This week R' Frand did not speak about the parsha and instead said divrei Torah about Chanukah. The following is a brief summary of some of thoughts said over by R' Frand. I have attempted to reproduce these vorts to the best of my ability. Any perceived inconsistency is the result of my efforts to transcribe the shiur and should not be attributed to R' Frand.
R' Frand quoted a Medrash Rabbah on Bereishis which states that the Greeks commanded the Jews to write on the horn of an ox that they had no place among the G-d of the Jews. Many meforshim ask - why specifically were they told to write this on the horn of an ox?
As an introduction, R' Frand first quoted the famous gemara which discusses the commands of the Greeks to not keep certain mitzvos - Milah, Shabbos and Kiddush Hachodesh. The gemara explains that these were chosen because they are mitzvos which differentiate the Jews from the non-Jews. From time immemorial, the Milah was a sign that a man was Jewish. Similarly, Shabbos is an Os - a sign that a Jew is different from his Muslim neighbor who keeps Friday or his Christian neighbor who keeps Sunday as his day of rest. The concept of the new moon and the lunar calendar is a further differentiation as Jews track their holidays and year based upon the moon, whereas most of the rest of the world follows the solar calendar.
R' Frand then quoted the gemara in Bava Kamma which discusses how certain royal leaders (which according to one meforesh were Greeks) approached the Jews and wanted to learn the Torah. They learned the Torah in its entirety three times and then stated that they believed that the entire Torah was true...except for the rule of damage caused by an ox. If an ox of a Jew gores the ox of a kusi, there is no requirement to reimburse. However if the reverse occurs, there is a requirement to pay. They expressed that this rule could not be true.
R' Frand quoted R' Elyah Finkel who bridged these two gemaras with the original medrash. He explained that the reason that the Jews were told to write this on the horn of the ox was because the Greeks wanted the Jews to feel that the law of an ox who damages another ox is no different by the Jews and that they themselves are no different.
R' Frand closed the vort by quoting R' Kolefsky (sp?) who quoted R' Guervitz (sp?) of Gateshead who had visited the Royal Museum in London and saw a portrait of a woman using a horn to nurse a baby who refused to nurse from his mother. He remarked that apparently this was the method that was used at the time to nurse a reluctant baby. R' Frand theorized that this could also be why it was written on the horn - because the Greeks' message was that if they wanted to impact a Jew they needed to start when he was a baby.
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