SPECIAL HANNUKAH APPEAL
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On behalf of Professor Frederick Krantz, Director, Baruch Cohen, Research Chairman,
& Joseph Shier, Chairman, CIJR wishes everyone a Happy Hannukah–Hag Sameach!
THE LIGHTS THAT NEVER DIM!
Baruch Cohen
In honor of Pearl and Jack Rothenberg
Hanukah, which literally means “dedication,” tells the story of the Maccabees who fought for Jewish beliefs, values and traditions. Hanukah is a Jewish story of commitment, vitality, hope and justice.
JudahHamaccabe and his fighters built high walls and strong towers around Mount Zion, so that the gentiles would never again come and destroy them, as they have done before. (Macabees 1)
The message of Hanukah is clear to anyone who reads the Biblical books of the Maccabees. Only by following the lessons of our history can we rekindle the Hanukah spirit of our tradition and give the Jewish people the strength to be a light into the nations.
While celebrating Hanukah 5772, we remember the heroes and heroines of the Warsaw Ghetto who never put down their weapons, nor gave up their faith. Let us remember our beloved brothers and sisters who were murdered at the hands of terrorists. Let us remember our new Maccabees, our brave Israeli soldiers who have fallen in the struggle for independence and security of our beloved State of Israel.
We must never, ever let history repeat itself. We should, and we will, go on, one generation after the other until the end of days. Nothing is more miraculous than the survival, both physically and spiritually, of Am Israel—the Jewish People.
The waves of hatred that we are witnessing today against the State of Israel and the Jewish people teach us that we must remember: Never Again! Am Israel Chai! The Jewish people live, today and forever! Our fight is not a fight only against our enemies, but a fight for Jewish values, for Judaism!
The lights of Hanukah will forever illuminate the way for future generations.
Hag Hanukah Sameach!
(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research)
ARE YOU HAPPY TO BE JEWISH?
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
Jerusalem Post, December 8, 2011
Are you happy to be Jewish? Is it a burden or privilege? For many, Jewish identity means having inherited a history of pogroms, the Holocaust, hatred and suffering; and now, the trauma of our past is interlocked with our fears for the future, filled with military threats, mounting international isolation of the State of Israel and increased incidents of anti-Semitism around the globe.
Though we are troubled, we must not fall into the trap of negativity, nor of a Jewish identity defined by our enemies. Hanukka offers us a different path, away from pessimism and toward a positive and inspiring Jewish identity.
There were two great miracles that took place some 2,200 years ago, when the mighty Greek Empire was defeated by a rebellion led by the Maccabees—the priests in the Temple. The first was the unlikely military victory of this group of priests and their followers over a world superpower. The second was when they entered the Temple and, as is recorded in the Talmud, found only one flask of ritually pure olive oil for lighting the menorah, but instead of it burning for one day, it miraculously lasted for eight. When we light Hanukka candles, we celebrate the second miracle and not the first.
This seems counter-intuitive: on the scale of miracles, surely the defeat of a world empire at the hands of a group of priests is more impressive—and indeed more historically significant—than how many days the oil burnt. Why, then, do we celebrate this seemingly smaller miracle? Rabbi Meir Simcha HaKohen of Dvinsk (1843-1926), writes in his commentary on the Humash, that our Talmudic sages modeled Hanukka on the G-d-given pattern of our other festivals, which focus not on the defeat of others but rather on the positive goals we achieved for ourselves; Passover, for example, is called z’man heiruteinu, the time of our freedom—and not “the time of the downfall of Egypt.”
So too Hanukka does not commemorate the defeat of the Greeks, but rather the rededication of the Temple and, especially, the rekindling of the menorah, which represents the light of Torah values. There is a moral reason for this model: It is insensitive to celebrate the suffering of other people.
According to the Midrash, when the feared Egyptian army was drowning in the Red Sea and the angels wanted to sing praises, G-d rebuked them; how could they sing when His creations were being destroyed? But there is an existential reason as well, and that is that Hanukka is not about the battle won over our enemies but about the victory of being able to light the flames of Torah values in the world.… This is why on Hanukka we focus on the miracle of the menorah and not the miracle of the war. Hanukka teaches us that Jewish identity should not be defined by struggle with our enemies, but rather by our G-d-given moral vision, mission and values.
Suffering and anti-Semitism must not define Jewish identity, for three reasons: First, that would give far too much credence to our enemies; we must not give them the right to define who we are. Second, it creates an identity rooted in negativity and pain, and this kind of Jewishness is not sustainable.… Third, defining ourselves by a history of suffering fosters the notion that our existence is solely about survival. But unlike animals whose aim is solely survival, human beings were created…to live with the higher purpose of a Divine mission, a calling which we carry in our souls.
The lessons of Hanukka need to guide us today. For too many Jews, centuries of pogroms and oppression have defined what a Jew is. Although the Halacha [Jewish law] mandates that we remember and honor the victims of anti-Semitism and mourn the suffering and destructions on fast days throughout the year…pain cannot dominate who we are. It forms but a part of a broader, positive whole.
