Author: Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Published:
NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003
As holiday lights festoon homes across America and menorahs come
out of storage, most Americans think of Chanukah and Christmas
as calendar comrades keeping one another company in December.
In some years that is true while in others Chanukah falls earlier,
coming out much closer to Thanksgiving, a holiday with which it
has far more in common. Both were holy days established to express
gratitude to God.
Chanukah was established a little over 2,000 years ago, as ancient
Jewish tradition records: "The next year those eight days
were appointed a festival with praise and thanksgiving to God."
On Dec. 12, 1621, one of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow, wrote
a letter in which he described the first Thanksgiving, which had
taken place a little earlier. In a style reminiscent of how religious
Jews pepper their sentences with "Baruch HaShem" –
Blessed be God – Winslow wrote:
"Our wheat did prove well, and God be praised, we had a
good increase of Indian corn. And although it be not always so
plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness
of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers
of our plenty."
Though America's founders linked bountiful plenty to God, some
schools are teaching their students that our nation's first Thanksgiving
was a secular rather than a religious event. Distorting facts
to fit secular mythology, teachers misinform young Americans that
Edward Winslow was not thanking God but the local Indians.
Inconveniently for today's secular fundamentalists, God remained
central to Thanksgiving well past colonial times. In 1863 President
Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving to be an annual American holiday
with words which should resonate with comfortable familiarity
in all Jewish ears:
"I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part
of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those
who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe
the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and
Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And
I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly
due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they
do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and
disobedience. ..."
Lincoln's words still ring with Old Testament fervor yet many
of us turn the joyful solemnity of both Chanukah and Thanksgiving
into childish extravaganzas. The holiday of Chanukah offers an
example of how we err.
Most American Jews are content to experience Chanukah through
olden tales our children are told at Hebrew school or through
a brief candle-lighting ceremony. If we are particularly traditional,
we might devote one evening of the eight-day festival to eating
oil-drenched potato latkes and playing spin-the-dreidel with our
children.
We would be more likely to believe that Santa slides down the
chimney on Christmas Eve than to accept that observing Chanukah
can be intellectually challenging for adults and enormously relevant
to our busy lives.
Yet we would be wrong. With our long-ago conquest of secularism,
we Jews should be the ones leading the protest when America's
secular culture infantilizes religion. Consider just one small
part of Chanukah's history as an example.
In Temple times, the Hasmoneans, led by Judah Macabee, rebelled
against their Greek oppressors, who, helped by their secular Jewish
allies, had ransacked the Jerusalem temple. The high priest, who
was preparing to rededicate the temple and relight the menorah,
found one small jar of olive oil. The Talmud indicates that this
small jar of oil, sufficient to burn for only one day, miraculously
kept the menorah burning for eight full days.
Jewish tradition poses the following conundrum. Although the
menorah burned for eight days, there was indeed enough oil for
the first day. This means that only the last seven days involved
a miracle. For the oil to burn during the first day was perfectly
natural. Therefore, why is Chanukah an eight-day festival? Properly,
it ought to last for only seven days to commemorate the seven-day
miracle.
One answer is that the first day of the holiday highlights the
real miracle – namely, that oil reacts with oxygen in a remarkable
chemical reaction that provides us with light and heat. Chanukah's
eight-day celebration teaches us all to see the miracles in everyday
phenomena such as the availability of fuel for our energy needs.
It is all too easy to ignore the miracle of God's blessing of
bounty. Using the laws of physics, the Hasmonean heroes assumed
that there was insufficient oil to last for the necessary eight
days. Then they learned that the laws of God dictate the laws
of physics. They learned that secularism, the legacy of their
Greek enemies, contracts the bounty of the universe while God,
with His gift of infinite limitlessness, expands it.
To this day we Jews light one additional flame each night of
Chanukah, partly to inject into our souls the idea that through
God, each day can bring more and more, not less and less. It is
not an accident that during the original Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims
expressed gratitude to God for doing away with hunger and shortage.
Neither is it an accident that America's high priests of secular
fundamentalism preach a doctrine of shortage. As secularists,
they must obsess with almost fundamentalist irrationality on the
need for conservation. This in spite of the fact that every historical
parallel, from Thomas Malthus' notorious 1798 "Essay on Population"
all the way to the examples below, ridicule this gloomy sacrament
of secularism.
America used to depend on whale oil for lighting. During the
early 19th century, pundits warned that since whales were being
harvested at an ever increasing rate, America would soon go dark.
They recommended extinguishing all lanterns no later than ten
o'clock in order to conserve the remaining whale oil.
They were right about running out of whale oil, but they were
wrong about America going dark. In 1859 a railroad conductor named
Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pa. America remained brightly
lit, but by lanterns that burned paraffin instead of whale oil.
Until the early 18th century, colonial homes were heated mostly
by burning wood. Forests were vanishing and the rapidly growing
colonies were running out of firewood. Eliminate immigration and
ration firewood was the call of the day. They were right about
running out of firewood, but it didn't matter because we soon
found and began burning a far superior fuel called coal.
William Jevons, an economics professor at University College,
London, became famous on account of a paper he published in 1865.
It was entitled "The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning
the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our
Coal Mines." He predicted that British prosperity would end
within 50 years when the nation ran out of coal and recommended
an industrial slowdown in order to conserve what coal was left.
We are just about into 2004 and Britain is still mining and burning
coal, although most of its energy needs are safely and bountifully
supplied by nuclear power.
During the 1980s, fax machines became ubiquitous and vast numbers
of Americans installed additional phone lines to accommodate these
handy devices. Again, saints of secularism like Paul Ehrlich issued
dire warnings about the price of copper. There was insufficient
copper in the world to run two phone lines to every home. What
would happen if people wanted three lines? Surely the price of
copper would rise to reflect the shortage, and industrial development
would be fatally curtailed.
They were right about there not being enough copper. They were
wrong about its price. The miracle of God-given human ingenuity
made copper as redundant as whale oil. We began sending data through
impossibly thin glass filaments. Glass is made from sand and we
are in no danger of running out of that particular commodity.
It only seemed that we lacked sufficient copper, whale oil or
wood. In reality, our God-given ingenuity developed exciting new
technology that eliminated our need for each commodity just as
it was becoming scarce.
Chanukah's miracle was that, day after day, the temple's menorah
just kept on burning in spite of an apparent shortage of fuel
– a metaphor surely, for all apparent shortages can be overcome
with faith.
Chanukah invites us all to express gratitude to the Creator whose
beneficence is boundless. It stimulates discussions that can spur
our spiritual growth. It reminds us that with His gift of creativity,
challenges become optimistic opportunities to partner with God
in creatively solving all material shortage.
Remembering that Thanksgiving and Chanukah go together adds adult
appeal to religion because a cardinal theme of Chanukah expressed
in its liturgy is giving thanks to God: "And they established
these eight days of Chanukah to give thanks and to praise Your
Great Name."
© Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Radio talk show host Rabbi Daniel Lapin is president of Toward
Tradition, a Seattle-based national organization that builds bridges
linking America's Jewish and Christian communities and advocates
ancient solutions to modern problems.
For more information or to schedule an interview, please contact:
Jennifer Brunson
(206) 236-3046
www.towardtradition.org
