Ask Your Father: The Tradition Against Greek Heresy

1“What blessing does one say? One says: ‘Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to kindle …’ And where did He command us? Rav Avya said: from ‘You shall not turn aside.’ Rav Nechemyah said: from ‘Ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will say to you.’”¹

2This raises two questions. Why does the Gemara ask “Where did He command us?” only about the mitzvah of the Chanukah lamp, and not about the other mitzvos that Chazal instituted? With those, it is obvious to the Gemara that “all the words of the Rabbis were based on ‘You shall not turn aside.’”² And what difference does it make whether we learn it from the verse “You shall not turn aside” or from “Ask your father”? What does the one who says “from ‘Ask your father’” add to the one who says “from ‘You shall not turn aside’”?

3We also find that Chazal said the Greek kingdom decreed against Israel: “Write for yourselves on the horn of the ox that you have no portion in the God of Israel.”³ Why did the Greeks decree that this be written on the horn of an ox, of all places?

4Let us first raise one more point, about the wording of Al HaNissim: “when the Greek kingdom stood …” Why the word keshe'amdah, literally “when it stood,” that is, rose up? It would have been more fitting to say keshegazrah, “when it decreed.”

5We can explain all this in the way of avodah, the service of Hashem. The root of the Greeks' way was to spread false ideas and to instill the feeling, Heaven forbid, of “my strength and the might of my hand …,”⁴ and so to deny the Creator's providence. That is why they said, “Write for yourselves on the horn of the ox.” The ox stands for strength, as the verse says, “Abundant produce comes through the strength of the ox,”⁵ and they wanted to instill the outlook of “my strength and the might of my hand.” This is also why the prayer says “when the Greek kingdom stood.” The word recalls the verse “and the substance, hayekum, that was at their feet,” which Rashi explains: “This is a person's money, which keeps him standing on his feet.”⁶ In other words, the Greeks came against Israel to put doubts about faith into the people's hearts. They said that a person must exert himself and toil to earn a living, and must study Greek wisdom. This is “when the wicked Greek kingdom stood against Your people Israel”: standing hints at toil for the sake of livelihood and money, and the Greeks came to instill this evil way of theirs in Israel too.

6This is what the second opinion adds by learning the mitzvah of Chanukah from “Ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will say to you.” The Greeks wanted to uproot faith in Hashem and bring in false ideas. The way to overcome this “grievous evil”⁷ is to hold fast to the customs of our fathers, and to the hiddur and fine details of the mitzvos that have come down to us, generation after generation, through the tradition of our fathers. That is what the verse “Ask your father, and he will tell you” speaks of. This also answers our first question, why Chazal asked “Where did He command us?” about the mitzvah of Chanukah in particular. Their question was: where can we learn how to stand against the heresy of the Greeks? And this is the second opinion's addition: we learn it from the verse “Remember the days of old … ask your father” in particular. The verse means that we should remember how our fathers went through the wilderness, “in a land not sown,”⁸ for this teaches us the middah of trust in Hashem, the character trait of relying on Him. So in the days of Chanukah we must strengthen ourselves in this, holding fast to the tradition of our fathers. Amen, may it be His will.