Elu V’Elu for January 2007

Rabbi Gary A. Glickstein

In the famous words of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and they is us!”

I worry about rising anti-Semitism in Europe, the Middle East, and even here at home. I am gravely concerned about the impending reality of a nuclear Iran and the implications of that nightmare for Israel and the Western world. The rise of a virulent and toxic Islamic fanaticism gives me pause.

However, I believe deep in my soul that we will rise up and face those enormous challenges and emerge victorious. I am not so sanguine about the rising tensions and rifts that continue to rip at the fabric of the Jewish world.

Item : Philadelphia – 400 Orthodox Jewish families move into a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and the community rises up against the newcomers. One woman represented the group saying, “I hate it. It’s overwhelming.”

Item : Los Angeles – Two Jewish neighborhoods, both Orthodox, will have nothing to do with each other. “The separation between the ultra-Orthodox and the Modern Orthodox communities is reflective of a kind of self-imposed segregation taking place in communities all over the U.S.”

Item : Israel – Many ultra-Orthodox children were denied entry into an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school. The school wants only Ashkenazic ultra-Orthodox and not Sephardic ultra-Orthodox children.

Item : Galilee – Mark Rosenstein reports that Orthodox children are being kept off sports teams because most of the competitions are held on Shabbat.

We live in a time when over 20% of the approximately five million Jews in the U.S. have disassociated themselves from our communities. In Miami, less than 25% of all Jews affiliate with any synagogue. And on and on we fight to rip ourselves apart from within. We work at finding areas of division and promoting them while the myriad of areas that unite us lay silent as if nonexistent. We fight over the points of division and glorify them while our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community remain strangers to us, a world apart.

Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg points out that the glorious holiday of Chanukah celebrates only a small part of the real story. In the words of Paul Harvey, “This is the rest of the story.”

We lost the war of Chanukah. Oh, we won the battle and reconsecrated the Temple and relit the Menorah, but we lost the war.

After Antiochus forbade Jews from observing the Sabbath, New Moon and circumcision, he ordered pigs sacrificed in the Temple. Under the leadership of Mattathias and later his son Judah, we took back the Temple and reconsecrated it. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the historical war of the Maccabees. After the battle, the Jews became divided, some of them joining the foreign troops against their brothers. The Assyrian-Greeks returned, killed Judah and defeated the Jews. Judah’s brother, Jonathan, initiated another rebellion which succeeded for a few years; then he was killed. His brother Simon took over and finally, 30 years after the war began, victory was achieved. However, our people continued to rip themselves apart from within. Alexander Yannai, the great grandson of Mattathias, had 800 of his Jewish opponents slaughtered after first forcing them to witness the murders of their wives and children. In 63 B.C.E., a civil war erupted between Jewish factions. The Romans resolved the conflict by taking away our sovereignty for over two thousand years.

We could defeat any enemy outside, but we failed to conquer the enemy within – our proclivity towards self-destructive internal separation.

The Talmud tells us that even though the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel disagreed on almost all issues, there was never any rivalry or rancor between them. Despite the disagreements, they never refrained from marrying into each others’ families. They taught respect and friendship, even with strong disagreement.

This year, I implore every member of our community to reach out and extend a hand in friendship to our fellow Jews of all types, from ultra-Orthodox to completely secular. Let us embrace each other and begin to heal the divisions that are so dangerous to our future. And if our fellow Jews refuse our hands and our greetings and our gestures of unity, so what? Let us not be deterred because they do not yet see the importance of these acts of building Jewish cohesion. Perhaps our commitment and sincerity will help melt the hardness of those whose hearts are closed to our entreaties at the moment. At the very least, we will have done the right thing to bring our people one step closer to the strength of unity we will need to face the enormous tasks awaiting us in the years ahead.

We are fighting the war of Chanukah again. If we lose this time, our children and grandchildren may not recover. We have so much in common with our brother and sister Jews; let us embrace and overcome the widening gap between us.