Honestly, after reading the article below, my head hurts. if you take the time to research the origins of Hanukkah what you find, is that the Maccabees were fighting to preserve their faith against an intolerant king, who was murdering anyone and everyone who did not go along with his beliefs. Sounds like the terrorists of today doesn’t it? Convert to Islam or die?
In fact, this king outlawed studying Torah, circumcision, and anything else related to the Jewish faith. He went so far as to sacrifice a pig on the altar in their temple, doing everything he could to defile and debase their beliefs.
So for this man in the article below to claim that the brothers were imposing their beliefs, hardly, they were fighting for what they believed with everything they had.
If only we Christians would take and learn from their example, and take a stand for our Lord’s kingdom.
Please read and share.
The “paper of record,” the New York Times, marked the beginning of Hannukkah on Sunday with an op-ed claiming the Jewish holiday “at its heart is an eight-night-long celebration of religious fundamentalism and violence.”
Newsbusters reported Jewish novelist Michael David Lukas argued that any urban, secular Jews who celebrate the holiday are hypocrites.
“It’s a holiday that commemorates an ancient battle against assimilation,” he writes. “And it’s the one holiday that most assimilated Jews celebrate.”
In “The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah,” Lukas says that after consulting modern scholars and rabbis, “everyone agrees that the Maccabees won out in the end and imposed their version of Judaism on the formerly Hellenized Jews.”
“So Hanukkah, in essence, commemorates the triumph of fundamentalism over cosmopolitanism,” he contends. “Our assimilationist answer to Christmas is really a holiday about subjugating assimilated Jews.”
Well-known Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the author of 30 books, begged to differ. He writes in a rebuttal column that the Times piece is the “latest puerile and asinine op-ed from The New York Times about Jews and Judaism.”
Boteach asserted the Maccabee revolt was “not a fundamentalist-religious movement sworn to the destruction of liberal Western ideologies.”
“It was, instead, a popular campaign to safeguard the freedom of a people to freely practice their faith and traditions regardless of the whims of an emperor,” Boteach wrote. “Unlike fundamentalist terrorist groups, which are born from intolerance of other faiths, the Maccabees fought to end the Greek intolerance of theirs.”
But Lukas writes: “The more I thought about all this, the more it disturbed me. For what am I if not a Hellenized Jew? … Why should I light candles and sing songs to celebrate a group of violent fundamentalists?”
Newsbusters noted Lukas did not mention which “modern scholars” or rabbis he consulted for his brief summary of the Maccabean revolt.
In his original piece, Lukas erroneously thought it was a war against the Romans, Newsbusters noted, which is “not a ringing endorsement of his historical accuracy.”
The post N.Y. Times launches ‘War on Hanukkah’ appeared first on WND.
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