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Remembering Chanukah

Chanukah is a joyous Jewish holiday. The Festival of Lights was meant to remind us of the miracles performed for our ancestors when our Jewish way of life was seriously threatened from both foreign enemies and Jewish traitors. Unfortunately too many of our leaders, while celebrating this holiday with joy and pride, fail to recognize its significance.

Today we are living under circumstances remarkably similar to those days. While, indeed, we do enjoy self rule in our own country, our hapless leaders have seen fit to compromise Jewish principles and values in a futile effort to curry favor with powers they deem greater than us.
What they choose to call “democracy”, a concept whose values change with the wind, has become a foreign god which demands total obedience, even when its values clash with Jewish ones.

It is patently absurd for any country to voluntarily accept a declared enemy entity as an equal member of its society even as it works within that society to destroy it. Yet this is exactly what the modern state of Israel has done. The very concept of “Palestine” is nothing less than a Trojan horse placed within the Jewish State for the sole function of destroying it. Any normal person with eyes in his head can see this quite clearly. Yet the Israeli government has closed its eyes to reality and insists that we accept the serpent in our midst as if it were some kind of worthy recipient of Jewish welfare.

Worse than this is the fact that, not only are there Arab citizens (sic) of the Jewish State, but the Jewish government has agreed in principle to aid in the building of a new Arab state on Jewish soil in which no Jew would be permitted to live! And they see no contradiction here.

The government of Israel unilaterally decided to forcibly evict Jews from their homes in Israel and turn over the entire area of Gaza to the Arabs... for peace. The result was that this area has become a defacto enemy military compound which continues to fire missiles into the Jewish State. Rather than learn from such bitter experience our leaders are continuing to find new ways to pacify enemies who will be satisfied with nothing less than the complete destruction of Israel!

In the time of the original Chanukah, it seemed to most that the Jews had no choice but to accept enemy demands, even those which conflicted with Judaism. After all, the mighty Greek Empire actually controlled Judea.

We didn’t have a government nor an army to protect us from this super power. Yet a hand full of Jewish zealots called the Maccabees arose and called upon the people to rebel. These rebels were castigated by pragmatic Jews who looked upon them as obstacles to living peaceful lives under Greek occupation. Jewish values in this case must be sacrificed for the good of the many. Few remember the fact that the rebellion began when one such pragmatic Jew agreed to bow down to a Greek god in the town of Modiin. Mattityahu ben Yohannan, an aged former High Priest, stabbed his fellow Jew to death in vengeance for the Jewish G-d. He then called out to his people, “Those who are willing to fight for the Living G-d of Israel follow me!” He then fled to the hills from which he led a guerilla war which eventually succeeded in driving the hated Greeks from our homeland and restoring true Jewish independence here.

Were Mattityahu alive today he would probably be arrested by Jewish police and convicted by a Jewish court as a murderer. Our entire government today is committing acts very similar to that of the Jew who bowed down to the Greek god. We worship the dollar, the USA and the European Union above our own G-d. This is the only reason we suffer.

In the special commemoration of the Maccabees which we recite at this time of year we remember how our G-d delivered the mighty into the hands of the weak; the many into the hands of the few; the traitors into the hands of patriotic; the impure into the hands of the pure; and the tyrants into the hands of those who observe your Law. But do we really believe what we are saying? Our leaders are afraid that we are weak; that we are too few and that our G-d cannot save us. This is the same view of the Hellenists who sided with the Greeks for pragmatic reasons.

May the light of the Chanukah lamps remind us where our real power lies.

Our Torah and our history remind us that our only purpose for living is to serve our G-d. When we choose to deny our very purpose in life then, in reality we deny life itself. We have a glorious destiny which has already begun to unfold. How dare we seek to “protect” ourselves by denying that destiny? Rather than freezing the process of building our homeland we should be increasing it. Rather than reprimand rabbis who teach that Jewish soldiers must never throw fellow Jews out of their homes nor destroy Jewish communities, such rabbis should be elevated into positions of leadership. We have all the tools we need to hasten redemption and we choose instead to pacify those who seek our destruction. May the lights of the Chanukah lamps remind us that the miracles of old are still with us today and that Jewish obligations never change.
 

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