QUESTION: I’m wondering about who the real reshaim (evil people) were in the story of Chanukah. Sometimes we seem to blame it on the Misyavnim, the Jewish Hellenizers, but then it seems like it was really Antiochus and the Greeks who caused all the trouble, like we say in Al Hanissim
ANSWER: You have to know that in the siddur when you read that “the kingdom of the Greeks arose against the Jewish people”, it’s not the whole truth. Because the truth is that the whole calamity was caused by Jews, by renegade Jews who wanted to adopt the ways of the Greeks. Only that these Jews used the Greeks as a way of forcing their fellow Jews to forsake the Torah.
Only that the Sages who established this prayer always tried to protect the honor of the Jewish people. They didn't want the truth to be known and so they blamed the Greeks, the ones who actually did the work of the renegade Jews, and they left out the cause, the ones who caused the Greeks to come against the nation.
And at the end of the whole thing, finally Antiochus, after many wars, he became so disgusted that he said: "What do they want of me? Why are the Jews dragging me into their own personal problems? The Jews want to keep their religion, what business is it of mine?"
And at the end he gave up, just before he died. He gave up the whole business because he wasn't interested in the whole thing. Only that he was being prodded and pushed constantly by these Hellenizer Jews.
It's only from people like me who like to rake up mud and tell the dirt that you’ll hear this. And I wouldn't tell it either, but since it's already told – Josephus tells the whole story and the Book of Maccabees tells the whole story anyhow – so now it's no secret anymore. It was Jews who caused the whole thing.
Reprinted from the Parshas Vayigash 5785 email of Toras Avigdor, - (December 1970)
