There's a pattern to be left's takeover of religion, it usually begins by writing G-d out of the equation and replacing him with paens to social activism. Environmentally motivated warnings about resource consumption, animal welfare and global warming are the next wave of liberal social activism and religion is ground zero for their targeted subversion.Examples include the recent movie Evan Almighty which coordinated with liberal churches in America and the UK to promote an ecology centered vision of Noah and the flood and now inspired by Jimmy Carter turning off the White House Christmas Tree, comes the Green Chanukah which is to be celebrated by lighting one Chanukah candle less.
The Greek Chanukah, oh I'm sorry Green Chanukah, the confusion is natural since Chanukah is the story of how secular Hellenistic values took over the Temple and parts of the Jewish people. The Green Chanukah is about secular environmentalist political activism taking over a religious holiday and subverting its message.
Environmentalism serves as its own theology, coming packaged with a vision of a careless and arrogant humanity consuming the planet and its resources and having to learn to put nature first. The Greeks put their faith in Science, in being able to take apart the world and understand its natural laws. Under those laws, a greater army will defeat a weaker one and oil can only burn for a limited time.
Chanukah is the demonstration that in the end it is G-d who rules the world and who determines the outcome of events as great as the winners of battles and as small as how long a flash of oil can burn. Chanukah is not about the conservation of resources, it is about the recognition that all resources ultimately come from G-d.
Judaism does not believe in the God of Natural Law who is bounded by his own creations but in a G-d for whom natural law is a procedure and not a limitation. Environmentalism and a Greek Chanukah is about guilt and fear, about teaching children that the food they eat, the cars their parents drive and the heat that keeps them warm at night are crimes against nature and the starving people of the world.
In place of sacrifices to G-d, environmentalism enacts sacrifices to nature, "giving up things" to somehow make the world better. The candle taken away from Chanukah is a sacrifice as well, a sacrifice to the green, to the supremacy of nature, a fundamentally pagan act. Where Chanukah sanctified the light of the flame, Green Chanukah, like some sort of Bizarro version of Chanukah, seeks to extinguish it. A true Hellenistic take on Chanukah.
It is no surprise then that Green Chanukah comes from Non-Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a left wing activist with a long history of trying to pass off political activism, like the Freedom Seder, as religious ritual. Far left wing, Anti-America and Anti-Israel and associated with the Jewish Renewal movement which is code for aging hippies meditating, smoking pot and calling it religious enlightenment, Waskow is the perfect foil for the environmental movement's war on Judaism.
From Hechsher Tzedek to EcoKashrus to Green Chanukah, the environmental movement seeks to subvert Judaism and replace it with environmentalist dogma. Some elements of Judaism like Kosher are openly attacked while others like Chanukah are reinterpreted with the end result being something that uses Jewish terms but has no more connection to Judaism than Messianic Judaism does.
Chanukah is about the celebration of G-d in our lives and the power of faith to change the world. Green Chanukah is about a Godless vision of a world on the edge of destruction that can only be saved through ritual sacrifices of electricity and consumption that have absolutely no meaning on a global scale but serve to entangle those practicing them in the environmentalist belief system.
Happy Chanukah, the old blue and white kind.
Comments
Environmentalism is a religion which replaces real truth. They have their own doctrines and orders of worship which center around symbolic doings which signify certain things.
ReplyDeleteHow about if the environmentalists agree to stop driving their cars, using electricity or watering their gardens every Shabbos. That would do a lot more for the atmosphere and greenhouse gasses than one less candle!
ReplyDeleteRabbi Sedley
Bravo Rabbi Bravo!!!
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't surprise me that liberals want to replace G-d and make the world go dark.
This green Chanukah thing is about as silly as the Jewish myth (I HOPE it's a myth) about a liberal Jew cutting a carrot instead of a baby's foreskin during a Brit.
Dear Sultan,
ReplyDeleteI don't know if this article is at all relevant to this discussion, but I thought you might appreciate it anyway. Have a Happy and meaningful Hanukkah.
Sincerely, Michael Devolin
*************************
Christopher Hitchens: Secularist Fundamentalist
I used to enjoy Christopher Hitchens and his articles critical of Islam. I assumed at the time he could discern the difference between the barbarities of Islam—barbarities no different in this 21st century than they were in the 7th century—and the benignant tenets of Judaism and how these same tenets have proven to be as beneficial to mankind today as they were before, during, and after the Hellenic age. To equate the long ago defiant independence movement of the Maccabee Jews and their adherence to the nationalist aspirations of Judaism with the expansionist and anti-Jewish ideologies of both Christianity and Islam is to blame the Jews for the genocide of Adolph Hitler’s Holocaust and the bloodlust and violence of Osama bin Laden’s jihadist terrorism. What Hitchens fails to mention in Bah Hanukkah is that the Maccabean revolt was not the only nationalist movement the history of that era records for us. There were also the provinces of Bactria, Parthia, and Cappadocia who asserted their independence. There were more than the Jews of Israel (not “Palestine”) with whom the idea of being conquered and subsequently ruled by foreign invaders who demanded taxes and taught philosophy and religion at the point of the sword did not sit well. I guess this historical fact, the brutality of the Greek army, was lost on Hitchens, or maybe he intentionally avoided mentioning it. Primo Levi wrote, “An extreme case of the distortion of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression.”
