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Rabbi Joel Lehrfield
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| The Rabbi's Study | |||||
| December, 2002 |
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| By the time
you will have received this Bulletin, Chanukah will have passed. Its arrival
so early this year was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's hard to believe
that Chanukah has come and gone. We barely had time to recover from Thanksgiving
and the Festival of the Lights was upon us. On the other hand, it's nice
to separate Chanukah from our neighbors' religious season. Our Holydays
have very little in common with theirs and the happenstance of their occurring
close together, denies their essential differences. |
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| I do get a very special
set of feelings around Chanukah time. It's nice to see families join in
festive celebration and light the candles. It's pleasurable to see the faces
of children and grandchildren as they receive Chanukah gelt or open their
presents (a non-Jewish harmless custom). Yet I am saddened by the realization
that Chanukah's original meaning is often lost. Chanukah is a Holyday based
upon stubbornness of the Jewish people in its commitment and loyalty to
its faith. The people who invaded the Beit Hamikdash (Temple) were not Greeks;
they were Jews. They were Jews who thought that the times called for a new
approach to their faith. They were Jews who thought the faith as practiced
when they were younger, was outdated and needed to come into line with current
thinking on the nature of aesthetics and philosophy and the practices of
their neighbors. So, having captured the seat of ecclesiastical power, they
set about changing their faith in such a way, that their traditions were
denied and their laws rewritten. That there remained a committed, stubborn,
loyal element, in spite of the groundswell to imitate the Hellenists, was
a gift from Hashem. Ultimately, the patience of the committed faithful wore
thin. They rebelled against the prevailing order and a battle for the soul
of the Jewish people ensued. If it would not have been Matityahu who struck
the spark, I'm sure it would have been someone else. To this reactionary
group, we owe the Judaism we practice today. |
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| We live in times in which
the same struggle is apparent. Rabbi Berel Wein in a recent article, included
some material written by John J. Ray, that appeared in Front Page magazine,
entitled "Leftism and the Post Religious Churches." Mr. Ray wrote
"the point is made that the enormous current decline in affiliation
with the Anglican Church worldwide and to a lesser extent, the Roman Catholic
Church in the Western world as well, is due to its giving up preaching Christianity
and instead preaching new modern nostrums. Leftism has infiltrated the pulpit
and pews of Christiandom." He continues: "Their (the Anglican)
churches become little more than hollow shells or religious vacuums. When
their traditional religious formulas and beliefs became widely questioned,
they abandoned any advocacy of them and had nothing substantial to replace
them. They now offer a facility for worship and fellowship but have no authority
in matters of morals, doctrine or anything else. They have become social
facilities rather than religious institutions. Rather than deliver salvation,
all that many churches now aspire to is to make their congregations feel
good…the lack of any moral, ethical or doctrinal anchors leaves the
door open wide for what is popularly believed and promoted in the secular
world to be adopted in the churches as well. The thinking seems to be that
if you want to keep the collection plates full, you must tell people what
they want to hear. So if Leftist, Greenie, Feminist or 'Gay-lib' beliefs
are vocally expressed in the community at large, such beliefs will be expressed
with similar energy from the pulpit." It seems to me as the old saying
goes "As the Christians believe so do the Jews (Vie es Christelt sich,
so Judelt sich). |
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| To continue quoting Rabbi
Wein, "The kowtowing to feminist causes and homosexual lobbies will
not in any way produce more Jewish families or Jews. Saving our forests,
having cleaner water, providing greater benefits to the seniors and the
poor, are all worthwhile goals. But they are not essentially exclusively
Jewish goals. Their achievement also will not produce one more Jewish home
or family. |
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| Chanukah
is certainly the time to reflect on these thoughts. I do not contemplate
a civil war between Jews (though from some of the remarks of the far left
secular community, the feelings and provocations that accompany civil wars
are abundantly apparent). But I do see a gap opening up larger and larger
between segments of the Jewish community. I would no longer call them by
the generally accepted names of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist.
Instead, I see the gap between the religious communities, as between the
traditionalists and the revisionists. Our worship services and our religious
practices have drawn so far apart that I wonder sometimes, how much longer
this can continue and yet we would still consider ourselves Jewish. In a
way, it is L'Havdil, akin to the tremendous break that occurred in Christiendom
between the Catholics and the Protestants. The disdain for what constitutes
Jewish law and praxis is immense and spreading. |
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| It is thoughts
of this nature that sadden me when Chanukah comes and goes because as it
is often said "The more things change, the more they remain the same."
The Rabbis were indeed wise. They recognized that the two enduring problems
for the Jewish community were the continuing desire on the part of the non-Jewish
world to destroy us physically (hence, the establishment of the holiday
of Purim); and the constant struggle against assimilation and the adoption
of strange G-ds (ergo, the establishment of the holiday of Chanukah). |
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| Our goal is to survive
as Jews. We are a special, unique G-d starred community. We remain Jewish
only as we are bound to the Torah of Moshe and the covenant at Sinai. Only
Jews observing Torah can influence mankind for better. That is our primary
goal today - - to teach and practice traditional, meaningful, challenging
Judaism - not the currently politically socially correct ideals.
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| A horrifyingly
ludicrous example of this appeared in the New York Times magazine in the
middle of November. A woman raised a question with a Mr. Randy Cohen, whose
column is titled "The Ethicist." It was a simple question. She
had engaged a real estate broker who is an Orthodox Jew, to arrange a closing
on a piece of property. At the conclusion of the deal, everything being
satisfactory to all parties concerned, the lawyer shook hands with the parties
concerned and said to the woman that he wished her Mazel Tov, but he was
Orthodox by practice and belief and therefore could not shake her hand.
She took umbrage at this and asked the ethicist, Randy Cohen, what she should
do. He said to her from the fountain of his great wisdom, that she should
tear up the contract after having received such an affront from the lawyer
in these modern times. That the lawyer did his job properly, that the job
did not include his shaking her hand and that the ethicist was telling her
to participate in an unethical act after she had signed the document and
given her word, boggles my imagination. But this is what things have come
to when we are guided, not by our traditions and our Torah (and I am assuming
Randy Cohen is Jewish), but by faddish politically correct social ideals
that have little to do with ethics and less to do with Judaism. |
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| That is what Chanukah is about. May the lights of Chanukah remain lit in our hearts and in our homes, "For a Mitzvah is a candle and Torah is light." | |||||
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