Grandma's army

In my last blog I chronicled the battles that Israel has fought since the State was declared. However, perhaps the most significant battle that the Jews fought, and won,   took place in the second century BCE.     Desiring to unify his kingdom through the medium of a common religion and culture Antiochus, the Greek ruler at that time, tried to root out the individualism of the Jews by desecrating their holy Temple and suppressing all the Jewish Laws. We are now at the end of an eight day Festival commemorating this particular victory. The story of Mattitiyahu Maccabee and his sons, who head the Revolt, is told in detail in the two books of the Maccabees.   A small, vastly outnumbered band of Jews waged battle against the mighty Greek armies, and drove them out of the land. Even though Judaism would have disappeared if Antiochus had succeeded in his strategy,   Jewish sages chose to leave these books outside of the Bible. One of the reasons is ...

For a country that has to spend such a huge, disproportionate   slice of the national   budget    on defense needs in order to exist, Israel can still be considered as the People of the Book. A fledgling state which resolved to make the most of the only resource it had – human intellectual capital – with results far exceeding what anyone could have imagined. Abba Eban once wrote that the Jews gave humanity the notion of “civilization. “ For 3,000 years, the creative tension between the People and the Book generated philosophy and law, offered models of piety and morality and defined a discipline leading to personal commitment and communal compassion.” In the words of Ben Gurion : "In Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] arose the Jewish people, in which was formed its spiritual, religious and national image, in which it created national and universal cultural treasures and bequeathed to the world entire the eternal Book of Books…" Ben Gurion also wrote: “Anyon...