Chanukah 5770/2009 - Jewish Infertility

Chizuk
The story of Chanukah comes to teach us how history can take the
most unlikely turns and produce the most improbable victors.
SHAAREI TIKVAH/ CHANUKAH 2009
almost overnight, and through the tattered Iron Curtain
450,000 Jews exited to Israel. Within a decade, the Jewish
population of Israel had swelled by a booming 10%, and all
mention of the demographic threat disappeared from the
media.
Now Phil, who dearly loves Israel, is convinced that we
will commit political suicide. After the failure of Oslo and
the near-fatal offers at Camp David, pro-Israel columnists in
American media warned that if the U.S. and Europe continue
to push Israel into dangerous concessions, the map of the
Middle East which appears in Palestinian textbooks – with
Israel totally absent – may yet prove accurate. Agreeing with
them, Phil opines that Israel’s leaders lack the political will to
take the steps necessary to disempower the Palestinian Authority.
Without such blatant measures, Israel’s future is
bleak.
I cannot argue with Phil’s facts and figures, but I know
that God is not bound by them. The story of Chanukah
comes to teach us how history can take the most unlikely
turns and produce the most improbable victors.
Chanukah
What would the experts of 167 B.C.E. have said about the
chances of the old priest Mattathias and his family and
friends defeating the mighty army of the Syrian Greek empire?
I can see their pronouncements now:
“An ultra-Orthodox priest and his reactionary compatriots
have raised the banner of revolt against not only the prevailing
rule of the Seleucid Empire, but also against all of
modern Greek culture and enlightenment. This motley band
of guerrilla fighters is outnumbered more than 4-1 by the Seleucid
army, which boasts some 40,000 professional troops
equipped with the cutting edge of military technology, as
well as the ultimate weapon – a herd of elephants trained
for battle, against which no warriors can stand.
“The Maccabees, as this reactionary rebel force is called,
are opposed not only by the considerable Greek population
on the coastal plain, but also by a large proportion of the
Jewish inhabitants, who have, over the last century and a half,
adapted to the world-wide hegemony of Greek language,
culture, and religion. Thus, the Maccabees have initiated a
civil war, targeted at their own progressive fellow Jews, who
are called Hellenists. As the Hellenists comprise the wealthiest
and influential segments of Jewish society, the effort to
unseat them is nothing less than preposterous.
“In short, the attempt of the Maccabees to score a military
victory, overthrew the progressive culture which dominates
the whole world, and re-establish their antiquated
religion on the soil of Judea is futile.”
The pundits would have been accurate in their analysis.
After all, who could have predicted that three years after issuing
his rallying cry, “Follow me, all of you who are for God’s
law and stand by the covenant,” Mattathias’s followers would
reconquer Jerusalem, purify the Temple of its pagan desecrations,
and reinstitute the Temple service? Although the
total victory was hard-won – taking over twenty years and
costing the lives of four out of five of Mattathias’s sons, the
Maccabees ultimately triumphed over the Greeks.
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