Season 1: Episode 4 - The Greek Encounter

Generated automatically from the audio and lightly corrected. It may contain errors; the recording is the authority.

You know, you don't just tell a story, you live it. And insofar as it's real to you, then it will be real to the people listening. This is Rav Mike, and I'm here to tell the Jewish story. We're riding the waves of time, hoping to catch one that's going to take us straight to the future of which we dream. Episode 4, The Greek Encounter. So we told the story of Shimon Hatzadi, Simon the Righteous, who brought the greatest source of beauty outside of the sacred precincts. He took the beauty outside of the place of holiness in order to meet Alexander the Great on the road to Jerusalem. And I said to you that this is really a literary representation of the encounter between Greek and Jewish culture as they met in the person of Alexander and Shimonat Tzadik.

Now Alexander came and he conquered old Persia. and another version of our story tells that he grants the Jews autonomy when he asks them what they want in return for their holy ways for the fact that he had been seeing visions of Shimon Tzadik in the night before his battles the Jews ask for their autonomy this is going to be an important element that's going to follow us down through the rest of our stories this insistence of the Jews that they must be allowed to live by the rules which rule their lives even at the expense of joining in the larger picture of society. So the Jews ask for autonomy, and he indeed grants it in return for two things. Truth is, at first he asks for three. He requests that a statue of himself be placed in the temple.

But Shimon Tzadik managed to convince him how offensive that would be to the Jews. And I want you to remember that event, because it's going to return to us tenfold in the time of Rome. But instead of placing a statue of him in the temple, he asks that all of the male kohanim, the male priests born in that year, be named Alexander. And he insists that the Jews accept the first year of his reign as year one in dating all legal documents. Now that began on the 1st of Tishrei, Rosh Hashanah, not so long ago, in the year 3449 in the Jewish calendar, and lasted until 5277. That's approximately 1,800 years. But aside from the math, what we see in this story is that the primary linkage between Greek and Jewish culture, and therefore the primary points of conflict, will be through language and time.

Now we're going to end with the story of language, but I want to start with time. So we already noted the discrepancy between traditional Jewish chronology and the conventional chronology, which is rooted in the Greek historians and articulated through academics to our very day, we noted that discrepancy which characterizes the murky nature of the Persian period. We're finally out of the Persian period. Alexander has come, and he will wipe Persia off the map for all intents and purposes. And interestingly enough, the appearance of Alexander and the advent of Greece, which don't forget that vision of Daniel, that if Babylon, which took away the kingdom of flesh and blood of the first temple period and brought kingship itself into the hands of the nations, if Babylon was that head of gold in the vision of Daniel, and Persia, by bringing the Jews back to their homeland in the person of Cyrus and the declaration he made to set them free and to rebuild the temple, if Persia was then the silver arms, now we have the appearance of the body of brass, the solid trunk of Western culture which until this very day finds itself both in conflict and in consonance with the Jews.

So it's not for naught that the discrepancy between Jewish chronology and conventional chronology will come right back together. And whether we see it as the traditional narrative sees it, that it was a personal request from Alexander to begin the count from his day, or it's the more historically oriented effect, that it was a response to the Seleucid Greek kingdom, which succeeded him, and then indeed it was the tradition in the ancient world to begin the counting of dates year one from a new king. It doesn't matter. What we have to delve into is why it is that time comes back together at this point. And in order to know why this is significant, we need to think a little bit about the nature of time in the ancient world.

The ancient world really gave us two senses of time. The first was cyclical. Sunrise, sunset, right? This is the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of the moon, the cycle of the sun rising and the sun setting. It's the most obvious aspect that nature can offer when it comes to time. The second aspect is linear. The primary source of linear awareness of time, of course, is you're born, you live, you die. And it's important to note how personal that is, because, of course, at this point in history, no one has calendars. Forget your iPhone. Most people are not concerned, in fact, about what month or year it happens to be. The Jews, however, are inordinately concerned about the weekly and monthly cycles because of Shabbat and the festivals.

