This Hanukkah, we need a Jewish George Washington to fight for freedom

Hanukkah is a well-known holiday in America, and it carries critical lessons for our time.

Jeffrey Berk is the founder and CEO of TruthTells.

In short, the story of Hanukkah is a perennial one spanning time and place, for it is the human chronicle of the tension between revelation and "reason," tradition and "progress," national sovereignty and universalism.

In the second century BCE, the Greeks of the Seleucid Empire occupied Judea and Samaria and ruled the Jews with a heavy hand. They restricted civil and religious liberties, outlawing, for example, the observance of the Sabbath, the study of the Torah, and the sacred Abrahamic rite of circumcision.