Remember when assimilation was the greatest threat to the Jewish people?
Those were the good old days.

For much of the American Jewish half-century after 1945, the fear was that Jews would assimilate quietly – through intermarriage, cultural neglect, or just indifference. After October 7, things have changed: the danger is not only the erosion of Jewish identity, but – Bondi Beach – the threat to Jewish life itself.
This is not an exceptional moment in Jewish history. It is a return to millennia-old business as usual: Jew hatred. The desire to replace the Jews has reemerged, now untethered from any single city or empire, and expressed through a brazen global universalism. Its language is moral, progressive, and abstract. Its aim is familiar: the attempted erasure of the Jew.

And yet, the older danger of assimilation – for which the Greek exile remains the model – has not disappeared. It is the only one of the four exiles to occur when the Jews are physically present in their land. Unlike Haman on Purim, the Greeks did not seek to kill Jews. Their ambition was subtler: to exile Jews from themselves. This is the internal exile of assimilation, one in which Jewish presence could remain, as long as signs of Jewish difference did not.

Under Greek rule, the Temple in Jerusalem retained its external form even as its meaning was hollowed out, transformed into a gymnasium. Though not destroyed, the oil was rendered unusable. The aim was neutralization rather than obliteration, and the same logic applied to Jewish life more broadly. A Hellenized Jew could retain external markers of identity while losing the inner orientation that allowed those markers to speak. What disappeared was not the external form, but the inner capacity to read the world as charged with meaning.

That logic has not vanished. ‘We love Jews, but hate Zionists’ is simply its latest formulation. Jewish presence is affirmed in the abstract, while Jewish peoplehood and historical claims are rejected outright. Jewish progressives speak this same language with confidence, often with moral outrage, unaware that the argument they endorse does not stop with its present targets. They are today’s Hellenists embracing a universalism that history shows will eventually be turned against them. That history begins with the Greeks.

Verboten!

The Greeks targeted three practices – each a sign of Jewish identity: banning Shabbat observance, the sanctification of the new month, and brit milah. Not arbitrary prohibitions, each contributed to a world of legible signs.

The collective observance of Shabbat testifies to the covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people. The declaration of the new month by the court in Jerusalem shows human beings partners in the sanctification of time. Brit milah inscribes God’s covenant into the body itself. That the divine does not stand apart from the world but speaks through it – in time, in flesh, in ordinary life – was what the Greeks could not abide.

The translation of the Torah into Greek, commanded by the Macedonian King Ptolemy, followed the same pattern. Torah became a book like any other, assigned a place on a shelf, a call number in a library, available for consultation but no longer addressed to a people. What translation cost was more than meaning; it displaced the reader. The Jewish insider becomes outsider.

Translation completed what the gymnasium had begun. The Temple could stand. Sacred works of Judaism could survive. Jewish life could even continue. What could not remain was the sense of being addressed. Once Torah becomes a book among books, it no longer places a claim on the reader. It can be mastered, compared, or set aside. The reader stands over it, not within it. At that point, Jewish life loses its grammar. The signs remain, but they no longer speak.

This is the moment to which Hanukkah responds.

Focus!

The tradition speaks of the hod of the Hanukkah lights. This does not mean brightness or display, but the capacity of the light to make recognition possible. The oil burning for eight days instead of one shows that nature’s seemingly immutable laws are subject to change. For this reason, the miracle of the lamp itself is acknowledged first. Through it, what Maimonides calls the most beloved mitzvah, illuminates the rest of the world.

This light refuses the Greek habit of mind in which events remain ordinary, explicable, reduced to necessity or law. The light does not change what happens; it transforms perception. Purim, the complementary rabbinic holiday, focuses on the body – food, drink, and the blurring of distinctions. But Hanukkah, by contrast, is a holiday of focus, of perception, of training the eye to see holiness as God’s presence, even in darkness. The public declaration of the miracle through the Hanukkah lights is a community-wide reminder, even exhortation: Focus.

Our lights allow the world to be read from within, rather than explained away from a distance. They remind us not to stand outside our own story, against translating ourselves into terms acceptable to others.

Where the Greeks sought mastery, Hanukkah teaches attention. The light is small, but it brings the world into focus. Even after catastrophe and trauma, the world still speaks. The lights of the menorah beckon, inviting us to learn how to read once more.