And there is also a yearly seven-year cycle, known as the sabbatical cycle, which they were concerned about for various reasons of the commandments that depend on their presence in the land. but linear time like we said is really not such a concern beyond you're born you live you die now those of you who just observed the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah and entered into the year 5777 may find this quite odd because we indeed have a linear account and almost every culture does indeed have a linear account here's a question for you when does the count of history from creation which is what that calendar, 5777 marks, appear in our tradition. One thing I can tell you for sure is it's not in the Tanakh.

The Hebrew Bible has only one avowedly historical statement in regards to linear time that I'm aware of, meaning speaking backwards as opposed to prophetic prediction of forwards. And it comes in the description of Solomon's building of the temple in the first book of Kings, in the sixth chapter, right at the first line. and it was in the 480th year after the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the 4th year, in the month Ziv which is the second month of Solomon's reign over Israel that he began to build the house of the Lord and it makes perfect sense to me that if the Jewish people were going to note the linear flow of time from a point of origin that it would be from the Exodus region because that indeed was our national birth as is true of so many other cultures that's when we begin to count our time.

So what is the origin of counting time from creation? It appears in my work that Seder Olam Rabbah, that oh-so-important rabbinic chronology is the origin, published by Rabbi Yossi Bar Khalifta in the second century of the Common Era, a good 500 years after the period of which we're speaking now. now the origin is in Seder Olam Rabba but we get a most interesting discussion when we open up the Gemara in Avodah Zara if you want to look it's on 9a and b because there amidst the confused discussion over how long the Persian Greek and Roman colonial rules lasted and as I pointed out to you that Persian period is that mysterious chaos which really precedes the creation of the Jewish world as we know it So there amongst all the confusion and the discrepancies specifically to be found between how the sages counted the year and how court documents record them, we hear the following statement.

The Tandor of Eliyahu taught, The world is to exist 6,000 years. The first 2,000 years are to be void. The next 2,000 years are the period of the Torah, and the following 2,000 years are the period of the Messiah. and through our many sins a number of these have already passed and the Messiah is not yet come. Now, the depth of the discussion on this statement is really beyond our scope but I do want to note that what we see here is that there are two potential drivers for why and how we mark linear time. The beginning and the end. Don't be confused by the Christian calendar which is of course the secular Western calendar today because it's counting from the birth of their Savior, meaning it is focused, the year 2016 is focused on what was.

Even though culturally the Christians are looking forward also to what will be, nevertheless, the calendar enshrines what was. The sages here in the Gemara are implying that we're counting toward the Messiah. And it should be noted that it was the Jews who introduced the dream of redemption. and therefore a sense of progression in time. This is a very important element of Jewish consciousness which lays a foundation for the world. Later when we get please God to the time of the Enlightenment we going to see that Christianity which had taken this redemptive sense of time over from its mother religion the Enlightenment will strip away the religious connotations, the specifically messianic connotations, and it will come up with the notion of progress, that classic Western notion that things are getting better, that we may not be headed somewhere in a teleological specific sense, but we are headed somewhere.

You know, this is all summed up in a phrase which is going to become quite significant when we get to the story of Hanukkah. And that story is right on our horizon. And as we speak about the melding of Greek and Jewish culture, you have to remember that at a certain point, the love is going to go out of the relationship and it will turn to war. And when we mark the Hanukkah holiday, we speak about this phrase of, in those days, at this time. That means there's a cycle through which we're passing every year. We mark it through the months. We mark it through the Jewish calendar. In those days, when we get to winter, we'll mark Hanukkah. But it's those days in the past. But it's at this time of the year.

