Chanukah 5770/2009 - Jewish Infertility

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Chizuk The story of Chanukah comes to teach us how history can take the most unlikely turns and produce the most improbable victors. SHAAREI TIKVAH/ CHANUKAH 2009 almost overnight, and through the tattered Iron Curtain 450,000 Jews exited to Israel. Within a decade, the Jewish population of Israel had swelled by a booming 10%, and all mention of the demographic threat disappeared from the media. Now Phil, who dearly loves Israel, is convinced that we will commit political suicide. After the failure of Oslo and the near-fatal offers at Camp David, pro-Israel columnists in American media warned that if the U.S. and Europe continue to push Israel into dangerous concessions, the map of the Middle East which appears in Palestinian textbooks – with Israel totally absent – may yet prove accurate. Agreeing with them, Phil opines that Israel’s leaders lack the political will to take the steps necessary to disempower the Palestinian Authority. Without such blatant measures, Israel’s future is bleak. I cannot argue with Phil’s facts and figures, but I know that God is not bound by them. The story of Chanukah comes to teach us how history can take the most unlikely turns and produce the most improbable victors. Chanukah What would the experts of 167 B.C.E. have said about the chances of the old priest Mattathias and his family and friends defeating the mighty army of the Syrian Greek empire? I can see their pronouncements now: “An ultra-Orthodox priest and his reactionary compatriots have raised the banner of revolt against not only the prevailing rule of the Seleucid Empire, but also against all of modern Greek culture and enlightenment. This motley band of guerrilla fighters is outnumbered more than 4-1 by the Seleucid army, which boasts some 40,000 professional troops equipped with the cutting edge of military technology, as well as the ultimate weapon – a herd of elephants trained for battle, against which no warriors can stand. “The Maccabees, as this reactionary rebel force is called, are opposed not only by the considerable Greek population on the coastal plain, but also by a large proportion of the Jewish inhabitants, who have, over the last century and a half, adapted to the world-wide hegemony of Greek language, culture, and religion. Thus, the Maccabees have initiated a civil war, targeted at their own progressive fellow Jews, who are called Hellenists. As the Hellenists comprise the wealthiest and influential segments of Jewish society, the effort to unseat them is nothing less than preposterous. “In short, the attempt of the Maccabees to score a military victory, overthrew the progressive culture which dominates the whole world, and re-establish their antiquated religion on the soil of Judea is futile.” The pundits would have been accurate in their analysis. After all, who could have predicted that three years after issuing his rallying cry, “Follow me, all of you who are for God’s law and stand by the covenant,” Mattathias’s followers would reconquer Jerusalem, purify the Temple of its pagan desecrations, and reinstitute the Temple service? Although the total victory was hard-won – taking over twenty years and costing the lives of four out of five of Mattathias’s sons, the Maccabees ultimately triumphed over the Greeks. 14
SHAAREI TIKVAH/ CHANUKAH 2009 So, when you go to light your Chanukah candles, instead of thinking you are enacting a quaint custom of Jewish tradition, realize that you are fulfilling a mitzvah 15 The prayer to God we add during the eight days of Chanukah emphasizes the unlikelihood of the Jewish victory: “You delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few ….” Chanukah celebrates the victory of the unlikely, the improbable, the virtually impossible. It is the antithesis of the still-prevailing Greek worldview which adulates logic and the laws of nature as absolute. Chanukah proves that in a world run by God, miracles can happen. Maximum Effort Judaism forbids relying on miracles. A Jew must always exert maximum effort according to reason to affect desired results. The Maccabees did not sit back and wait for a miracle to happen. But neither were they cowed by the odds nor discouraged by daunting prospects. The rule of thumb in Jewish history has always been that when we are threatened spiritually, as we were by the Greeks, who wanted to exterminate our religion, not our lives, we fight back physically, as the Maccabees did. And when we are threatened physically, as we were during the events leading up to Purim, when Haman wanted to exterminate every Jew, we fight back spiritually, just as the Jews of Shushan, at Mordechai’s and Esther’s behest did tshuva. Since we are today threatened physically, we must – in addition to the Israeli army’s self-defensive measures – fight back spiritually. The spears of the Maccabees are the mitzvot of today. Every time a Jew commits to keeping Shabbat or reaches out in friendship to a Jew of a different stripe, a spiritual force is produced which could cause a terrorist bomb placed on a Jerusalem street to fail to detonate. (The vast majority of terrorist bombs in Israel miraculously fail to detonate, or blow up on busy thoroughfares without injuring anyone.) My cousin Phil accuses me of being passive. In truth, I am a spiritual warrior. I know that God will come through for Israel if I exert myself beyond my comfort zone to keep the mitzvot that aren’t easy for me, and if other Jews do the same. If I overcome my urge to take revenge against my obnoxious neighbor, I have launched a projectile powerful enough to bring down Saddam Hussein’s most deadly missiles. The time has come to wage a spiritual war against our enemies. Every mitzvah is an infinitely more powerful weapon than anything Bin Laden has in his arsenal. So, when you go to light your Chanukah candles, instead of thinking you are enacting a quaint custom of Jewish tradition, realize that you are fulfilling a mitzvah, and mitzvot are the spiritual antidote to whatever chemicals the bio-terrorists are brewing in their nefarious laboratories. God, who runs the world, expects us to exert maximum effort in doing mitzvot. The victory in this war, as in the Maccabean war we are commemorating, will come from Him. ––––––––––––––––––––––– Sara Yoheved Levinsky Rigler graduated from Brandeis University magna cum laude. For fifteen years she practiced and taught Vedanta philosophy and meditation. She is the author of A Bridge of Dreams and Holy Woman. She presently resides in the Old City of Jerusalem with her husband and two children working as a book editor and writer.
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