It was the Maccabees, the loyal and devoted priests of the Temple, who fought for freedom in those days because their vision was founded upon authentic Jewish values.… When we light our Hanukka candles, we celebrate not the fearful battle with our enemies but rather the privilege of having a value system given to us by G-d—represented by the glowing flames of the menorah—which illuminates a dark world.
These values guide us, giving meaning, purpose and direction to our existence. They guide us on our moral responsibilities and spiritual vision of how to be a nurturing parent, a respectful son or daughter, a loving spouse, and on the meaning of honesty, integrity, generosity and compassion; how to run a government and economy; how to establish courts and what justice is; how to connect with G-d and how to pray and learn; how to practice medicine and law; how to understand science, psychology and history; how to be ethical in business and generous in charity; and how to live with inspiration and meaning in accordance with Hashem’s will. This model of positive Jewish identity is the key to our future.…
With all the troubles of our time we need a compelling and inspiring vision of what it means to be a Jew. And that can only be found in the light of the menorah. History has proven that the only form of Jewish identity which has sustained, nurtured and inspired generations of Jews for thousands of years has been an identity rooted in Torah Judaism. As we stand around our Hanukka candles this year, let us look at the lights and internalize what they represent: the light of our values, meaning and purpose, the fulfillment of a noble and Divine mission and the privilege and joy of our Jewish legacy.
(The writer is chief rabbi of South Africa.)
Last Sunday, Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist leader, Vaclav Havel, died at the age of 75. A dissident playwright and human rights champion, Havel helped lead Prague’s 1989 “Velvet Revolution,” emerging as a hero in the Cold War struggle for democracy in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.
In 1977, Havel co-authored the human rights manifesto Charter 77, which became the catalyst for the Czech dissident cause. Just weeks after the collapse of communism, Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia on Dec. 29, 1989.
A strong supporter of Jewish causes, Havel repeatedly denounced anti-Semitism, and demonstrated his commitment to the Jewish people by making one of his first foreign trips after becoming President a three-day visit to Israel in April 1990. In 2010, he was one of the founding members of the Friends of Israel group of international political figures.
The European Jewish Congress called Havel a “great friend of the Jews” who “did much to confront anti-Semitism and teach the lessons of the dark chapter of the Holocaust during his two terms in office.” The Conference of European Rabbis in a letter to the current president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, described Havel as “the emblematic symbol of peaceful change from totalitarianism to democracy” in Eastern and Central Europe.
Today, the Rabbis asserted, “Jewish communities [worldwide] join…in offering our deep condolences to all the Czech people on the passing of Vaclav Havel, an indefatigable fighter for freedom of all peoples.”
VACLAV HAVEL, THE PRINCIPLED PRESIDENT
Madeleine Albright
Washington Post, December 19, 2011
Nov. 24, 1989: Prague’s storied Wenceslas Square swarmed with demonstrators chanting slogans and waving signs that read “Posledni Zvoneni,” the last bell. Activists rattled the keys in their pockets, emulating the sound of a bell tolling to mark the end of four decades of communist rule. On a balcony overlooking the crowd stood a 53-year-old man who had been arrested that year and would, within a month, be president. Almost alone among his countrymen, he had predicted that this moment of triumph would arrive not in spite of the repression his people had suffered but because of it. In writings for which he would be jailed, he warned the communist leaders that by attempting to stifle the human urge for freedom, they were dooming their own system. Under the guidance of Vaclav Havel, the result was a movement that toppled a brutal government not in the spirit of vengeance but in affirmation of democratic institutions and values: the Velvet Revolution.
Havel, who died Sunday at age 75, never became fully comfortable with the exercise of political power. Through two terms as president, he maintained the psychology of the outsider, worrying about the effect holding high office could have on his own moral sense. He was a person more intrigued by principles than policies, by what he called the poetry of revolution compared with the prose of day-to-day governance. The division of Czechoslovakia at the end of 1992 pained him, not because he begrudged Slovaks their own state but because he felt people everywhere should be motivated by forces more uplifting than nationalism. He was the leader who gave his country a second birth of freedom. But his preoccupation was not the acquisition of liberty; it was the use of liberty for the right purposes.
In January 1990, I accompanied a delegation from the National Democratic Institute to Prague. Havel greeted me with a cheerful “Hello, Mrs. Fulbright.” But our relationship went uphill from there. The next month he came to the United States, and his advisers used my house as an informal office, filling it with excited discussion and clouds of cigarette smoke. The highlight of his visit was an address to Congress, where his audience anticipated a ringing celebration of Cold War triumph. Instead, Havel pleaded for assistance to the disintegrating Soviet Union and challenged everyone—the West as much as the East—to reexamine their moral values.
This preoccupation with ethics struck some as naive, but Havel dismissed the utility of mere dreams. It was Havel who plotted strategy in the weeks leading up to the revolution and later presided over a transition to a free economy, maintained unity within the Czech Republic, guided his country into NATO and prepared the way for its entry into the European Union. There was nothing naive about Havel’s advocacy of collective action to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, or his support for democratic activists in Cuba, Zimbabwe, China, Burma and beyond. Havel was steadfast in pursuing a moral universe, but he never suffered from the illusion that he lived in one. The urgency in his voice came less from lofty expectations of human character than from the distress he felt at those who accepted injustice simply because it was easier to look away than to resist.
