Timeless Torah

Fifteen year old Monica with an I.Q. of 165 was a talented musician blessed with an insightful personality and loving parents. Still, Monica was depressed enough to enter psychotherapy because, “I’m a pimply whale.” Monica is a case study in the best-selling book Reviving Ophelia whose author Dr. Pipher writes: “These last few years my office has been filled by girls with eating disorders.” The pressure to be beautiful, or to use the book’s terminology, lookism is the main culprit. Dr. Pipher writes: “In early adolescence girls learn how important appearance is in defining social acceptability…This is an old, old problem. Helen of Troy didn’t launch a thousand ships because she was a hard worker.” Dr. Pipher is right; beauty as the ultimate value is an “old, old problem.” In fact, we can trace its roots to ancient Greece who invented the aesthetic ideal. While other ancient cultures beautified their buildings and pottery, the Greeks introduced beauty for its own sake, or, as we say today, “art for art’s sake.” Ancient Greece’s infatuation with physical beauty can be blamed on their ancestor Yefes, (son of Noach), whose name means beauty.

When the Maccabees reconquered the Temple, they had to improvise a rough menorah made of their own iron spears, as the Golden Menorah had been pillaged by the Greeks. It was years before the Jews could afford even a silver replica. A question raised is why G-d miraculously produced pure oil, but not a fitting Menorah? The purity of the olive oil represented that which is internal; the Menorah of gold that which is external. The miraculous discovery of oil but no Menorah was G-d’s statement that the inner is more important than the outer.

Do not think Judaism scorns beauty. Indeed, beauty is worthwhile when used to enhance the holy. Thus, the Sages praised the Temple for its beauty declaring that, “One who never saw the Temple never saw a beautiful building.” That beauty should be secondary to holiness corresponds to Noach’s blessing that Yefes should, “Dwell in the tents of Shem (ancestor of the Jews).” When beauty serves holiness, it enhances. When it becomes its own master, it tyrannizes.

This is the tragedy of Monica. If a person’s sense of self devolves on external beauty, on the slimness of her body or the sleekness of her hair, her sense of self will be as fragile as a hollow plaster figurine.

Judaism’s rebuttal to such lookism is: You’re a soul. Your self worth is intrinsic and immutable: Being created in the image of G-d means that your essential self is holy. And the more you identify with your spiritual essence, the more liberated you will be from the tyranny of the Greek god of external appearance.

Obeisance to the external tyrannizes because it’s never good enough. No anorexic girl is ever thin enough; no attractive woman can compete with the billboard models. Conversely, those who value holiness are secure knowing that this incorruptible quality can be obscured, but never eradicated. Moreover, unlike physical beauty, holiness is the province of all. Only some people are born beautiful, but all people are born holy.

Obviously the battle of Chanukah is far from over. See those who spend more time working out than working in; or who spend a fortune on clothes but hesitate to give a hundred dollars to charity; the parents who pass false values on to their children; and those of us who judge others according to how they look rather than how they act.

In Hebrew, yofi is the primary expression for beauty, while hod implies a beauty that is majestic. The essential difference between the two terms lies in the interplay of surface and substance. For example, the vessels in the Tabernacle were in the main fashioned out of wood and coated with gold. True beauty, not shallow good looks, is when the packaging of an object directs us toward its content. Or take Moses’ “karnei hod - rays of glory” that graced him when he descended from Sinai. These karnei hod were in effect the overflow of his inner spiritual glory which his corporeal body could no longer contain within.

Greece was endowed with yofi, Israel with hod (see Daniel 10:8). The Greek worldview, restricted to shallow beauty, allowed itself a passing glance and declared that, “What you see is what you get.” Not so with the Jewish nation. Our eyes are opened to the glory that lies beyond our physical world which hints to a realm that is deeper than the reach of our senses.

Could there ever have been a partnership between these two value systems? Winston Churchill once thought so: “No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy and art have been the main guiding light in modern faith and culture. Personally, I have always been on the side of both” If one adds the Hebrew letter tzadik (meaning righteous) to the letters yud, vav, nun spelling-Yavan (Greece), one gets Tziyon-Zion or Israel. Combining righteousness and morality to all that glitters gives us true glory- hod, the root of -Yehudim, Jews.

But it is easy to be confused by all that glitters. When we find ourselves submerged in the December non-Jewish ‘traditions’ of Chanukah gifts, parties, etc., grafting the foreign rituals on to our own holiday, the Greeks win. How ironic that as Chanukah arrives, we lose sight of the forest for the glitter of decorated trees.  With these lessons, let us transform the beauty into glory and the darkness of Greece into the light of Chanukah.