This article is an except from Sefer Abir Yosef al Hatorah. It has been adapted into English by the author.

There is something missing from the Chanukah story. We know that there was an uprising against the oppression and persecution of the Greeks. We know that there was a military victory, and we know that it was miraculous. But there is no mention in the Al Hanisim or in the Midrashim of a mass mobilization for fasting and prayer. We hear no mention of the pure voices of thousands of young children saying Tehillim in unison.

By contrast, the Megilah tells us (Esther 4:16-17) that the miracle of Purim was preceded by three days of fasting and prayer. And the Midrash describes (Esther Rabbah 8:7) how Mordechai brought together all the young children, deprived them of bread and water, dressed them in sackcloth and had them sit in ashes until they wept and cried out in prayer. But while there is no doubt that, two centuries later, the Chashmonaim repented, fasted and prayed before they went out to battle the Greeks, there is no written record of anything of this sort with regard to the miracle of Chanukah.

1 Rabbi Reinman is the author of Shufra Dishtara and Abir Yosef al Hatorah in Hebrew and numerous works in the English language. He is an occasional contributor to these pages.

The story of Pharaoh’s dream in Parashas Mikeitz, which falls on Chanukah, may shed some light on this question.

Pharaoh Woke Up

The Torah describes how Yosef is taken from the dungeon, brought to the royal palace and told to interpret Pharaoh’s dream, which he does to Pharaoh’s great satisfaction. He tells Pharaoh that his troubling dream is a portent of seven years of abundance to be followed by seven years of famine, an extremely valuable prediction. But at the end of his interpretation, Yosef adds a strange statement. He says (Bereishis 41:33), “And now, Pharaoh should identify an intelligent and wise man and appoint him over the Land of Egypt.”

The commentators are puzzled by this unsolicited advice. Yosef had been summoned to interpret the dream. He had never been asked to advise the king on how to deal with the looming crisis. Wasn’t it presumptuous for this man just pulled from a prison cell to offer direction to the king of Egypt? The commentators also wonder why Pharaoh found Yosef’s interpretation more persuasive than those of the professional dream interpreters in the palace.

Let us take a closer look at Pharaoh’s dream. Actually, there seem to have been two dreams. First, he dreamed that seven stout cows were devoured by seven emaciated cows. And then we are told (Bereishis 41:4-5), “And Pharaoh woke up, then he slept and dreamed a second time.” In the second dream, seven fat stalks are devoured by seven withered stalks. And then (ibid. 41:7), “And Pharaoh woke up, and behold, it was a dream.” The first time, however, we are just told that he woke up but not that he was aware he had been sent a message in a dream. All we are told is that he continued to sleep and dream.

The Rashbam explains that there was indeed a difference between the two awakenings. Sometimes, a person caught up in his dream may come

partially awake and then sink back into his dream world. Pharaoh did not come fully awake until after the second dream, but between the first and the second dreams he had a partial awakening.

Apparently, the Torah finds it important to tell us about this partial awakening. In fact, Pharaoh himself felt that it was significant, because after telling Yosef about the bizarre dream about of the cows, he says (ibid. 41:21-22), “And I awoke, then I saw in my dream, and behold, seven stalks …” Pharaoh makes it a point to tell Yosef that he awoke between the two dreams. What is so important about this partial awakening?

If we look closely at Pharaoh’s words we notice that he doesn’t even say that he went back to sleep. He just plows ahead with the rest of his dream. It seems that Pharaoh considered the two dreams to be one continuous dream and his partial awakening between them as an important element in the continuum of his extensive dream. This was the element Yosef was addressing when he advised Pharaoh to appoint an intelligent manager over Egypt.

Wait a Minute!

Very often, when a person is immersed in a powerful dream, he gets the feeling that he is being swept along by events over which he has no control, like a rudderless boat adrift in a strong tide. He moves from one nightmarish scene to the next, overwhelmed by fear and dread of what is to come next.

But sometimes, in the midst of his dream, he says to himself, “Wait a minute! This is only a dream. I do not have to submit to all of this helplessly. I have some control over my destiny. This is not the direction in which I want this dream to proceed. I want to step on the brakes and change course.”

And it happens. The dream continues, but the feral intensity is diminished. The events that transpire are less threatening. And the final result can be quite positive. A nightmare has been transformed into a pleasant experience.

This, explained Yosef, is what the brief moment of semi-wakefulness in the middle of Pharaoh’s nightmare signified. While it was true that the dream was a portent of dire developments, Pharaoh was still the king. He could still step on the brakes and say, “Wait a minute! Not so fast. I can still turn this around and make it work to my advantage.” He could do this by appointing an intelligent and wise man as overseer of the Land of Egypt.

This last statement was not a presumptuous offer of unsolicited advice. It was the interpretation of an important element of Pharaoh’s dream. Pharaoh himself sensed that this moment of half-wakefulness, this interlude of self-awareness in the midst of his dream, was important, and he stressed this point to Yosef when he retold his dream. Yosef discerned the meaning of this element while the royal dream interpreters did not, and this convinced Pharaoh that Yosef’s interpretation was correct.

Religious Persecution

The Greek oppression that preceded the miracle of Chanukah developed over a long period of time. It was the first occasion of religious persecution in the history of the world. Until then, forced submission to pagan gods was politically motivated. The pagans were religiously tolerant. They had no ideological issue with other nations worshipping other gods. But when a pagan nation conquered another nation, they demanded that the conquered people submit and pay homage to the gods of the conquerors. If they did so, they could go home and worship their own gods as well.

