Archives for December 2006

Two things have been bothering me and I need to talk about both.

1. I do not enjoy the fact that in the past week, the three mentions of Hanuka in the New York Times, all had to do with Jewish families who were celebrating Xmas. Don’t get me wrong. Xmas is a beautiful and wonderful holiday for Christians. It is a very special time of the year for them and it is of deep religious significance. But is it NOT an “American holiday.” It is NOT a “secular holiday.” And whoever thinks it is and writes about it that way and thinks that tinsel and stockings are what it’s about is being downright disrespectful of people who take it very seriously.

But I don’t fault the people in the stories. After all, those whose stories I read are people whose observance of Judaism is limited to the outer trappings and the outer trappings of Hanuka are clearly less attractive than those of Xmas. After all, what is a menora whose full splendor comes to the fore only after seven nights of increasing light to a Xmas tree with ornaments and lights and fake snow and tinsel and gifts beneath it? Were these people to understand the deep religious significance of Hanuka and of other Jewish festivals and observances, they would not cast them aside nor think of them as lacking in any way. They would be touched by the presence and protection of G-d at a time when the Syrian-Greeks were spreading Hellenism and asking Jews to join them, when only the brave were able to stand up and say that what we have and what we are committed to is precious to us. They would understand that the capitulation to the trappings of a holiday that is not ours is an echo of the same battle that Hanuka commemorates.

2. On a totally different subject: To those beauty queens who have been naughty girls- showing what shouldn’t be shown and doing what shouldn’t be done– Women!!! Are you crazy? This is not the 1950s when only camera nuts had cameras. This is not the 1960s or 70s when those little instamatics could only take pictures from 6 to 8 feet away from the subject. This isn’t even the era of film cameras most of which were big and all of which required film, meaning the expenditure of money and limited numbers of pictures. This is the new millenium. We have digital cameras. They are so tiny that we have to lift up an envelope to find them and can lose them in our pockets. They can take thousands of pictures on one memory card and those pictures don’t cost even a penny. There are cameras on cell phones. Yoo hoo…. how can you possibly think that no one will see what you look like when you are acting out??? You attract attention to yourselves and then are “surprised” at being caught? I mean, I thought the days of the “not-so-smart-but-has-a great-bod” were over. When you act in such unintelligent ways, you women embarrass me. You embarrass your mothers. You embarrass yourselves. Get a grip! Respect yourselves. How you look is G-d’s gift to you. How you act, is your gift to yourself.

OK, I’ve said it and I’m done! (for now.)

It’s been tough to write recently. I don’t want to write about the situation in Israel. It’s all too frightening. We have a government led by a man who has great difficulty keeping his foot out of his mouth and his hands out of other people’s pockets. At present, the press has stopped obssessing over our President’s legal difficulties (the allegations of improper sexual conduct) and all we are concerned about is the possibility that the man who says he wants to annihilate Israel will succeed in building a nuclear powerhouse that will destroy not only Israel, but all of Western civilization. All of this, while the Western countries debate whether sanctions are in order. What, may I ask, is the good of all of the Holocaust memorials and education if the Western world is sitting around and waiting to see if a madman who has vowed death and destruction really will do it??? And don’t these ostriches know that once he is done with us they are next???

When I was a little girl, my father told me that he too lived through difficult times. He told me that people talked about whether the world would survive. He told me that he believes that the world is stronger than the evil that wants to destroy it. He was not a traditionally religious man, but he had more faith in the goodness of the world and the kindness of people than anyone I have ever met. He was the consummate optimist while at the same time understanding and being concerned with reality. His gift of optimism is what keeps me going, keeps me hopeful.

We are taught that our lives are seen in a balance with the good deeds we do on one side and the places where we fail on the other and that any one act can tip the balance. I think of our place in the world in the same way. I believe that adding goodness in any place at any time can shift the balance. I believe that showing kindness to our family, friends, and strangers, being helpful, considerate, and understanding can bring enough goodness to the world to outweigh the destructiveness and hate that threaten us. We need to appreciate the beauty in each person and recognize in each other the holy spark of the Divine that resides in all of us.

This is one way in which we can bring about “tikkun olam” -healing the world.