According to Christopher Hitchens, history has forgiven rulers such as Alexander the Great of rampaging about the world imposing by force upon conquered peoples the adoption of Hellenist philosophy and religious sentiment and, as happened in the land of Israel at the time, not only the prohibition of Judaism but also the worship of the G-D of Israel as defined in Judaism. Miserable secularist that he is, Hitchens fails to mention also that the Greeks demanded the Jews worship their gods, a decree antithetical to the tenets of Judaism. His praise of Hellenism’s “secularism and philosophy” is not only a contradiction of the fact that Hellenism was all about the polytheistic worship of a pantheon of Greek gods, but also, laughably, this imposture conflicts with his personal and many published aggrandizements of secularism. The angry stupidity of Christopher Hitchens proves the veracity of the proverb, “Zeal without reflection is dangerous.”
Our poor historian then excoriates the Maccabean dynasty for becoming “exorbitantly corrupt, vicious, and divided.” Just like the Islamic fundamentalists whom Hitchens so often accuses of malice, he now imitates their propagandists by obfuscating the harsh and dissentious realities endured by the Jewish people in Israel (not “Palestine”) during the Greek and Roman occupations. He fails to mention that these same Greek and Roman “saviours” and their respective god-cultures were responsible for the politically and religiously motivated murder of Jews by hundreds and thousands. From this point on I will refer to Hitchens’ mendacious zeal as “secularist fundamentalism”. I think the shoe fits.
Maybe, like his easily distracted countryman David Irving, Hitchens is attempting to rewrite history. Perhaps he doesn’t take Jewish history seriously enough to recount it in real context and with the respect it deserves. Perhaps he could learn much from those Jews who today dutifully remember to each other those few glorious days in ancient Israel (not “Palestine”) when the brave Maccabees made it known to Antiochus in no uncertain terms that his murdering thousands of observant Jews would never interrupt their obedience to the numinous intransigence of the laws of their Torah. The Maccabees are not the thugs in the story of Hanukkah, regardless Mr. Hitchens’ sciolistic interpretation of their story.
Lastly, I haven’t read anywhere that observant Jews disbelieve the world is “made up of atoms.” On the contrary, if I remember correctly, there have been a few Orthodox Jewish physicists awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in this field of science. As for Hitchens’ “intellectual renegade who prefers Athens to Jerusalem,” I’m reminded of a summation of Plato and Aristotle written by Blaise Pascal, a very religious Roman Catholic and a physicist: “when they diverted themselves with writing their Laws and Politics, they did it as an amusement. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious; the most philosophic was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on politics, it was laying down rules for a lunatic asylum; and if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors. They entered into their principles in order to make their madness as little harmful as possible.” Now if only the irreligious Christopher Hitchens would consider the harm and the hurt caused by his insensitive and abrasive language. No-0ne is forcing him to light a candle, although it sounds to me like Mr. Hitchens is by far the loudest at “bitching about the darkness.”
Written by Michael Devolin
(as a rebuttal to Christopher Hitchens' 'Bah Hanukkah')
The theory of human induced global warming is that sequestered fossil fuels are being burned and the co2 is being added to the atmosphere .
ReplyDeleteHowever candles are a biofuel made from renewable sources for which the carbon footprint is ZERO>
The carbon in the candle comes from CO@ in the air.
This is another example of Jewish liberals trying to bugger Jewish Jews.
regardless, I,for one, would rather breathe cleaner, fresher air and eat food from uncontaminated soil and drink unpolluted water. The idea should not be conservation but a better product that doesn't befoul the very environment one needs to exist. Making things people don't need while befouling the very air they breathe is not rational. I do not want mercury, residual pharmaceuticals, ammonia, and rocket fuel poured into my lakes and rivers. That is just common sense. I'm all for the entrepeneur who does this.
ReplyDeleteAll human industry impacts the environment. There's no perfect utopia in which people do not impact the environment. The goal should be to limit actual hazardous interactions, not to worship the environment itself.
ReplyDeletePost a Comment