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   Chanukah celebrates the victory of Judea over Greece, of a small band of Jews over those who sought to subvert their faith and profane the sanctity of their lives.

   In the course of the last four thousand years, many ideologies and cultures have sought to compromise the Jew's allegiance to G-d and His Torah. But there is something unique about the challenge posed by the Hellenists twenty-one centuries ago_something that marks Chanukah as the ultimate triumph of spirit over matter and of light over darkness.

Soil and Water
   In general, the factors that might undermine the integrity of a Jew's faith and his commitment to G-d fall under two categories.

   Most blatant are the challenges of a material sort. The Jew living in 16th-century Europe had a choice: cleave to your faith and suffer humiliation, poverty, frequent expulsion and outright slaughter, or submit to the faith of your "hosts". Twentieth-century America offered the same choice, albeit in more "humane" terms, beckoning to the Jew to shed Shabbat, tefillin and kashrut for smoother distilation in the melting pot and enhanced access to the "American dream." On the individual level, we are daily challenged with the choice of devoting our lives to serve our Creator and fulfill the purpose of our creation, or to pursue physical gratification and material gain.

   More subtle are the ideological challenges: doctrines and philosophies that lay claim to virtue and truth, and may even espouse altruistic behavior and transcendent aims, but are utterly alien to the Jewish soul. A Jew disconnected from his roots and ignorant or unappreciative of his heritage is ready prey for the foreign waters that offer to quench his spiritual thirst.

   Infinitely more noxious is a third category_doctrines that combine the soil of materialism and the well-springs of reason into a lethal muck.

There is something unique about
the challange posed by the hellenist
twenty-one centruies ago something
that marks Chanukah as the ultimate
triumph of spirit over matter and of
light over darkness.

   A person buried in corporeality can claw and dig his way out to sunlight. A person sinking in a sea of spurious reason can struggle to the surface and swim to shore. But he who adds water to his soil_who saturates his materialism with intellectual fluid_creates a morass from which it is infinitely more difficult to extricate himself. When his soul is moved to reach beyond the mundanity of the material, a host of rationalizations rise to still its yen; and when to the fallacy of the alien creed, the grasp of earth pulls him down. The person is thus steadily sucked down, as his efforts of both mind and will to rise above his mired state are counteracted by the bog of idealized hedonism.

   Such was the challenge that faced our forefathers during the Greek domination of the Holy Land: indeed, Yavan, the Hebrew word for the Hellenic culture, means "mud"The Hellenic "reformers" did more than entice and threaten the people of Israel to embrace the body-worship of Greece; they also sought to indoctrinate them with a philosophy that exalted the physical and made its worship a virtue and an ideal. The Greek was not merely pagan; his was a paganism aestheticized by art, glorified by poetry and hallowed by reason. The Greek was no mere materialist, but one who kneaded his earthiest wants with the subliminal waters of his intellect to form a mucilage that fastened on the soul and drew it, inch by inch and limb by limb, into the quamire of Yavan.

Holy Mud
   Mud can be made with the putrid water of sophism. But even water from the most pristine well turns to mud when mixed with soil. Thus, our sages have said: "If the student of Torah is meritorious, the Torah becomes an elixir of life for him; if he does not merit, it becomes a death-potion for him," G-d forbid. The Hebrew word zechut ("merit") also means "refinement", so the above statement can also be read, "If the student of Torah refines himself, the Torah becomes an elixir of life for him; if he does not refine himself, it becomes a death-potion for him." If a person does not refine his soul, cleansing his character from the soil of its baser instincts, the pure waters of Torah become for him a mudpit of depravity: instead of buoying and nourishing his soul, his wisdom and knowledge only feed his ego, justify his iniquities, and aid his manipulation and distortion of the truth.

   Therein lies the eternal lesson of Chanukah: intellect may be man's highest faculty, but it can also be the instrument of his degradation to the lowest depths. Chanukah celebrates the cleansing of the Holy Temple from Hellenic corruption, the triumph of the pristine essence of the Jewish soul_represented by the "small, pure cruse of oil" that burned in the menorah for eight days_over the mud of Greece. We each possess such a "small, pure cruse of oil" in the pith of our souls_a reserve of supra-rational commitment to our Creator, with the power to illuminate our lives with a pure, inviolable light. A light that ensures that our search for water does not leave us mired in muck.