And what does it teach us? History matters. In those days matters. But what we care about is the future. And so we focus on the message of the past and how it can build us in the present because that will take us toward the redemption of which we dream. So, it could be that Alexander's request to shift the count of years in court documents over to the years of the Seleucid Kingdom actually allowed for a smoothing over of all the chronological inconsistencies around the birth of the rabbinic tradition. And it's important to note that, of course, the rabbis left these inconsistencies scattered throughout their literature for those who would care to look and know. But as we've said before, every notion needs its origin myth.

And here we have the rabbis telling us that it's in the encounter with Greece that their way of knowing the world is born. By the by, there may have been a secondary goal here, is that those 165 years of discrepancy between Jewish traditional chronology and conventional chronology may have actually been hidden, tucked away by the rabbis because the average person wasn't keeping a calendar, as we said. The place that they went to see linear time was in court documents because if I made a real estate deal and sold my home and I happened to be in debt and there was a lien on my house, so we're going to have to sort out what year did I take my loan, what year did I sell the house. That matters to me.

And it's a very powerful and effective way for the sages, whose power base, as we noted way back with Ezra, was based in the courts to actually hide years in the calendar. And in which case, this could be part of their consistent desire to dampen messianic fervor. Remember, that statement in the Gemara of Avodah Zarahoa that we saw is that the end of time, that 7,000th year, the Sabbath of the millennia, is the time of Messiah. And we will see, once we come to the destruction of the Second Temple and the revolts with rock to the Jewish-Roman world afterwards that the rabbis became very wary of premature messianic fervor. And to hide 165 years, making it not 57-77, but rather 59-42, if you're heading for year 6000, that's a significant difference.

But this is all supposition. What we do know for sure is that indeed, the counting of year one in all court documents begins in the year 311, which according to historians is the foundational year of the Seleucid Empire, even though our narrative will attach it to Alexander. Now, Alexander's journey to the east and his conquest was meteoric, both in its extent and in its duration, meaning he was a flash across the sky of history. And before we get to how it ended, I want to note one very important event for the Jewish story, is that in 331, he founds the city of Alexandria. Truth is, he founded a lot of cities named Alexandria, a modest man that he was, but the one I'm talking about is the one which still stands today in Egypt, right at the delta of the Nile.

And it's important to us because the history of Alexandria is bound up with the history of the Jews. In fact, the Jews were present at the foundation of the city, according to Josephus, and they were granted specific rights equivalent to those of the Greek citizens. Remember, one retelling of our story, the encounter of Alexander and Simon the Righteous on the roadside there, is that what the Jews wanted was autonomy. And that's a powerful thing to participate in a Greek polis, a Greek city-state, to have the privileges of citizenship and yet to be exempted from the idolatrous practices which were part and parcel of the social fabric. This is the pattern that the Greeks will set in the Hellenistic world and will carry itself right through the Middle Ages, that we are both in and out of society.

That we are fervently in protection of our rights, and yet that we are just as fervently in avoidance of participation in the idolatrous culture which enshrines them. Now, the Hellenistic century is going to become the embodiment of Hellenistic culture. Hellenistic culture, in a nutshell, is the fusion of the ancient Greek classical Hellenic world with that of the Near East, Middle East, South, West, Asia area that we're speaking of now. and it is a fascinating phenomenon that Greek culture was a steamroller and yet it wasn't a steamroller that erased what lay before it it was a steamroller that caused a melding between all the cultures and the power of the ancient Greek world there's a personality in Alexandria who's going to be very important for us in understanding the challenges and the potential that exist within Hellenism and that's Euclid I don't want to give anybody the willies talking about geometry.

But Euclid, of course, is the author of The Elements, that fundamental work of geometry. And he's not only that, he is an iconic figure who represents the power of the logical mind to know truth. Because in a sense, math, and in particular geometry, is a world of absolute truth. You work from axioms to postulates to theorems, and once you have proved it, it is true. There really is only one line that can pass through a point and be perpendicular to another line. And this is an absolute truth, however, which exists within the mind, rather than being dependent on being revealed from without. And we can see in that both its appeal to the rabbinic world, as well as the challenge it poses to traditional Jewish thought.

