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| Dreidel sculpture along NYC's Fifth Avenue (NYP) |
Orthodox Jews that tend to be politically liberal seem to favor the cultural argument over the religious one. It is almost as if they are saying that the religious argument is no longer valid in our day.
So strong is the cultural influence upon us that it can negate centuries of tradition. This is not to say that one cannot be a liberal and be a fully observant believer. Of course one can. But it is still somewhat striking when I see a politically liberal Jew favoring modern concepts of morality over traditional ones.
This is one of the problems I have with the extreme left of Modern Orthodoxy (What used to be called Open Orthodoxy). They never saw a secular cultural value they didn’t like and then try to ‘sledgehammer’ it into Orthodoxy with some sort of twisted reinterpretation of the Torah’s narrative on the subject. Like justifying forbidden act of gay sex as forbidden only to heterosexuals.
These were my thoughts having read an article by Rabbi Ari Lamm in the New York Post where he makes the not so outrageous claim that Chanukah is the least favorite holiday of the cultural elite.
What?! I can’t think of a Jewish holiday more present on the cultural scene than Chanukah. How could Rabbi Lamm say that Chanukah...
…irk(s) everyone from the late Christopher Hitchens, who memorably derided it as a “celebration of tribal Jewish backwardness,” to author Sarah Prager, who took to the pages of The New York Times recently to explain that she won’t be teaching her kids about it?
If one thinks about why Chanukah is so present in our culture instead of what it actually celebrates it might be a little easier to understand. The reason is that this holiday comes at a time of year that the most popular holiday in the world is celebrated: Christmas. Which is obviously a Christian religious holiday.
In a country that was until recently all about fully assimilating into an American melting pot, Jews that are mostly secular were therefore left out. So they turned to another holiday to celebrate and can thereby join in the holiday spirit of the season with their fellow Christians. If a Jew is secular enough, he might even bring a ‘Chanukah bush’ into his house.
As multiculturalism has since taken over form the melting pot culture, the secular world has done a good job in learning a bit more about Chanukah other than seeing it as the Jewish Christmas. It seems like every year the media has become more aware of the details of Chanukah – realizing for example that it lasts eight days, we light candles each day, and that it does not coincide exactly with Christmas. Sometimes it can be as early as Thanksgiving.
But if we dive a bit more deeply into what Chanukah is about, one can understand why Christopher Hitchens and Sarah Prager hate it. To put it the way Rabbi Lamm does:
Hanukkah is about as out of step with the contemporary elite consensus as any religious tradition can be.
Chanukah is about rejecting popular culture and staying loyal to our religious traditions. It is about a group of Jewish zealots known as the Maccabees who fought off their Greek rulers attempts to get the Jews to reject the strictures of Judaism and assimilate them into their culture of Helenism. Because those strictures were ‘weird’ and made Jews so different from them.
Their motives were not that dissimilar from what is happening today. The Greeks saw their culture and idol worship is the ideal way of life. They saw Jewish culture as backwards and limiting personal freedom - hampering their ability to fully become one with them and adopt their culture in total.
Chanukah celebrates the rejection of those values - and the right to live our lives according to the laws and strictures of Judaism. We are a nation of obligations. We are a nation dedicated to serving God according to His will as dictated in His Torah and interpreted by our sages throughout Jewish history.
What we are clearly not about is complete personal freedom. When Moshe gave Pharaoh the message dictated to him by God which said ‘Let my people go’ he was not only asking for His people to be freed from slavery. That phase is incomplete. It reads in full as follows, ‘Let My people go so that they can serve Me’. We are a holy people and free only to serve God. Not our own desires... or any man including the Greeks of the Hasmonian era of 2000 years ago.
When seen in the light of truth, one can understand why Rabbi Lamm says that Chanukah is despised. The liberal mantra dominating American culture today is increasingly about the complete freedom to do as one wishes as long as it doesn’t infringe the rights of others. The idea of serving God is completely counter to that notion. Celebrating the victory of the Maccabees allowed us to reject that kind of freedom for ourselves. Which flies in the face of that liberal ethos.
Just to be clear. There is nothing wrong with having liberal values. But in Judaism there are some values that supersede those values. I think it would wise if we thought about what Chanukah is all about and understand that not every secular value of our day is compatible with the Torah. And fully reject any and all attempts to use twisted logic to make it so.
