The Real War: “Traditional Judaism vs. Hellenism”

Jews just finished celebrating the Holiday of Hanukkah. This Holiday commemorates the victory of “traditional Judaism” over Hellenism. Although the actual military victory was against the Greek oppressors, the real fight and the key of the war were between the Jews who wanted to hold onto their traditional method and those who wanted to follow the Hellenistic lifestyle.

Although this Holiday commemorates something that happened almost 2200 years ago, the tension between “traditional Judaism” and “Hellenistic Jews” remains and still threatens the survival of the Jewish Nation and, with it, the survival of humanity.

In order to understand this, we have to go back to the very origin of the Jewish people.

The original group of people who assembled around Abraham in ancient Mesopotamia were unique individuals from many assorted and diverse nations and cultures. At that time, they had no genetic, familial, cultural, or religious connections. They were simply highly sensitive and inquisitive people who, on the one hand, felt and understood the inherently egocentric, self-serving, and self-justifying human nature; on the other hand, had a deep and irrepressible desire to rise above and exist against this inherent human nature in order to achieve similarity with and attainment of nature’s all-encompassing system and its force, that operates and creates life based on different qualities than the inherent human nature.

Nature’s singular, life-creating, and life-nurturing force field operates based on totally selfless and unconditional love and bestowal. Without this selfless and unconditional love and bestowal — serving everything “outside of” and against the egocentric self — life would not be possible at all. This is what we can observe in the so-called “circle of life” and also in the interaction between the cells and organs of our biological bodies.

The “forefathers” or “original Jews were unique empirical natural scientists who took it upon themselves to study nature’s singular force and its developmental plan by changing themselves, developing a lifestyle and behavioral pattern that is above and against the inherently egocentric, subjective, and individualistic human nature.

The more they revealed and attained nature’s singular force field and the developmental plan of reality, the more they also understood that Jews — those unique people who follow their method and lifestyle — from generation to generation will also have to try to show and teach others how human beings can rise above and behave against their instinctive nature in order to build human societies that are compatible and integrated with nature’s all-encompassing system.

This Jewish way of life is externally expressed in a special unity and mutual guarantee — where each Jew is absolutely and unconditionally responsible for each and every other Jew — that is achieved and maintained above and against the instinctively selfish, egoistic, and exploitative human nature that tries to prevent and destroy this unity and mutual guarantee. As great Jewish sages wrote, the single most important commandment or principle of the Torah is “Love your Friend as yourself,” as this “brotherly love” above and against the instinctive mutual “unfounded hatred” is the basis of that unity and mutual integration that enabled them to sense nature’s singular operating force through the achieved similarity with it.

This fundamental schism between Jews and the rest of humanity started in ancient Mesopotamia and continued since.

Others instinctively hate Jews because the “Jewish method” built on the selfless and unconditional unity and mutual guarantee is directly against the inherently self-serving, self-justifying, egocentric, and exploitative human nature all people instinctively live by. This is why even religions that developed based on the original teachings of the Torah claimed that they supersede and make obsolete everything the Jews have done or taught.

Since the inherent human ego constantly grows and intensifies — human history is basically the chronicle of this ever-changing and ever-intensifying human ego — even Jews lost the constant inner war with their egos and abandoned their actual and practical method about 2000 years ago with the Destruction of the Second Temple, which also symbolized the destruction of the unique unity and mutual guarantee between Jews due to “unfounded hatred” overcoming their previous “brotherly love.”

Since then, “original Judaism” has become the “Rabbinical Judaism” we know as the “religion of Jews” today, based on certain practical traditions that were supposed to keep Jews together during the time of exile. This “religious Judaism” is devoid of the “inner meaning” of Judaism, which is the original, unconditional, and altruistic unity and mutual guarantee between Jews.

This introduced another dimension of the previous “Jew-hatred,” among others. Although other people hated Jews as the “original Jewish method” went against inherent human nature, at times of great conflicts and crisis, at times when great calamities hurt humanity, people instinctively and unconsciously expected and still expect the Jews to offer the solution and remedy: which is the same unity and mutual guarantee that provide the foundation for Jewish existence and survival for millennia.

And when Jews fail to “deliver,” as their original unity and mutual guarantee is still missing, the hatred against them grows even stronger.

To be a Jew is extremely hard. “Being a Jew,” according to the original meaning of this notion, is existing and behaving above and against inherent human nature, loving and serving others more than one instinctively loves and serves oneself. Moreover, Jews had to maintain and showcase their method so everybody else could learn and implement the only true method of successful survival in nature’s finely balanced, mutually integrated, and mutually complementing system.

“Hellenism,” “Western values of today,” or, in general, the method of the world is selfish and exploitative individualism, where each individual makes calculations only to serve oneself, while one ruthlessly and exclusively fights against others, succeeds and survives at the expense of others.

This “Hellenism” or “philosophical” existence is also marked in the blind belief in and worship of the inherently limited and distorted, 100% subjective and egocentric human intellect.

Thus now, this “Hellenism,” or the modern version of “Western values,” drives humanity towards seemingly inevitable self-destruction due to the complete incompatibility between the selfish, narcissistic, and exploitative human lifestyle and nature’s altruistic, mutually integrated, and mutually complementing system. Only Jews have the method that can facilitate and safeguard continuing and collective human survival in this natural system.

This is why it is extremely important that Jews relearn and revive their original method and the original “supernatural” — above inherent human nature — unity and mutual guarantee, so Jews could become the single positive example humanity can follow. This is also the only method to counter the constantly rising and worsening Jew-hatred or Israel-hatred in our days.

When Jews and the Nation of Israel start supplying the method of continuing survival to humanity, when everybody else starts recognizing and attaining nature’s singular force field and nature’s developmental plan through the Jewish method, we will reach the “proverbial state” of the Nations of the World carrying the Children of Israel on their shoulders to Jerusalem fully appreciating and thanking for their positive leadership.