There was one Israeli who couldn’t understand why unaffiliated Jews bother to eat sufganiot and play dreidel on Chanukah. After all, wasn’t it the Hasmonean victory that doomed Greek secularism in the Jewish world?
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Until his passing a decade ago there was one Jew living in Tel Aviv for whom Chanukah was a time of mourning. He was a prominent journalist and author and for a short time a minister in the Israeli government. His name was Tommy Lapid. Yes the father of…. |
He once wrote the following in approximately these words: “The victory of the Maccabees because of which we celebrate Chanukah was actually the Jewish People’s greatest failure. Its result was that we remained with our outdated religion and all its stringencies disconnected from the great Greek civilization whose influence spread over the whole rest of the world. If the Greeks had won the war we would have been spared everything that happened to us in our long exile and we would be a happy normal nation today living as part of the family of nations.”
According to Lapid the victory of the Chashmonaim was in fact our downfall and he couldn’t understand why Israel’s secular community continues to celebrate Chanukah with candles sufganiyot dreidels presents and games.
Tommy Lapid was an intriguing personality. I once had a conversation with him in which he confessed to me that he was a total ignoramus when it came to Judaism; he was 25 years old when he first laid eyes on a pair of tefillin. And it seems that he was also lacking a basic understanding of Jewish history despite his sharp intellect and broad education.
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