The rise of the Greeks was another story altogether. It was the beginning of true kefirah, the rejection of all deities and their replacement by man’s worship of himself. In the Greek view as it was formulated in the late Hellenic and Hellenistic period, the human being stood at the pinnacle of the world. He was the true object of worship. The traditional gods were

retained only for social and cultural purposes. The Greek intelligentsia laughed at the gods.

When Alexander the Great, who always kept a copy of his teacher Aristotle’s works under his pillow, conquered most of the civilized world, his stated intent was to Hellenize the world and spread kefirah to its every corner. And he was generally successful. The Jewish people somehow escaped his notice. They were a small and peaceful group centered around Yerushalayim, and they did not seem to pose a threat to his schemes. But then, during the reign of his successors, the situation changed dramatically.

About seventy-five years after Alexander’s death, King Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Greek ruler of Egypt, ordered the Torah translated into Greek. Megillas Taanis records that when the Torah was translated three days of darkness descended to the world, which is the way of Chazal to express that they viewed the translation under these circumstances as a terrible calamity. Many explanations are offered for why this was such a terrible thing.

I believe it was because this was the first time that the Greeks realized that their true enemy was not the Parthian or any other army on the periphery of their empire. It was a book, an idea, the idea contained in the holy writings of this small group living in Yerushalayim and its surrounding towns and villages. The Jewish people had no cavalry, no siege machines, no battalions of archers, but they were the true enemy. They were the ones who posed the greatest threat to a Hellenized world. And history proved them right, because the ideas and concepts of the Torah ultimately did bring down Greco-Roman civilization and kept it down until the Renaissance.

That is why the translation of the Torah was such a tragedy for the Jewish people, a tragedy symbolized by three days of darkness. The Greeks now saw the Torah as a mortal threat to their ambitions, and they launched a relentless campaign to destroy it. Their attack on the Torah was not for political reasons, as earlier persecutions had been. It was an ideological war, the battle between the Jewish idea of a world ruled by the Almighty and the

Greek idea of a world ruled by the human race. It was the start of the grand struggle that continues to play itself out in many forms on the stage of world events to this very day.

After the translation, the Seleucid kings of Greek Syria instituted a series of laws designed to weaken Jewish observance of the Torah and ultimately tear the Jewish people away from it. If they could Hellenize all the Jews, the Torah would cease to exist, Heaven forbid. So they instituted laws directed at specific crucial observances with the idea that ultimately they would undermine the entire Jewish structure of belief and observance.

They forbade milah, circumcision. They outlawed Shabbos observance. They stripped the Jewish courts of the power to control the calendar. They decreed that Jewish brides must first submit to the local hegemon. And they instituted these laws slowly one at a time. They knew that if they outlawed the entire Torah, the Jewish people would not comply. So they set out to erode the Jewish morale and loyalty to the Torah, in a program reminiscent of the Nazi assault against the Jewish people two thousand years later.

The Greeks issued a decree, only one, and the people, in the face of the overwhelming military superiority of the Greeks, bowed to the inevitable and came to terms with it, because they rationalized that they could still live an otherwise complete Jewish life. Then the Greeks issued a second decree, and although the people were outraged and upset, they again came to terms with the situation. And then another decree. And another. And time after time, the people adjusted to the inevitable and came to terms with it. Moreover, droves of the young and the not so young, known to us as the Misyavnim, abandoned the Torah altogether and becoming fully Hellenized.

Slowly but surely, the spiritual citadel of the Jewish people was crumbling and tumbling down. The Jewish people were caught in a terrible nightmare, swept along from one calamity to the next, with the sense of inevitability that only a nightmare can produce.

And then something happened. In the middle of this nightmare, there

was an awakening. In the middle of this horrendous nightmare, a group of heroic Jewish cried out, “Wait a minute! We do not have to submit to this. We can gain control of this nightmare and turn it around.”

As described in the Midrash (Otzar Midrashim, Chanukah 6), the daughter of Mattisyahu Kohein Gadol stood up at her wedding feast in front of all the gedolim of that generation. She clapped her hands to gain everyone’s attention, and she ripped open her garments. Her family and the guests were scandalized, but she declared, “Listen, my brothers and friends. If you’re upset that I’ve done this, why aren’t you upset that I’ll have to submit to the hegemon?” At that moment, the revolt of the Chashmonaim began. And the rest is history. The nightmare came to an end.

A Fresh Start

At the end of Parashas Vayishlach (Bereishis 36:3), Rashi writes that when a person gets married, he is forgiven all his sins. Why is this so? Perhaps it is because when a person makes a new start, when he embarks in a new direction with the proper intent, the Almighty wipes the slate clean and gives him the fullest opportunity to succeed. The chassan and kallah fast and pray on the day of their wedding and it is the turning the page on the old and the embarkation on a new phase in life with hearts full of hope and faith that is the supreme cause of the forgiveness they are granted.

This then is what happened during the time of the Chashmonaim. The people had sunk into a long period of torpor and decline. But then they came to their senses and decided to take control of their own destiny and turn in a new direction, and the Almighty rewarded them by wiping the slate clean and forgiving all their sins.

The Chashmonaim were chassidei elyon, men of stellar righteousness, as the Ramban writes in Parashas Mikeitz, and there is no doubt that they fasted and prayed before they went into battle. But there does not seem to have been a mass mobilization of fasting and prayer of the sort that led up

to the miracle of Purim. Why was this so? Because the awakening itself, the decision to break away from the past and stand up and fight for the honor of the Almighty and His Torah, that alone earned them complete atonement/