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.)
