Credo - The battle to teach moral values is won at school

It was the original clash of civilisations, and one of the most fateful. Ancient Greece and ancient Israel met and collided. Jews won. Had they not done so, not only would there be no Judaism today. There would almost certainly be no Christianity or Islam either.

I refer to the events commemorated on Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish festival of lights we are celebrating now. They happened twenty-two centuries ago, when Israel came under the rule of the Alexandrian empire. After Alexander’s death the empire split in two: the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Seleucids in Syria. In the third century BCE Israel was ruled by the Ptolemies, in the second, by the Seleucids.
           
Ancient Greece and Israel were profoundly different cultures. The Greeks excelled at everything visual: painting, architecture, sculpture, drama and the spectacle of the Olympic games. The Israelites – by then, the Jews – worshipped the invisible God. Theirs was a culture of the ear not the eye, the word not the image. Both distrusted the other. To the Greeks, the Jews were strange and superstitious. To the Jews, the Greeks were pagans and idolaters.
           
Despite their differences, there would have been no conflict had the Greeks allowed Jews to practice their faith in peace. The Ptolemies were good at this. It was a lesson one Seleucid leader, Antiochus IV, failed to learn. He believed in the active Hellenisation of the Jews. It was an act of hubris that was to cost him dear.
           
Not all Jews were opposed to Hellenism. Some, especially the wealthy and high-placed, saw it as the wave of the future. It was cosmopolitan. Judaism, they felt, was parochial. The glittering achievements of the Greeks seemed to breathe a freer air than the pieties of their own people. Two high priests in particular, first Jason, then Menelaus, saw Antiochus as an ally with whose help they could force the pace of cultural change.
           
They introduced a gymnasium into Jerusalem. Young priests began to spend more time on the body than the soul. They encouraged Antiochus to forbid the public practice of Judaism. Eventually they went so far as to erect a statue of Zeus in the Temple precincts – designed, some said, to look as like Antiochus as possible. They began to offer pagan sacrifices on the Temple’s altars. It was deeply provocative. The Jews called it the ‘abomination of desolation’.
           
A priestly family, the aged Matthias and his sons, known as the Maccabees, rose in revolt. They won back Jewish independence, cleansed and rededicated the Temple, and relit its candelabrum, the Menorah. That is why to this day we light candles for eight days. Hanukkah means ‘rededication’.
           
The military victory was short-lived. Within a century, Israel was again under foreign rule, this time by the Romans. It was the spiritual victory that survived. Realising that the real battle was not against an empire but a culture, Jews set about constructing the world’s first system of universal education. The effect was astonishing. Although they were later to suffer devastating defeats at the hands of the Romans, they had created an identity so strong that it was able to survive two thousand years of exile and dispersion.
           
What history taught them was that to defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need schools. In the short run battles are won by weapons, but in the long run they are won by ideas and the way they are handed on from generation to generation. Oddly but appropriately, Hanukkah comes from the same Hebrew root as ‘education’.
           
In Britain today, we risk undervaluing and misconceiving our schools. We think in terms of league tables of academic results. But schools are more than this. They are the way a civilization hands on its values across time. When a culture forgets its own values, especially when it thinks they are something we each invent for ourselves, it is about to die – not immediately but inevitably. That is why faith schools have become so popular. They have a strong and distinctive ethos. They honour the past. They create community and continuity. They teach children who they are and why.

Hanukkah tells us that there are two different battles for freedom. One is fought by soldiers, the other by teachers, and it is the second that eventually determines the course of history. When civilizations clash, strengthen schools. The world we build tomorrow is born in the lessons we teach today.

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