With Havel, the message mattered but it was words themselves that penetrated the heart. He belongs among the handful of modern political leaders who could write with originality, psychological insight, power and flair. Communism was defeated by “the resistance of Being and man to manipulation.” The point of European unification “is not for all European nations…to merge in some amorphous pan-European Sea…[but] to create a…Europe in which no one more powerful can suppress anyone less powerful.” Czech and Slovak officials who collaborated in the Holocaust were “nonhomicidal murderers.” Of the man who hates, Havel wrote, “He is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule.… Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically.”
As for ideals about governance, he concluded that “We may approach democracy as we would a horizon, and do so in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained.” Summing up, he declared himself neither an optimist (“because I am not sure everything ends well,”) nor a pessimist (“because I am not sure everything ends badly”) but, instead, “a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom and justice have meaning…and that liberty is always worth the trouble.”
(Madeleine Albright was US Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001.)
TYRANNY AND INDIFFERENCE
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2011
As cosmic coincidences go, the deaths of Václav Havel and Kim Jong Il in the same week the U.S. pulled the last of its troops out of Iraq is hard to ignore. Havel made the exposure of tyranny the great task of his life. Kim was tyranny personified. And the war in Iraq was the bruising leap over the wall of global indifference behind which all tyrannies subsist.
The power of indifference is something I first understood from Havel himself after interviewing him, over a beer, in the gardens of Prague’s Czernin Palace. The occasion was a June 2007 conference of international dissidents that he co-chaired with Israel’s Natan Sharansky. I asked him about his views on the war in Iraq. He had once supported it, but now he was more tentative. The rationale, he said, had not been “well-articulated.” The timing of the invasion was “questionable.” As in the 1960s, the U.S. risked becoming an emblem of William Fulbright’s “arrogance of power.”
Then Havel stopped himself and, as he seemed wont to do, put the train of his thought in reverse. “The world,” he concluded, “could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein.”
Here was the nub of the matter when it came to the invasion of Iraq. Never mind the faulty human or technical intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction: The real WMD, better known as Saddam Hussein, was always hiding in plain sight. Over the course of 25 years he and his henchmen gassed, assassinated, machine-gunned and otherwise murdered somewhere between one million and two million people. That’s a big number, the equivalent of a dozen or so Hiroshimas.
Yet because most of the victims were Kurds, Shiites, marsh Arabs, Iranians and Kuwaitis, the question was why it should matter to the West—anymore than, say, the butcheries in the Congo matter. Opponents of the war argued that it should not: that there was no emergency; that no supreme national interest was at stake; that humanitarian interventions needed to be carried out consistently or not at all. Failing those tests, they concluded, guaranteed that the war was folly from the start.
If Havel’s now-celebrated career means anything, however, it is to beware that facile conclusion. In his great 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” written just as his career as a dissident had begun in earnest with his signing of the Charter 77 manifesto, he warned against “the attractions of mass indifference” and the “general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity.” Havel feared that one’s indifference to the question of the freedom of others would ultimately result in a well-fed indifference to the question of one’s own freedom. “A big danger of our world today is obsession,” he told the conference the day of our interview. “An even bigger danger is indifference.”
All this was Havel’s way of saying that political extremism—whether of the Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden variety—would flourish if free people did not actively resist the temptation to acquiesce to it in the name of “peace,” or some other go-along-to-get-along slogan.
A proper attitude may not have required physical belligerency, he believed, and it could easily incorporate diplomacy. But it did require a constant posture of spiritual belligerency—a refusal to accept that a regime like Saddam’s or Kim’s was just a normal fact of life, beyond the reach of moral examination. In the context of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Havel called it a matter of “living in truth.” In the context of countries like North Korea, Russia or Iran, Havel told me it was also a matter of truth-telling. “We can talk to every ruler,” he said, “but first of all it is necessary to tell the truth.”
What does it take to “tell the truth,” as Havel saw it? In his case, a great deal of courage, including a willingness to spend years of his life in prison or working the menial jobs to which the regime sentenced him. The real mystery is why, in free societies where few journalists and politicians are ever at serious risk of reprisal, truth-telling seems to be in relatively short supply. North Korea is a vast modern-day Auschwitz. Yet when George W. Bush named Pyongyang to the Axis of Evil, it was Mr. Bush who was roundly mocked. Note the balance of contempt in the New York Times’ write-up of Kim’s death from Sunday night: “President George W. Bush called [Kim] a ‘pygmy.…’ Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanor and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled.” O, misunderstood Dear Leader, if only we had known you better.
It says something about the force of Havel’s personality and ideas that his life did, in the end, have a fairy-tale ending. That is a triumph for the West. It is a triumph for the West, too, that for all the opposition to the Iraq War, a noose was put around Saddam’s neck.
But it also says something that Kim died in his proverbial bed, thanks in part to global acquiescence in, and considerable tangible support for, his rule. That’s a testament to what our indifference continues to achieve for tyranny, and a poor way of honoring the memory of Václav Havel.
