Rabbi Berel Wein

JWR Outlook



Jewish World Review Dec. 6, 1999 /27 Kislev, 5760

Trendy vs. tenacious


By Rabbi Berel Wein

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- A LONG TIME AGO - about 2,165 years - a band of Jews waged a guerrilla war against the Syrian-Greek armies and government that controlled the Land of Israel. The war was successful and eventually the Syrian-Greeks loosened their grip on the country.

The Jewish kingdom of the Hasmoneans existed for more than a century. During this period the early Tannaim began their work and the study of Torah spread among the masses of Israel.

But in historical terms the Hasmonean triumph was short-lived. It is therefore strange that this event - the original Hasmonean victory - should be the focus of a commemorative holiday that has survived the ages. Imagine the British still celebrating Washington's defeat on Long Island or the French still commemorating Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz. The Jews are certainly a strange people!Econophone

That is why I've always felt that Chanukkah must commemorate more than a passing event. It marks a fundamental lesson that we learned then and has since become part of the Jewish makeup.

It is the lesson of tenacity, the lesson of being unimpressed and undaunted by the changing mores and fashions of popular opinion. The doggedness of the Jewish people is our primary trait.

As for the question of who is a Jew - and I mean this philosophically rather than halachicly - it is eventually decided by the possession of that trait of tenacity.

Moses characterized Israel as "a stiff-necked" people. That description is not entirely pejorative. Our survival till today, the fact that we still celebrate Chanukkah, and that neither the Greeks nor the Romans are around any longer, is simply due to a test of wills, a struggle of tenacity.

I am convinced, therefore, that Chanukkah, perhaps more than any other holiday in the Jewish calendar, speaks loudly to our generation.

The State of Israel, after the monumental achievements of its armed forces, its economy, and technological development, its ingathering of the exiles from all corners of the earth, its intellectual and scholarship development in Torah and in all secular fields of study and inquiry, has somehow become tired. This is understandable, for its citizens have borne such great burdens for so long that it would be naive to expect no relaxation of our will to succeed.

And yet it is sad to see a young generation that has no sense of the tenacity and stiff-neckedness that created the state and preserved the Jewish people throughout the ages.

In last week's Ha'aretz magazine section there was a long article about this generation. It was entitled "Dope, sex, and post-Zionist thrills - The young clubbers of Tel Aviv are out for only one thing: the ultimate high."

The magazine breathlessly reports: "They're young. They're intelligent. They dance, they do drugs and they make love.

"It's all happening on the local - and already world-famous - club scene, where a whole generation is in revolt."Trakdata

And the article concludes: "...the roar of liberation emitted by that secularism is heard loud and clear. And it says a lot about some sort of broad uprising by the Israeli youngsters of the millennium against a host of demands that are hurled at them. Against a whole system of imperatives and codes and constraints that they are no longer ready to accept....

"Those gathered here [at the club] have come to worship freedom, liberation, the breaking of every taboo. The discarding of every boundary. The crossing of every threshold."

Well, someone should tell this brave new generation that it's all been tried before: the 1920 Weimar Republic society, Paris between the wars, the American flappers of the 1920s, and the Beat Generation of the 1960s. And all of those thrills and freedom and liberation only led to world catastrophes, broken lives, deep societal divisions, and astronomical bills for individual and national rehabilitation.

Who in Israel is going to pay for detoxifying these druggies? What sort of people will these twentysomethings be when they reach their forties and fifties? Why should they be glorified by the media for their self-destructive and essentially antisocial behavior?

Of course, they don't represent the danger to Israeli society that the hated haredim do. Still, we are entitled to ask who is going to pick up the bill for their youthful suicidal behavior? I guess that as always, the old, backward, unliberated, tenacious Jews will have to do so.

Chanukkah teaches us that we have seen all of this before. The Syrian-Greeks also had great sex-and-dope clubs, and also broke every taboo.

And there were plenty of young Jews - Hellenists and others - who flocked to their parties. But eventually the realities of life, of implacable enemies, and the wasting results of all types of addiction, of moral emptiness, and the absence of standards and values destroyed the Greeks and the Hellenist Jews with them.

And the tenacious Jews, even in the midst of exile and physical defeat, continued to light their little candles every Chanukkah.

And so we shall continue - for that is the Jewish thing to do.



JWR contributor Rabbi Berel Wein is one of Jewry's foremost historians and founder of the Destiny Foundation. He resides in Jerusalem. You may contact Rabbi Wein by by clicking here or calling 1-800-499-WEIN (9346).


Up

11/15/99: Legacies and remembrances
11/08/99: The joy -- and responsibility -- of being a grandparent
10/28/99: Imperfect solutions
10/21/99: 'Holy loafers'
10/07/99: Earthquakes --- 'natural' and otherwise
09/28/99: Beauty
09/17/99: Blessing the children
09/10/99: A good year


©1999, Rabbi Berel Wein