#987 12/22/19 – This Week: Hanukkah’s Meaning For Us

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Well, it’s Hanukkah.  In kindling and gazing at tonight’s first candle, reflect on why we’ve been doing this now for two thousand years – to strengthen our resolve in contending against those mightier than us who’d take from us our distinctive Jewishness.  Today, in our time, this includes Hellenizers among us who’d cede the heart of our homeland in the name of making it “democratic and Jewish.”

This Week:  Hanukkah’s Meaning For Us

Some Current Takes on Hanukkah

Ok, there are more meanings of Hanukkah making the rounds these days than ways to spell it in English.  One liberal rabbi in these parts has been championing for years making it a celebration against global warming.  How everyone lighting more and more candles every night for a week fights global warming, only a liberal can tell you.

I much prefer the martyred Ari Fuld’s take, recapped for us this week by The Jewish Press, “The Real Miracle of Chanukah,” 12/21/19.  He said there were two miracles in the Maccabees’ war against the imperial Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great – the oil that lasted eight days, of course, but also, and what’s lastingly meaningful, that we Jews fought and improbably won that war against vastly superior forces attempting to extinguish our Jewishness.  That victory, Fuld said, was not achieved by force of the Maccabees’ army alone.

Some detractors denigrate the Maccabees’ war as “a civil war between Jews.”  It had a civil discord element, of course, but so had the George Washington-led revolt against Britain. Arlene Kushner wrote in “From Israel: Kindle Your Lights!” this morning:  “A good number of Jews of that time were assimilationist and attracted to Hellenism,” and that this encouraged the Seleucids’ anti-Jewish campaign.  I wrote in my own book, Israel 3000 Years (p. 53), of feuds between the Jewish elite and populace over Hellenizing.

Taking On the Hellenists of Our Own Day

The Jewish particularism that Jewish Hellenists in America oppose today is not so much Jewish ritual practices that set us apart from other Americans, but the Jewishness of our Jewish homeland itself.  Only by surrendering Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem to a new Arab state with borders that “hew precisely” (save for any agreed “adjustments”) to “the 1967 borders,” they say, can Israel be both “democratic and Jewish.”

Don’t buy this supposed dilemma.  Palestinian Arabs do have a homeland state, a Palestine homeland state, eastern Palestine, Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate, of which they are the population majority.  Jordan as “Arab Palestine” isn’t something that may or may not come to pass.  It did come to pass with the early-on excision from the Palestine Mandate, with its provision for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home, of 78% as Arab Transjordan, today’s Jordan.  And if Palestinian Arabs aren’t today in charge of Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan, that’s to be solved in that 78% of Palestine that became Arab Jordan, not by again dividing between Arabs and Jews the 22% of Palestine the excision of Jordan left for the Jews.

But if Israel ever did have to choose between being “democratic” or Jewish, it has to choose Jewish.  Israel isn’t America, founded on and generally following (but cf, e,g., Native Americans and Blacks) principles of full and equal citizenship for all legal residents.  It’s an ethnic state, the one small Jewish ethnic state, in a region packed with “The Arab Republic of …”, “The Islamic Republic of …”, often in name and always in practice.  “Dhimmi,” anyone?  And it’s not a case of Jews being new there.  Jews were Jews in the land of Israel a millennium-and-a-half before Muslims were Muslims in the Mideast.  And – the point of my Jews-in-Palestine book – we never left there.  We involuntarily became the minority, but those who remained weren’t there as stray individuals, but as the always organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming Yishuv.  As historian Parkes put it in Whose Land (p. 266), the continuous presence of the Yishuv wrote our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

I would leave you with two things to think about as you light and gaze at tonight’s first Hanukkah candle.  They’re two aspects of the same imperative about the land of Israel, all of it – We Have To Have It.

[1]  It’s impossible to read about the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948-49, 1967 and 1973 without appreciating not only the Maccabean courage of Israel’s Jews in those wars, but, soberingly, what close things those wars were – the desperation of Israeli attempts to break through the Arab siege of Jewish-held Jerusalem in 1948; battles like Ammunition Hill and the tank assault up the steep slopes bordering the Jerusalem road in 1967; and how close the Syrian tank forces came to breaking out into the lowland coastal plain in the surprise-war of 1973.  The specter of returned Arab control of the Jordan Valley and Judea-Samaria hill country heartland literally overlooking the nine-miles-wide in the middle lowland coastal plain, of surrendered Israeli control of the peoplehood core of the homeland, historic Jerusalem, Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all, is not to be countenanced.

[2]  The Holocaust was not an anomaly, but the culmination of centuries of persecution of the Jewish people in Europe.  Over the centuries, every device of ethnic maltreatment – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – was devised in Christian Europe, heartland of Western civilization, expressly for Jews.  Not to mention Jews’ centuries of “dhimmi” mistreatment in Muslim lands.

Today’s Hellenists among American Jews, in the name of making Israel, against the will of Israelis, “democratic and Jewish,” would rip from it Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem, reducing it to a defenseless fraction of the 22% of the Palestine Mandate’s Jewish national home, ceding those most defensible and most peoplehood-meaningful parts of the Jewish homeland to a new Arab state controlled by “Palestinians” who never ruled any of those parts of the thrice-sovereign Jewish homeland ever.

Resolve in lighting and gazing at tonight’s first Hanukkah candle to plead with fellow grassroots American Jews not to follow the lead of the lay and religious leaders of American Jewry’s Reform and Conservative institutions in championing, along with the UN, EU and other non-fans of the Jewish homeland, the ripping from Israel’s now half-century control of historic Jerusalem, the very heart of the homeland, and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland.

Happy Hanukkah!