Bondi Beach brings back the true meaning of – Latest News
On Sunday, the first evening of Hanukkah, a father-son terror workforce hit Australia’s Bondi Beach and massacred innocents at a household occasion celebrating the Jewish pageant.
Ever since, well-intentioned commentators have proclaimed their anguish that this vacation of “light,” of “togetherness,” of common values everybody can admire, may very well be marred in such a approach.
But that imaginative and prescient of Hanukkah is a lie — and it’s not how we needs to be honoring the lives brutally taken.
Hanukkah shouldn’t be a pageant of imprecise illumination or seasonal heat.
It shouldn’t be about universalism. Bondi ought to have taught us that.
The story of Hanukkah is about Jews who refused — violently, unapologetically, and at great price — to stop being Jews.
In our era, we’re combating that very same battle.
The Hanukkah story shouldn’t be one of peaceable coexistence interrupted by misunderstanding, however of a overseas empire that demanded Jews abandon Jewish law, Jewish apply and Jewish identification.
Assimilation was not non-compulsory below the rule of the Seleucid Empire; it was obligatory.
The Maccabees didn’t reply with interfaith dialogue. They didn’t problem statements about shared values or manage conferences.
They took up arms. They fought.
They killed their oppressors and reclaimed the Temple.
The miracle was not the oil — it was Jewish survival by way of defiance.
We have spent many years watering that historical past down.
In America particularly, Jews have discovered to discuss ourselves in methods designed to reassure.
We body Jewish holidays in common phrases of “light over darkness,” as if specificity itself had been harmful.
That intuition, particularly after a bloodbath, is comprehensible.
It would even be a mistake.
Last week, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum launched chilling footage of six of their kidnapped family members being pressured to “celebrate” Hanukkah in Hamas tunnels in 2023 — simply a few months earlier than they had been executed.
Even earlier than the horror in Australia, it was an important reminder.
Neither Hamas nor the gunmen in Sydney murdered Jews as a result of we failed to elucidate ourselves correctly.
Antisemites don’t goal Jews as a result of we don’t sufficiently emphasize that Hanukkah is about peace and light-weight.
No, Jews are attacked as a result of we’re Jews — distinct, persistent and unwilling to vanish.
It’s up to us to make sure no one will overlook it.
This refusal to vanish is exactly what Hanukkah commemorates: It’s the vacation of selecting Jewish continuity over consolation.
For too long, American Jews have tried to show Hanukkah into a Jewish model of Christmas, not simply culturally, however theologically.
As a consequence, we now have hollowed out the vacation’s meaning — at the very second we need it most.
Jewish survival has by no means relied on being embraced by the majority, however on refusing to give up to it.
The assaults on us remind us that Jewish particularism, the insistence on remaining Jewish even when it’s harmful, shouldn’t be a bug in our custom; it’s why we’re nonetheless right here.
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This doesn’t imply glorifying violence for its own sake. It means being sincere about historical past.
The Maccabees didn’t win by way of goodwill, however by way of energy, resolve and an unyielding dedication to Jewish law and life.
The Temple was rededicated not as a result of the Jews had been charming, however as a result of they prevailed.
There is a motive antisemites despise Jewish satisfaction more than Jewish struggling.
Suffering Jews could be pitied, patronized and instrumentalized — however to antisemites, proud Jews are insupportable.
This Hanukkah, Jews ought to stop explaining ourselves in methods designed to earn approval.
We ought to stop pretending the vacation is about generic goodness, and never about Jewish endurance by way of energy.
We ought to train our kids that Hanukkah is about refusing to assimilate, even when assimilation guarantees security.
Every evening we gentle menorah candles, we ship a clear message: We are nonetheless right here.
We is not going to convert. We is not going to disappear.
We is not going to reshape ourselves to be acceptable.
We is not going to flip our historical past into a youngsters’s story that offends no one and teaches nothing.
Hanukkah shouldn’t be about making the world like us.
It should be about Jews liking ourselves enough to stay who we’re.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
