The Light of Chanukah

Josephus
"But Joshua preferred to be called Jason, just as his younger brother (they succeeded one another as High Priest) preferred to be called Menelaus instead of Chonyah. Now, when Menelaus together with the sons of Tobias had (in the dispute with his brother over the office of High Priest) to concede the office of the High Priest and yield to this violence, they approached the King Antiochus, and offered to throw off immediately their Jewish laws and customs, and to conduct themselves in accordance with the statutes and customs of the king and the Greeks. They, therefore, asked permission to erect a Greek college in the city of Jerusalem, and when it was granted they let their foreskins grow, so that even when naked they might appear quite similar to the Greeks. Thus abandoning all the customs of their forefathers they adopted the habits foreign people." (Josephus, Ant. Bk. 12, Ch. 5, l)

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Light of Judaism
An elderly Priest called Mattityahu, and his sons and their supporters known to history as the Maccabees, rose in revolt. Over the next three years they scored a momentous victory over the Seleucids, reconquering Jerusalem and bringing it back under Jewish sovereignty. They cleansed the Temple and rededicated it, lighting the great Menorah, the candelabrum that stood in the Temple, for a celebration lasting eight days. That is the story of Chanukah as captured in history in the first and second books of Maccabees. But that is not how the story was ultimately told within the Jewish tradition, as it was ruled that the two books of Maccabees, and others under the same title, should be called Sefarim Chitzoni’im, apocryphal works, and kept out of the Bible. The Chanukah story that is told instead is a very different one, with a powerful message.

Encyclopedia.com
JOSHUA BEN GAMLA (d. 69/70 c.e.), a high priest in the last years of the Second Temple. Joshua was married to one of the wealthiest women of Jerusalem, *Martha, daughter of Boethus (Yev. 6:4; ibid., 61a; Yoma 18a and Tos. ibid.; Git. 56a). He is apparently to be identified with the Joshua b. Gamaliel referred to by Josephus (Ant., 20:213) as a high priest appointed by *Agrippa ii. In common with the high priests at the end of the Second Temple period Joshua, too, was appointed to office because of his wealth. Although most of the others were deprecated in rabbinic literature, Joshua was singled out for praise for his establishing a universal system of education after all previous attempts failed. He evolved a system whereby "teachers of young children be appointed in each district and each town," whereas previously they were to be found only in Jerusalem. In addition he laid down sound pedagogical principles. Because of this, it was said of him: "Truly, the name of that man is blessed… since but for him the Torah would have been forgotten in Israel" (bb 21a).

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Light of Judaism
What Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Gamla and the other Sages understood, and what was not understood at the time of Chanukah itself, was that the real battle against the Greeks was not a military one, but a cultural one. At the time, the Greeks were the world's greatest in many fields. They were unparalleled in their advances in art, in architecture, in literature, in drama, in philosophy. Even today, their achievements have never been surpassed. But Jews nonetheless believed, and surely history has borne this out, that there is within Judaism, within ancient Israel and still within its heritage to today, something special. Something worth fighting for. Judaism, with its emphasis on the sanctification of life, and the belief that every human being was created in God's image, held eternal truths that we could not abandon. This was the unique distinction between the culture of the Greeks and the world of Torah and Judaism. As a result, Jews have always known that the real battle is not necessarily fought on the physical battlefield with physical weapons, but rather in the hearts and minds of future generations.
That is the message of Chanukah, and to articulate our story, we focus in a rather beautiful and symbolic way on just one tiny detail of the original chain of events: That one cruse of pure, undefiled oil was found by the Maccabees among the wreckage and defilements of the Temple, just enough to light the Menorah until more oil could be sourced. One of the most interesting aspects of this shifting perspective from the original way of telling the story to the current way is reflected in the name of the festival itself. Chanukah, from the word chanuch, means re-dedication. That is what the Maccabees did to the Temple. They rededicated it, as described in the books of Maccabees. Yet over time, Chanukah became connected to the word chinuch, a word meaning education. What we re-dedicated was not a physical building - the Temple - but living embodiments of Judaism, namely our children, our students, the people to whom we teach and hand on our heritage and values. From being the festival of a military victory, Chanukah became the festival of a spiritual and civilizational one. I believe this history of our history has a message for us all. It teaches us this fundamental truth, as relevant to our lives today as ever before: To defend a country physically you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education, you need educators, and you need schools. Those are the things that kept the Jewish spirit alive and the Menorah of Jewish values burning throughout the centuries in an everlasting light. Often what seems at the time to be the headline news, the military victory, is, in the hindsight of history, secondary to the cultural victory of handing your values on to the next generation, and making sure that your children, and theirs, light up the world.