Significant historical events tend to generate different narratives. The players at the time of the event are probably too involved in the evolving historical sequence and cannot seriously evaluate the events they participate in. Likewise, subsequent generations retell the story in ways in which they relate to the events, but from their own perspective.
The story of Hanukkah has been told in several forms. Is it the story of miraculous divine intervention, the triumph of religious truth, the victory of the Jewish People over a cruel foreign oppressor? The most surprising and anachronistic narrative is the contemporary version in which the Maccabees fight for religious freedom. This narrative conflicts with the history of the Hasmonean Kingdom and seems to contradict the traditional point of view that the views Hanukkah as a festival commemorating the triumph of the one true religious outlook. And yet this version of the Chanukah story that the Maccabees themselves would find very strange, may in fact uncover a deep connection between our contemporary modes of thought and the very foundations of Jewish religious experience.
Many, Torah Giants in the last hundred years reveled in the results of emancipation in spite of its seemingly detrimental results to Jewish continuity. HaRav N. Z. Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka, HaRav A. Y. Kook and their common student HaRav Y. Hutner view religious freedom as an opportunity for new sense of identification with the Almighty and the Torah, identification based on personal deliberation choice rather than social norms and conventions.
Their intuition runs to a deeper level of understanding of the struggle for religious truth. The Torah's disdain for the graven image underlines the essence of our faith. Ours is a relationship with the One beyond image, beyond any specific dogmatic theology. Coerced Religion always bespeaks a regimen of ideas not only of ritual. Although certain dogmatic theologies have immerged in Jewish civilization, no one dogma ever completely dominated. Fortunately each proposed set of theological tenets never rose to absolute dogma. Instead they were subsumed into a tradition that insists that the Divine cannot be seen nor fully imagined.
By its nature Jewish theology is a project that is a never ending quest. Religious dogmas are only meaningful as part of this journey. Some may even play a role as a starting point others as detours but none can be viewed as the final destination. A final and complete dogmatic Theology is a reified form of a graven image. Reb Nachman of Bratslav thought that any particular conception of God was false if it wasn't in the context of a continuous journey. Rav Kook said that prose was a very poor vehicle for religious belief, poetry far more appropriate. Rav Hutner said approaching the creator was being in His presence. These thoughts can thrive only in a world of freedom of choice. Thus religious freedom is the necessary platform for Torah's ongoing religious truth.
Thus, unknowingly, the Maccabees crusade against idolatry foreshadows our faith that religious freedom is the only soil in which the tree of knowledge can bare roots.
