Parshat Mikeitz: Chanukkah

In this week’s פרשה, the entire family of Yaakov Avinu venture into the foreign land of Mitzrayim. This is the פרשה that coincides with חנוכה where the Nation of Israel fought Yavan (Greece). Is there a connection between the two?  These people don’t have the values of Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov. Our nation, despite being near them, were worlds apart…Think of the difference between cooking a vegetable and cooking an egg. Vegetables soften when boiled, but the inside of an egg becomes hard. Being a Yehudi means being at odds with the world. It means doing the right thing even when the nations of the world are not.

If one wishes to complain about the moral decay of modern society, then one should look back a century ago when abortion and inter-faith marriage was already waving upwards in the Americas. The Hebrew word “Peretz” (פֶּרֶץ) accurately describes the breaching that the wicked have made in the world. The destruction of fences is common even in so many angles of modern culture that it seems as if our society has become a dystopia. The Egalitarian  consciousness looks down upon the idea behind our seemingly cohesive nation.  Today’s progressive society has succeeded in the act of destroying barriers meant to keep mankind safe. Both Christianity and Communism have many social constructs and ideological elements that are incompatible with our Torah, but has the world always been full of such decay? 

The people that came from the חם became the procreators of many nations that the People of Israel have dealt with. The בני כנענים are from region that Avraham once dwelled in. These idolatrous gentiles practiced many barbaric rituals which included child sacrifices. Their brothers, Mitzrayim, had an unfairly large amount of טוּמאָה – spiritual impurity. In fact, the Nation of Israel was on the second-highest highest level of טוּמאָה when the Children of Israel were close to leaving Mitzrayim. Had we stayed there, we would have hit the highest level and thus would cease to be the holy nation that we are.

As we read and remember our ancestors who ventured into Mitzrayim, a land filled with impurities, let’s try to do what we can to guard ourselves from the evils in our current world. We should also acknowledge that this nation, along with Yavan, had many advancements. They had art and architecture. They had technology, and like the modernists of today, they did not have the highest level of ethical standards.

The “Mitzrayim” we see from Hollywood is much more romanticized than the nation our ancestors dealt with. The lifestyle in the postmodern, secular world is also romanticized. In fact, both have many similarities. Today’s Liberal-stance on abortion could be the equivalent to a child-sacrifice ritual of the ancient days of barbarians.

The story of חנוכה is about fighting against a developed society that was causing the holiness of our nation to spiritually decay. We should acknowledge that we currently live in a world that is much like such nations. We have technological advancements but are surrounded by enormous amounts of טוּמאָה. Even though we are able to derive some benefit from the world we currently live in, we should make sure to guard our eyes and our heart from the dangers of the lands we are dwelling in.