A Time for Purim, A Time for Hannukah

By Ya'aqov Lawrence Shenkin, Smol Emuni Gap Year Staff

(Article fully published on Substack)

Likely the most famous Hannukah dvar Torah, at least throughout my own childhood, was one which compared and contrasted Hannukah and Purim. The Levush, Rav Mordechai Yoffe, the great poseq of Eastern Europe, explains that Purim contained a distinctly physical threat, whilst Hannukah contained a distinctly spiritual one. On Purim, Haman sought to destroy the Jews physically, by wiping them out entirely, but Antiochus wished to weaken the Jewish spirit, to spread the moral rot of hellenism throughout the minds of the Jewish people (See Mishneh Berurah 670:6). The responses to each danger are met according to their needs: in the Purim story, all the Jews rally around Esther in an attempt to stop Haman. In the Hannukah story, Jews of conscience choose to separate themselves from Jews infected by a morally rotten ideology, even coming into open conflict with them, in order to truly confront the problem of Hellenism.

The common mantra heard in Israel over course of the Gaza War has been: “BeYahad NeNatzeah” - “Together We Shall Win”. It is a rallying cry which demands Jews of different backgrounds to bury their concerns in order for the broader Jewish collective to unite around the single goal of the war effort in Gaza. Such an action for the Jewish people makes sense in the face of a Purim-style threat, which is how many understand the current situation; it is common to hear claims that “all Palestinians wish to kill Jews” or that we must “kill them before they kill us”, and so on. Such threats have existed in the Jewish past, exist to an extent in the Jewish present, as witnessed with a horrific shooting in Sydney on the first night of Hannukah this year, and will continue in the Jewish future, and solidarity amongst different sects of Jews in the face of existential threats has always been an essential aspect to Jewish survival.