The Hellenistic Jewish culture, which will emerge out of Alexandria, is going to have a story all its own, and we will be tracing it right down through to the birth of Christianity. Now, moving on. Alexander conquers, legendarily, all the way to the Indus Valley before he dies in 323. Interestingly enough for our story, he dies in Nebuchadnezzar's palace, the palace of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar, who was that head of gold, who took kingship away from the Jewish people and gave it over into the hands of the nation. It is in his palace that Alexander dies. And what was he doing there? Well, he's searching for the legendary gold of the East, of course, because part of the background, or even I would say the topography on which our story is taking place, is that the world is changing.

You know, the ancient world, the economy was based on what we think of as reciprocity, or one could really think of as debt. I know that many were probably taught in your 101 economics classes that barter is the economic system that preceded coinage. But the reality is it's not entirely true. Because that story they told you about the chicken selling guy who went to the shoe selling guy and gave him a chicken in order to get his shoes sounds nice, but it doesn't really make sense. Because the reality is the shoe selling guys likely need a lot more chickens than the chicken selling guy is on any given day. So instead what happens is that the chicken selling guy gets a pair of shoes and in return he has a debt.

And that debt is expressive of the reciprocity which is at the foundation of all traditional societies. And that reciprocity itself rests on an intimacy of association, a strong social fabric. And here comes the juggernaut of Greece, the cultural steamroller, which is going to break up the traditional ties of family, clan, society, and replace them with a more multicultural, international view. And not only that, but Alexander, of course, is riding the head of a conquering army. Where did he get the money to pay all these soldiers? He went into debt, and therefore he had to conquer more in order to pay them. And as they conquered more, he accrued more debts, because, of course, more conquest is more money.

And in order to take care of that, he would have to conquer more, and therefore you would accrue more debts and you'd have to pay more money. You see where this is going. It's a cycle that has not yet ended. And we're going to trace this line as well. The line from conquest to tribute to taxation to advertising is going to be a very important part of our story And Alexander really sets the ball rolling that as long as you keep pushing the edge of empire then the wealth can flow back to center. It's like a game of musical chairs, and as long as nobody stops the music, we all have where to sit. So interestingly enough, it's Alexander, according to many historians, who introduces coinage into our story.

And what does coinage represent? Coins represents the absolute opposite of reciprocity. Like I said, reciprocity is that aspect of traditional society that allows relationships to be the basis for debt, or really the opposite, for debt to be the basis of a relationship. The chicken-selling guy goes to the shoemaker, and the shoemaker gives him a pair of shoes that are going to last him for a year or two. And then any time the shoemaker needs a chicken, he'll come back and he'll get it. And why are they willing to trust each other? Because they're neighbors, because they share culture, because they share intimate family relationships. Alexander's soldiers show up and they need a pair of shoes. They're here today, gone tomorrow.

They're going to take some round piece of coinage and give it to the shoe seller. They'll take their shoes and they'll never see each other again because it's coinage that allows for a completely impersonal relationship in commerce. I want you to keep that in mind because a part of our story is the dissolution of traditional society. So Alexander dies in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar seeking that legendary gold of the East. And legendarily, as long as we're speaking about legends, he, on his deathbed, when his generals gather around him and say, but who will succeed you? He looks up and says, the best amongst you. And then he dies. And thus begins the wars of the Diodati. His successor generals, none of whom were powerful enough to dominate the empire which he had welded together in the brief years of his conquest.

And therefore, What emerges will be four different empires. The two that we're concerned about are the Ptolmeic Empire, which is based in the area of modern-day Egypt, and the Sleucid Empire, which is based in the area of modern-day Syria. These are what we will now know as the Hellenistic kingdoms, which are the successors to the mighty empire of Alexander the Great. And with the breakup into these empires, and the advent of cities like Alexandria, which allow for a fusion of the Hellenic classic Greek culture together with local culture, the stage is set for the emergence of a Hellenistic Jewish culture. Because remember, this is a story about Jewish consciousness in its historical context. We want to know how the Jews know the world.

