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DEBUNKING THE DEBUNKERS
The Jewish world suffers from a plague of debunkers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The occasion of the wonderful holiday of Chanukah brings out the debunkers in their hordes. Chanukah never happened or at least not in the way that the Talmud and tradition transmit its happenings.
A noted op-ed Jewish (?) columnist in the New York Times wrote that in his opinion the Hellenist Jews were the good guys and the Maccabees were the bad guys and that it is certainly somewhat regrettable that the bad guys won. The secular Jewish press here in Israel and in the Diaspora is also always busy every Chanukah denying tradition and fashioning the struggle of the Maccabees in their own image and in their own current political correctness.
The Jewish debunkers are always busy destroying our faith and heritage. A noted Conservative rabbi in The United States denies that the exodus from Egypt ever occurred. He chose Pesach as the time to deliver this pearl of wisdom in his holiday sermon to his congregation. In fact his opinion is found in an essay of his included in the Conservative Chumash. And then they wonder why the movement is being riven with apathy and intermarriage.
As long as the main task of the secular non-traditional Jewish world is to debunk all Jewish tradition and to hollow out all holiness from Jewish life, they are doomed not to be able in the long run to replicate themselves as Jews. And that sad fact of Jewish history is that no holy value is immune from being debunked.
Archaeologists discovered in the Negev artifacts that prove that a Maccabeean kingdom existed and flourished. This was reported in the Israeli press in the same newspaper that in another article debunked the whole Chanukah story as being rabbinic myth. Oh well, everyone is entitled to read whatever section of the newspaper one wishes to.
Last week a noted Jewish historian and scholar, Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi, passed away in New York. He wrote a small thin volume called “Zachor” that dealt with the importance of tradition as opposed to pure currently agreed upon historical fact in Jewish life. He attempted somehow to reconcile these two streams of Jewish scholarship. He came to the clear conclusion that the collective memory of a people – certainly of the Jewish people – a memory that we call and identify as tradition and not only the study of dry historical facts, is the key to the survival of that people. I
t is the only proven method of transmitting values, identity and national pride and self-worth to succeeding generations. The debunkers are in essence therefore debunking themselves. And they are creating a climate of self-doubt, cynicism and defeatism that imperils the entire Jewish future. That is what happened here in Israel when the post-Zionists debunked Zionism.
This attitude – clever by half – has led to wars, tragedies, diplomatic weakness and isolation, as well as to creating an unnecessary and most harmful division in Israeli and Jewish society. Of course they maintain that we are all aware that our grandparents and their ancestors were liars and that the correctness of present day liberalism is to be unquestioned. The traditionalists are always wrong even when history and facts prove them right while the new boys are never wrong even when the facts clearly point to the fact that they are wrong – dead wrong.
Our task is therefore to debunk the debunkers. That in essence is what Chanukah teaches us. The Hellenists were the debunkers of Torah and tradition. The Maccabees rose up to debunk the debunkers whether they were Jews or Syrian Greeks. The lights of Chanukah are meant to dispel doubts. They stand as stark evidence that the collective memory of the Jewish people which recalls the exodus from Egypt, the revelation and granting of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the entry of Israel into its promised land, the two temples that graced Jerusalem and the heroism of the Maccabees and the miracle of the lights of Chanukah is the cornerstone of Jewish belief and integrity.
The debunkers are perpetrators of national suicide. No matter their wisdom and talents they do us great harm even if that be not their stated intention. It is therefore incumbent upon us to continue to debunk the debunkers. In the words of Tevye, that caricature of the holy Jew of Eastern Europe, it is all about “tradition, tradition.” It really is all about that and we should never allow ourselves to be misled that bunk, even for what passes as scholarly bunk, can replace tradition.
