Chanukah Means Dedication |
Chanukah Means Dedication
On the 25th day of the month of Kislev, we celebrate the
dedication of the Temple to the service of G’d according to Jewish tradition
and the teachings of the rabbis. Of course, the Temple is no more and the
ancient rituals once performed there have long ceased to have a meaning for the
Jewish people. There are those who say that they want to build yet a third
Temple. The first Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.
and rebuilt in 516 B.C.E. King Herod then again re-built the Temple in 35 B.C.E.
and that second
Temple was then finally destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. At present, the
Temple Mount is occupied by a Moslem shrine called the Dome of the Rock which
was built in 687 C.E.
It
may be debatable whether we want to again perform animal sacrifices if a third
Temple is ever built there.
It may even be debatable whether or not it is in our interest as Jews to
build or help build such a Temple. It is however vital for Jewish survival that
we continue to hold and have access to the Temple Mount, which is the most
sacred place in Judaism. Unfortunately, the current Prime Minister of Israel,
Ehud Barak, and his mentor, Shimon Peres, feel no obligation to keep the Temple
Mount in Jewish hands. On the contrary. Consistent with the
practices of the European ghetto Jews, Barak is willing to hand Arafat and his
terrorists anything the terrorists want, including the Old City of Jerusalem
from which all Jews were excluded when it was in Arab hands until 1948.
Therefore we must dedicate ourselves to the preservation of Jerusalem as
a Jewish city and do all we can to defeat Barak and his policies. Barak, in no
sense dedicated to the security of Israel,
is willing to hand the terrorists the Jordan Valley, which will make it
possible for Iraq and all the other Arab states to invade Israel from the east.
Therefore we must dedicate ourselves to the security and preservation of Israel
by defeating Barak, a man who has learned nothing from history or from current
events.
In
1938 the Germans under Hitler signed an agreement with England to give Germany a
part of Czechoslovakia
if the Nazi dictator would thereafter keep the peace. Hitler of course
had no intention of keeping the peace. Shortly after he signed that piece of
paper, the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland and then Russia and so
on. Likewise, Arafat signed agreements for seven years but kept none of them.
Not only did Israel not get peace for all the land and weapons former Prime
Minister Peres has handed
them, but instead the Arabs attacked and continue to attack Jews
everywhere, shooting, killing and murdering any Jew they can find.
We
must therefore dedicate ourselves to preventing the destruction of Israel for
temporary political advantages by a small clique of politicians who are willing
to destroy the only land we Jews ever had. It is of course certain that any
agreement signed by Arafat is worthless and that as soon as Israel hands over
yet more land, the Arabs will demand more and more until there is nothing left.
Today, December 22, 2000, it was announced that Barak intends to reduce
Israel to the boundaries of June 1967, a line which Abba Eban has called the Auschwitz
line.
We must dedicate ourselves to the defeat of that policy by writing,
protesting and demanding that this not be done. Barak is another Chamberlain. He
is driving Israel to the brink of disaster. We must dedicate ourselves to the
preservation of Israel and join the United Synagogue and other organizations in
this country to end this madness.
There
have always been those Jews who bowed to any enemy, afraid to stand up for our
rights and our lives. Peres and Barak are not the first to believe that Jews
must crawl in the back door and never resist lest “things get worse”. How
much worse can it get?
To
give us some strength, some sense of purpose, read again the story of Chanuka.
We know about the fight of the Maccabees from the work of Josephus Flavius, a
Jewish apostate and the Benedict Arnold of his time. Appointed to command Jewish
forces in their fight against the Roman invaders in Galilee, i.e. northern
Israel, he betrayed his country, and for personal advantage surrendered to the
Romans without a fight in 67 C.E. Thereafter, Josephus Flavius (his Latin name)
accompanied the armies of Vespasian and his son Titus to the destruction of
Jerusalem. He advised the Roman enemy how to destroy the city and then wrote two
works called The
Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. In
volume 12 of Jewish Antiquities Josephus
Flavius discusses the first Chanukah, which occurred in 165 B.C.E.
Unlike
Barak and Peres of our own day, Judah the Maccabee and his followers refused to
surrender to the demands of the Syrians and won. Unlike the frightened
“peaceniks” of today, the Maccabees stood up for the right of Jews to live
in their own country and to defend their lives. Unlike the “liberal”
establishment in Israel and the U.S. who know only surrender to all and any Arab
demands, the Maccabees would not surrender because they believed, as do the
majority of Jews today, that we too have the right to self determination just
like any Arab.
If
Chanukah means anything, then it means that it is the festival of freedom. For
centuries we Jews prayed “next year in Jerusalem.” Now Barak wants to throw
it all away. Utterly devoid of the most elementary understanding of Jewish
history, we see once more the spirit of the European
Judenrat who has no appreciation of the hopes and needs of the Jewish
people. Therefore we must protest loudly and vehemently at this near betrayal of
all our accomplishments and all our achievements
and all the blood and deaths suffered by Jewish defenders of Israel
before it is too late and we witness another Shoah caused by Jewish stupidity
and private ambition. Shalom
u’vracha.
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