And in order to get a real sense of how the Jews were knowing the world in this day, it's useful to look back at the Mishnahh in Pirkei Avot the Mishnahh in the teachings of the ethics of our fathers we already mentioned the first two one was the chain of attribution from Moshe to Joshua to the elders, to the prophets, to the men of the great assembly and we spoke about them we also mentioned the second which was the fact that Simon the Righteous who met Alexander who represents the encounter with Greek culture was of the remnants of the man of the great assembly. But who received the tradition from Shimon Hatzadi? Antigonus, man of Soho. Now before we get to what he said, just pause for a second.

Shimon is a good Jewish boy. He's got a biblical name. What do I know about this Antigonus? For that's just short of Rabbi Christopher. But according to the Mishnahh, he has that absolute necessary element of authentic tradition and the authority to wield it. And what did he say? Do not be as servants who are serving the master in order to receive a reward. Rather, be as servants who are serving the master not in order to receive a reward. And may the fear of heaven be upon you. Here we see another element of the evolution of thought which I labeled as the theology of exile. I mean, it's a beautiful thing what he's asking us to do, that we should do what is right because it's right. That we should serve the Master because that is what we're meant to do, and not in hopes of receiving a reward.

Because, of course, anyone who serves in order to receive a reward ultimately is serving themselves on some level. And yet, this runs counter to so much classic biblical thought. If you listen to my words, the rains will fall, the grass will grow, the cattle will be fat. That we serve God in order to survive and thrive in the world, in the biblical view. And I don't think that Indigitus denied that. What he's after, however, is a way of living in a world where the complexities of life and the nature of the hiddenness of the divine that we mentioned in our discussion of the men of the Great Assembly don't contradict the duties of the Torah. But he also added, may the fear of heaven be upon you, because it's a thin step between serving a master not in order to receive award, and believing that there's no reward at all, and therefore no reason to fear punishment.

Because in fact, Antigonus of Soho's teaching has within it a time bomb. It has within the question of why am I doing this at all? And even though this Mishnahh does not have a Gemara commentary upon it, most of the tractates of the Mishnahh are spoken out, discussed, and analyzed in the Gemara. But, interestingly, ethics of our fathers, Pirkei Avot does not have such a thing. There is a longer version, the 2.0 version, which we call Avot de Rabinathan. And there, in the discussion of Antigna Sosok was teaching, we learned that he had two students who listened to his word and walked away very confused. And they said that what he meant was that there is no reward. specifically Boethus and Tzadok, who founded the Sadducees and the Boethusians, the two sectarian, schismatic movements that emerged at this point in the 3rd century before the Common Era, at the time of the Hellenistic Judaism, at the time of the philosophical challenges to the traditional Jewish ways of thought, they denied that there was either an afterlight or a resurrection of the dead.

Two principles which become central to rabbinic theology and, of course, are central to the notion that we have a future. What are they saying? There is no future. Live for today. Not necessarily in the empty consumerist fashion which we think of that phrase in our time, but nevertheless we're going to see that this is the birth of the sectarianism, which in many ways will define define the Second Temple period, and ultimately bring about its second destruction. Now, I made a reference to language right at the beginning of our episode, and we said that the two things which Alexander asked of Shimon Tzadik when Greece and the Jewish people met out there on the road to Jerusalem were that all of the male priests born in that year be named Alexander.

