Understanding the meaning of Hanukkah can help everyone!
An article in The Jerusalem Post:
My comment:
While Hanukkah can strengthen our connection to our traditions and increase our sense of belonging among Jews — as the article states — it can also help us remember what dangers the infighting between us and the recurring tendency of assimilation and following the methods and lifestyle of others can bring us.
The real battle, according to the Hannukah story, was not between Jews and the Greeks, but it was between the “traditional Jews” and the “Hellenistic Jews.”
The same infighting has repeated itself again and again in our history, and we can observe this also today how Jews are happy to give up their traditions and our original values of selfless unity and unconditional mutual guarantee in favor of the “Western values” of misguide and narcissistic individualism and success at the expense of others.
These “Western values” mirror our inherently selfish, egocentric, and exploitative nature, but at the same time, they are also misguided and self-destructive in a natural world that exists and survives by mutual responsibility and mutually completing cooperation. Global humanity also cannot survive without adapting itself to the laws of integral nature.
This is why remembering and keeping our original values of “supernatural” — above instinctive human nature — unity and mutual responsibility is so important since these Jewish values do not only safeguard our own survival, but they also show the only method of survival to humanity.