish him from their
family and mission.
Subsequently
Joseph, as a result of his exile and peregrinations, comes to realize that it
is indeed God who is at the helm as final guide and arbiter. When he stands
before Pharaoh to interpret his dream, he clearly states, “It has nothing to do
with me; it is God who will respond to bring peace to Pharaoh”; and even
earlier in his Egyptian experience, Joseph finds the moral strength to resist the
seduction of Potiphar’s wife because he could not “sin before God” (Gen. 39:9).
It is hardly coincidental that these biblical readings always fall out in the
period of Hanukka.
Hanukka
sameah.