And notice, Antigonus has followed in that route in being named such a Greek name. The other thing he asked was the fixing of time. We spoke about time, but the extent of the power of language as a bridge between Greek and Jewish culture really begins to emerge in the reign of Ptolemy II. He is really the powerful shaper of the Ptolemaic inheritor to Alexander's Alexander's kingdom, based in Egypt, as we said. Tolanen II reigns from approximately 285 to 246 before the Common Era. And it is he who shepherds in a new linguistic era. You know, the Mishnahh in Megillah says that the only language that a book of Scripture, meaning the Torah, is permitted to be written in other than Hebrew is in Greek. And why does that matter to us?

Well, the Gemara goes on and tells a very interesting story. It was taught that King Ptolemy brought together 72 elders and placed them in 72 separate rooms without telling them why he'd brought them together. And then he went into each one of them and said, translate for me the Torah of Moshe, your master. And God prompted each one of them with a miracle, and they all had the same idea because of course every translation is an interpretation and there are many things in the Torah which if they are separated from the traditional understanding could appear quite problematic like let us make man in our image that plural there just seems to be an open door of the idolatrous culture within which the rabbis found themselves and indeed that's the example that the Gemara gives that they all had miraculous guidance and translated it as I shall make man in my image and likeness.

72 rabbis in 72 separate rooms all translating in the same way tells you that Tolmi didn know the Jews so well because it might have been a greater miracle if he put 72 rabbis in one room and they'd gotten the same translation. Nevertheless, Josephus also tells the story, and he also places the emphasis on the Greek desire to have a copy of the Torah, because Tolmi, legendarily, was the founder of the library at Alexandria, and any library would be lacking if you didn't have the Torah on the Jew shelf. But both stories, as well as a third document, which is known as the Letter of Aristias, present it in a narrative fashion as the Greek desire to have a copy in Greek of the Jewish Torah. And in fact, historians will tell us that this translation, which is known as the Targum Shivim, the Septuagint, the translation of the Seventy, as we can see from the story, is the first major translation of any document from an oriental language into Greek.

And it becomes critical in the Jewish culture of Greece. Not of Greece, sorry, but of the Greek-speaking Jewish culture because the Alexandrian Jews who were there at the beginning of the city quickly adopt Greek as their primary language. I mean, I'm speaking to you in English right now, aren't I? And Philo of Alexandria, the very important first century thinker tells us that it was already being used, this Greek translation, this Septuagint, was already being used for public Torah readings in Alexandria from the first century before the common era. Meaning that just like Jews today take the Torah out of the ark, lay it down on the bimah, on the lectern, and open it and read publicly. It's a very important part of our weekly service.

And no one would imagine just taking out an English language Torah written on parchment or on hide or whatever, but Philo says they were taking it out, written in Greek and reading it in public. This Septuagint has a long and complex story because ultimately we're going to see that there are three competing texts of the Torah which will emerge in this time. One is what's known as the Masoretic text, the traditional text which is what exists in the Hebrew Bible today, in which the analysis of documents from the late Second Temple times are now telling us are reliable, at least for the last 2,000 years. The second is the Septuagint, this Greek translation, because from a critical perspective, we can see that it was not translated from exactly the same text as the Masoretic text.

And the third is what's known as the Samaritan Pentateuch, which is kind of a fun word you can use to impress your friends. but amongst all of these documents there's a very big question as when does the Septuagint get rejected by the sages and come together with their adherence to the Masoretic, to the traditional text well, it will be ultimately the adoption of the Christians of the Septuagint as their primary text which leads to its rejection by the rabbis in fact, early church fathers will claim that the Septuagint was a divinely inspired translation. In fact, it reflected the word of God more precisely than the Hebrew original. Now this is consistent with Christian thought of its day, and we'll get into that discussion when we get to the birth of Christianity.

But again, for our purposes, we need to understand that the emergence of a Greek version of the Torah, the Septuagint, is going to be an event of extreme importance in Jewish history. And in fact, I'd like to challenge a little bit the sort of narrative frame which Josephus, the Gemara, and the letter of Aristias present. Because though they all present the story and place the emphasis on the Greek desire to have a copy of the Torah, it seems that Philo, in his simplicity, is indication that the Jews were using this as a public document back from the first century before the Common Era, only about a hundred years after its translation, indicates to us that it was indeed the Jews who wanted such a translation.

That there was a Greek-speaking Jewish culture which emerged in Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish culture, which will be a major cultural competitor in its day with the emerging rabbinic culture based in the land of Israel. Now, if you want to understand how significant this event is, then you have to understand that every tenth of David, the tenth day of the month of David, the Jewish world fasts. And we fast for many things. One of the things we fast for is the translation of the Torah into Greek. And that's somewhat astounding in and of itself, but it's even more complex when you compare it with the fact that the Torah itself, in the book of Davarim, in the 27th chapter, in the 8th line, says you shall write upon the stones all the words of this Torah very clearly.

God commands Moshe to write out the Torah on giant stones and to place them at the entrance to the land of Israel. And that very clearly, according to the Sages, means in all 70 languages. Meaning that on one hand, in the mind of the rabbis, God himself commands Moshe to translate the Torah into every possible language which can be read, and it's a commandment. On the other hand, the Jews of Alexandria, or perhaps Ptolemy the king, desire to translate the Torah into Greek and succeed in doing so, and we mourn it to this very day. 2,500 years later, we're fasting for that. How could that be? I think that the answer actually is quite simple, and it's going to be a keystone to understanding where the Greek and Jewish encounter is headed.

Because ultimately, the tragedy in the translation of the Septuagint is it is the emergence of a Jewish culture which is estranged from its source language, Hebrew, knows the world through Greek member language, is not a code for meaning. I can't just simply translate from one language to another and get a perfect overlap. Language is the way in which I conceptualize my experience and then, and only then, communicate it to others. It's something as simple as saying the word king, and in English it conjures up a guy with a funny hat and a big seat and maybe a lance and armor. Whereas when you say the word melech, there's a completely different host of cultural associations. And so the emergence of a Greek-speaking Jewish culture which sees Greek as its primary language goes together with a diaspora culture, a culture which sees itself as well-rooted outside the land of Israel and legitimately telling its story.

Don't forget, back in the time of Ezra, we noted that the efforts of Ezra were to use the twin tools of exclusion and entirety to draw a strong boundary. And we noted there, using the tool of language as well, to draw a strong boundary between who is in and who is out within the Jewish people in order to be able to enter into right relationship with all the cultures which the Jews would ultimately meet. and also entirety, a sole legitimacy and the ability to dictate the nature of the story which was and therefore the identity which is and the future toward which we're heading. And here we have the emergence with that Hellenistic power of the fusion between Jewish culture and Greek culture. We have the emergence of a competing narrative.

And that narrative is based outside of the land and in a foreign tongue. whereas the Torah which Moshe wrote even though it was in a foreign tongue was there on the edge of the land of Israel because the idea would be that the nations would read what was written there and then eagerly enter into the land to see how it was lived because this, as we head into the conflict of the Maccabean Revolt the story of Hanukkah this is what we need to keep clear that the Torah as it's written is only half the battle ultimately, as we know there is no text without reader It's the nature of the Torah as it is lived which will matter. And this is going to set the stage for the inner struggle for the spirit of the Jewish people, for the nature of our identity, and for the first true crisis which the returnees face since the time of Ezra.

Because the Greek and Jewish cultures may have had love at first sight when they met, but the interpenetration, the loss of self and the bleeding into others is ultimately going to lead to a bloody separation I just want to thank the people at Pardes that's P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L who give me such a beautiful platform to reach such a broad swath of Am Yisrael I want to thank all the folks at the Land of Israel Network helping me get this story out to the world and of course I want to thank Suley Miakob because it's my home and all those people out there, big and small who gave themselves their time and everything in their hearts to make this project happen. I'm Rav Mike Boyer, and this is The Jewish Story.